Attack on Titan First Impressions--HOLY CRAP

Wow. Just... wow.

 
I always watch hyped series with a little bit of hesitation, since hype is never a guarantee of quality. If you've stuck around the seasonal watching scene long enough, then you've been burned by at least one of these before. So far, this is not the case for Attack on Titan, which delivers on its premise in spades.

The dramatic thrust of the plot so far is pretty simple: the world has been overrun by human-eating giants, and the remaining humans have built a fortress where they've lived peacefully for the last hundred years. That changes when a giant far larger than any ever seen before breaks the outer wall, letting the giants in. Our young heroes lose their friends and family in shockingly gruesome ways, making our lead character Eren swear revenge.

 
I don't have a lot of experience with horror, but there are two elements from that genre that work really well here. The first is the idea of the unknown (ex: things that go bump in the night) we don't know where the giants came from, why they eat people, or why the bigger ones don't have hair or skin (just the "no skin" part is enough to make mine crawl). There are no answers, just the fact that they are predators. This plays into the second element, the basic instinct to stay alive. Through brain power, technology, and opposable thumbs, humans are at the top of the food chain. Sure, stuff can kill us, but humans don't have a designated predator in the animal kingdom that exclusively hunts and eats us. In Attack on Titan, that's no longer true.

 
Add to the relationships between the characters that are very easy to understand and relate to (the friend, the family, the guard) and we've got extremely emotional opening episodes. I was already tearing up when the woman was presented with her son's arm--all that was left of him after a raid--and I'm surprised that I wasn't a complete mess by the finale. The second episode does an exploration of "the lesser of two evils" approach; there's not enough food to go around, so a ton of people are sent marching under the excuse that they're going to take back the wall, but really they're just Titan food. The series seems to be encouraging debate about the decisions that are made and how the characters react to their situation.

 
Attack on Titan is not the kind of show you watch as an escape from reality. It's an intense and emotional punch to the gut, but that just makes it all the more worth watching. It's got a unique visual style, with characters that have thick outlines around them and highly detailed and expressive eyes. The music direction in this show also has me really impressed, and the OP deserves all the praise that it's been getting. My experience of the first two episodes was also enhanced in unexpected ways as well. The area where I live has been getting some crazy weather lately that has briefly knocked out the power at points, and while I was watching the first episode the lights flickered at the exact moment of the explosion marking the arrival of the Titan. This was awesome and terrifying, and I spazzed about it over Twitter.


Overall, if you haven't seen this show yet, what are you waiting for? Legal HD streams are available, and Attack on Titan is promising to be quite the thrill ride if the character's journey's don't break my heart first. This has all the makings of becoming the best anime of the season, if not the best anime of this year.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.