Made in Abyss Review

The bait and switch is deliberate and it is effective. Riko and Reg descend a hole using the visual language of a children's adventure, painted layer backgrounds, oversized flora and a bright colour script, and the series lets that run long enough that the first serious injury arrives as a real shock. The curse of ascension is one of the best worldbuilding devices in modern anime because it is a one-way rule that converts every decision into an accounting problem, and the show never once softens it.

Kevin Penkin's score is the other reason this works, a choral and orchestral thing that treats the abyss as a cathedral. The layouts and background paintings are the finest television work of their year by a distance. The problem is tonal contamination. Tsukushi's fixation on the physical humiliation of children sits in the middle of an otherwise serious story about survival, and it is neither incidental nor removable. This is a brilliant series with a real defect, and both halves of that sentence stay true no matter how far you get.