Made In Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul Review (5/10/2020)

Made in Abyss is a wonderful and one-of-a-kind anime series that combines adventure, comedy, drama, lovecraftian horror and existential themes. Its cutesy aesthetic is charming to look at, but it carries with it a deeply twisted and yet at the same time beautiful world and story. Both the manga and anime series so far have been nearly equal in storytelling quality, both telling a wonderful story in a fascinating world with the manga adding a little more depth and a unique tone with its surreal, but the anime bringing it to life in a way it never could have as a manga with beautiful, fluid animation and a hauntingly beautiful score (and also makes the wise decision to tone down the manga's more unfortunately fetishistic elements that makes the reading far more uncomfortable in all the wrong ways).

Made In Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul is a film adaptation that works as a sequel to the thirteen episode anime series and an adaptation of what is perhaps the manga's darkest, most disturbing arc yet. It's an intense, thrilling ride, but one that I thought was a little hard to follow in its jam packed finale, with so much action that it really strained against the limitations of the comic medium. It was an arc that, more so than anything else in the story, needed the color and motion of an animated feature, and Dawn of the Deep Soul brings it to life in perhaps the perfect way. Rather than being separated into multiple chapters of manga or episodes of anime, the story of Riko, Reg and Nanachi's clash with Bondrewd in Ido Front is told as one whole, cohesive chapter, and it really manages to elevate this to perhaps the franchise's finest individual work.

I won't go too deep into the plot; for those who haven't read the manga, you won't want spoilers, and for those who have, you already know what's going to happen. For those who have never seen or read it, I wouldn't recommend starting here. But there's a lot of key emotional beats and pay offs that span directly from where the anime season left off, and it serves as almost a halfway point for the story, marking their crossing of the path of no return into the unknown depths of the abyss. These plot points are delivered beautifully, with a mixture of excellent voice acting, gorgeous and fluid animation and haunting to music. The characters and their struggles are brought to life in beautiful and heartbreaking ways alike, and the villain especially, already one of the most fascinatingly despicable villains in anime/manga, is given terrifying new life.

Overall, Made in Abyss is a story that is more suited for the serialization of TV series and manga, but the Ido Front arc is a curious exception, one that flourished in a single contained work, and became what will surely be a cornerstone of the franchise. Moving forward, I'm glad the story is returning to a serialized format as season two adapts the next arc, but for now, making this story into a film was an excellent choice.