Kora
“Mama always tells us, doesn’t she? Don’t go near the gate or the fence in the back of the forest because it’s dangerous.”
The Promised Neverland caught my eye early on as one of the likely standouts of the season, not necessarily in terms of quality but in terms of impact. I haven’t been keeping up with many manga as of late, but I remember seeing the title among the new Shonen Jump series a year or two ago, and it seemed to be getting an inordinate amount of attention. Now I know why. I went into this series expecting a dark twist, and I was still unprepared. This wasn’t a perfect introduction to the series, since it relies too heavily on certain conventions and there are a few lapses in logic, but it’s still effective. If this premiere serves as an accurate indicator of the quality that we can expect throughout the season, then The Promised Neverland may prove to be one of the stronger and more marketable entries we can expect.
The series follows 3 young children, Emma, Norman, and Ray, who live in a remote orphanage called Grace Field House along with around three dozen other children under the watchful eye of their caretaker, Isabella. Plenty of flags are laid out early on to alert viewers to the fact that this place isn’t right, but one of the issues is that, even the children notice these inconsistencies and irregularities, but they get dismissed. It would be one thing for them to not recognize the odd nature of their habitat if they didn’t have anything to compare it to, but they’re permitted to read books and develop concepts of what is and is not normal, which seems counterintuitive. This isn’t the type of inconsistency that causes the narrative to fall apart, but it continued to nag at me throughout much of the episode, and never fully quieted. I won’t reveal much of the premise beyond those basic elements, but I will add that one character kept tripping all the “bad end” flags. The show was notably blatant in those moments, and, while that doesn’t completely undermine the show’s shock value, it does lead me to question whether a delicate touch would be more effective. And let’s not be mistaken here, I may have harped on those two issues, but the show is highly effective with its tone, and, from early on, the potential for this series to deliver a tense psychological horror is evident.
The production for this series is handled by CloverWorks, and in most instances I’d argue it’s quite a solid product. However, the series needs to be capable of deftly shifting between cute and lighthearted and harsh psychological imagery, and I get the sense that the studio may be more comfortable with the latter over the former. The children’s designs sometimes come off as too round and cute, as if CloverWorks was drawing inspiration from Made in Abyss’s deceptively cute visuals or had pulled them straight from a Ghibli production. Or it could be that the models from the manga didn’t transfer well to animation. I don’t know, but this results in the younger children feeling out of place. I find many of my issues with this premiere stand out more due to how well it nails everything else, though. The sound design deserves praise for being able to deftly shift between several conflicting tones. The episode is punctuated with a female vocalist whose singing is cut off so abruptly by what I would describe as a the sound of a disemboweled violin (It sounded as if someone took an entire track from the The Dark Knight soundtrack and compacted it down to a single second.) that it actually succeeded in startling me. With such a refined presentation the minor blemishes can become attention grabbing, so I want to be clear when I say that The Promised Neverland is a delicate blend of childlike whimsy and grim horror that will likely be one of the defining titles of this season.
Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:
- The name of the episode is 121045 which corresponds to the date using the European dating method of Day-Month-Year. Still, it seems oddly temperate given the mid-October timeframe. I wonder where the Grace Field House is located and whether that detail is ever disclosed in the story.
- I like the opening, but I’m starting to feel like every decent anime opening this season is going to have a random English word or phrase in it that breaks my immersion. In this case, it’s the repeated use of the word “fire.”
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