Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Why You Should Be Watching The Promised Neverland
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Beansprout Midget
Posts: 145 |
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Anime-only viewers are going to have so much fun with the twists and turns the show takes.
I also spoiler[Seeing Norman walking around here and then having him finally reunited with Emma and Ray in the manga is just...cathartic. ] NOTE- this is a manga spoiler for super recent manga chapters, stuff way beyond what the anime will reach, so read at your own peril -Maya |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2306 |
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It frustrates me to no end that my library only has the first three volumes. Single biggest reason I'm considering subscribing to Jump online.
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings
Posts: 1034 |
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I got bored of it by episode 2. I can acknowledge that it's well-put together, both visually and when you analyze the cinematography, but there's just not a lot here for me beyond the initial twist, the shock of which wears off pretty quickly. Emma's a pretty unengaging protagonist, and I don't see the show's premise staying interesting throughout the entire run.
Also I really don't like the OP, but comparatively that's more of a nitpick. I shouldn't be all that surprised though, I've never really seen an horror anime actually be successful at being a horror. Shiki's good for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual attempts to scare or unsettle you, Higurashi's a lousy adaptation that uses little to none of the effective tricks the VN did. Paranoia Agent's probably the closest. |
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AksaraKishou
Posts: 1414 Location: End of the World |
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Tbf this isn't really an horror driven series. There's that backdrop, sure, but i figure it's something more along the lines of a Detective Conan mixed with Death Note. |
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jdnation
Posts: 2109 |
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Krone's design looked pretty fine to me. I mean... that's pretty much how you'd picture an affectionate black lady as a maid. Particularly if they're trying to capture the aesthetics and clothing of a certain era. Though it's also possible to see that at times certain characteristics are played up and distorted in order to convey horror and the fact that she's also crazy. This ain't Mr. Popo. I think it's just you guys.
Really? The hook is not so much the first shock, but essentially all about the Escape Plan and game of wits being played; and even if escape plan is successful, what exactly is the world like outside that they are escaping into? So there's plenty of intrigue. |
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meiam
Posts: 3450 |
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I'm also a bit lukewarm about it, episode 1 was great no question about it, but 2 and especially 3 were a lot weaker to my mind. 3 was especially weak, with Krone jumping up and down and shouting at the top of her lung her secret motive in the middle of the night with the children room literally right next to her. It's really hard to take a character seriously after that. Same with the 3 kids shouting there plan in the middle of the forest.
But I think the eventual undoing of it for me will be how they'll actually escape. Since they've doggedly decided that they would save everyone I already know that the ultimate outcome will either involved a deus ex or a spectacular poor planning from the facility owner (which is already apparent since we already have the technology to make GPS tag that can geolocate yet the super advanced alien apparently haven't figured that one out). Then you get into the question of how the hell are kid going to get food once out and it just going to get farcical real fast. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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My biggest issue with this show has nothing to do with the show itself, but instead the intense peer pressure to enjoy it which, as is usually the case for me, has backfired and made it harder to get into. The hype train for this one has been firing on all cylinders since before the first episode even aired. Every year or so we get a (usually) shonen anime that both the critics and the fanbase as a whole instantly fall in love with, and anyone who doesn't like it must be a weirdo (kind of a recursion given what the rest of society thinks of this subculture). Attack on Titan, One Punch Man, MHA, Made in Abyss, and now this one.
The actual anime, so far, doesn't feel like it has much going for it. I don't know if I'm just oblivious or if the ecstatic reactions to episode 1 came from knowledge about what happens 50 chapters from now, but it just didn't impress me. Good directing and animation, sure, but all in service of one big twist that anyone could see coming a mile away (not in the specifics, obviously, but raise your hand if you really thought that girl was getting adopted... yeah, didn't think so). Subsequent episodes were more interesting, to some extent. But I can't get past the contrived-ness of the whole setting. Spoilers for first 3 episodes, if we're tagging those? spoiler[I get the whole metaphor for rigorous schooling only to prepare kids for an exploitative environment, and very much agree with that message. But why would the demons bother with all this? Do they not have knowledge-implanting technology? If they're not much more advanced than humans, how did they take over the world? For that matter, if smarter kids taste better, why don't they just clone the smartest ones? Why bother with this whole "moms" thing (other than as a metaphor for coercing women into motherhood, another social-commentary bit I agree with, but makes no sense in context)? The safest plan for farming delicious humans would be to recreate The Matrix.] Maybe they did, and that's an upcoming twist, but that would only raise further questions. More likely, I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that way too much of this story doesn't add up. Honestly, though, I probably wouldn't overthink it so much if the show wasn't unengaging for reasons I can't fully explain. |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 959 |
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Patience...... it is a dying art.
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Mad_Scientist
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 3013 |
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Added a quick clarification that the spoiler in the opening post was for super recent manga stuff. Regarding the show, I'm really enjoying it, but also really enjoying watching other people go through the same I did with the manga now with the anime, the twists and turns, and the speculation. It's very fun seeing others speculate, comparing them to my own thoughts when I was at that point in the manga, and knowing now some of the answers to see how close (or how far!) we were.
Gonna get my bro-in-law into the show as well. All I told him about the premise was that it involves a group of orphans who discover there's something a bit odd about their life/home. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5181 |
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As someone who's never read the manga, I'm still enjoying The Promised Neverland but it sounds like the biggest problem is that it's trying too hard to be overly faithful to the manga source material in a way that doesn't feel natural to a casual audience. But I'm still interested in the basic premise of seeing how the kids try to outwit the adults and escape and seeing the twists unfold.
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fantaselion
 Posts: 351 |
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Actually allot of people are complinging that its straying from the source material to much.
Your whole reasons for why it "doesn't add up" are all assumptions you've had. We don't know NEARLY enough yet to confirm pretty much ANYTHING you said. yea it doesn't add up, because your ASSUMING stuff. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I have never encountered any anime, or any other work of art that takes more than 5 seconds to experience, that turned out vastly better in the end than it initially appeared to be. Sometimes things take a sharp turn for the worse, but never for the better. Anything worth watching has enough savvy to get people's attention quickly, before the audience drifts away; this is especially true for things like Neverland that are well produced but, inevitably, not for everyone. It's certainly communicated enough to grab its audience. Apparently, I'm not part of that audience. Clearly, for most people, what Neverland has laid out so far works, and I'm not going to tell anyone they shouldn't like it. Presumably you're one of those people--and since, as I said, most everyone who likes this show got hooked immediately, it's a bit disingenuous to imply that anyone who doesn't care for it is just impatient. The fans of this show may need to wait for the plot to unfold, unless they've read the manga. But they don't have to wait for the show to reach a point where it becomes fun to watch, because it already is. Time flies when you're having fun, right? But when you aren't... I'll probably stick with it a bit longer because, again, the hype, but it's becoming even more clear (see post just above this... dude, I'm literally doing the opposite of making assumptions, this show is forcing me to ask questions that I can't imagine a reasonable answer to) that the community is going to ruin this one for me, and I'll probably never really know whether I would have liked it without that factor. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1463 |
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That's too bad, because there's certainly a lot of things --- anime among them --- that do turn out much better than you might think from the first few minutes or even the first episode. Too bad you haven't encountered them. |
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steelmirror
 Posts: 342 |
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In anime particularly I think you can tell a lot about a production from a first impression, maybe an episode or so. After that point, it's a rare one that manages to end on a vastly better note than it started. Other media are less applicable; I've read plenty of books that I didn't get sucked into until a few pages, chapters, even a few books into for some longer running series (The Dresden Files, for instance, is a book series that didn't start being truly enjoyable for me until book 4, after which it became pretty much nonstop awesome). Some of my favorite TV shows started off pretty crap, too. Star Trek the Next Generation is one of my all time favorites even though the entirety of season 1 is hot garbage that I wouldn't watch again if you paid me. I'm enjoying Neverland so far, though I do think that it benefits from being in an otherwise rather sparse season. Emma is also my favorite part of the show so far. I actually like how over-the-top emotive they made Sister Krone, it makes her such a contrast to the reserved and inscrutable Momma. Looking forward to going through the emotional wringer with this one this season! |
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings
Posts: 1034 |
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Goooooooonna have to disagree there. There's a number of anime that take more than 1 episode to reveal what exactly they have up their sleeves. I very much doubt there was anyone who watched the first episode of Madoka and seriously thought "you know what, this is gonna be considered a masterpiece by a large portion of the anime community by the end". Saga of Tanya the Evil is an even better example, because most people who are fans of the show, myself included, will tell you that the first episode is incredibly misleading and kind of a poor introduction for what the entire thing is actually about, some even telling you to skip it outright. Heck, if you want something from this season, you really won't find a better case than The Price of Smiles. |
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