I have to admit I haven’t watched a lot of anime in recent years, my two main obsessions were Legend of the Overfiend also known as Urotsokidoji.
A series that started off great and ended up a bit of a porno anime mess with giant penis's attacking Tokyo, (yeah, I was kinda puzzled too)
The other was the sublime Akira, well crafted and great story telling.
Okay, I should really give a shout out to Studio Ghibli, they produced genius anime like Princess Mononoke and Grace of the Fireflies.
Okay I need to stop now, I want to talk about Attack on Titan, I’ll be here all night if I get started on the classics above, and then it'll be to the DVD shelf and watch some stuff again, and I have work in the morning.
So I started hearing a lot of stuff about Attack on Titan, or Shingeki no Kyojin as its known in Japan. The story revolves around Eren Yaeger and his friends. After the wall that protects his town is breached by the titans, led by a colossal Titan, Eren watches in horror as his mother is eaten. Humanity is on the brink of extinction and are hidden and protected behind massive walls, these keep them safe from the Titans hungry for human flesh, we never quite get to know what came before, who are the Titans? Why do they want to eat the whole of humanity...?
Eren then enlists in the military swearing revenge on the Titans for eating his Mother.
Now I’ve only watched the first season, but these Titans are horrific creatures, they range in size and have one aim, and that’s to eat humans alive, as many as they possibly can. The Titans range in size, from just bigger than human to colossal and there seems to be different kinds, I don’t want to say too much but the armoured Titan looks splendid and starts to make you wonder is there and underlying order to these Titans? Is there something deeper going on...?
Eren Jaeger is voiced by Yuki Kaji, he seems to a stalwart of Japanese anime, I’m not really up on anime voice actors but every does a more that passable job. I don’t tend to listen to or watched English dubs, tried it with old Kung Fu movies and it never felt right, so I always stick with subtitled.
It can be a hard watch sometimes, you get a real feeling of dread and horror from the characters, the scouts themselves have an extremely limited life span and quite a few end up in the belly of the Titans, some episodes are more gruesome than others, but at times it takes on an eerie nightmarish quality of people trapped behind a wall waiting to be eaten by the titans. The titans themselves fascinate me, I know there is a deeper mystery with them, but it’s a weekly show and you don’t get too many revelations per episode, but it does build nicely.
As I said, it can be quite tense show as the Scouts face off against insurmountable odds and a relentless enemy that wants to slowly devour you.
That's the question here, why are the titans so intent on feeding on human flesh, is there something more going on here, some of the early episodes allude to a deeper mystery that's developed more later on.
If you are a hardened anime fan you will most likely have watched this already, if not, give it a try, it's well worth a watch.
