Violet Evergarden Review

Nobody makes television that looks like this. Kyoto Animation spends its budget on what other studios skip, on hands and hair and the exact behavior of light through a window, and Violet's steel fingers working a typewriter carry more meaning than most shows get from a monologue. The premise is strong and the lead is well drawn, a soldier learning the words for things she has already done. Where the series divides opinion is the script.

It is episodic by design and the installments are uneven, with a few, the playwright who cannot write about his dead daughter above all, among the best single episodes of their decade, and others that reach for tears with the machinery visible. The war that made Violet is sketched rather than built, and the final act settles her guilt too neatly. The craft is unmatched and the writing is ordinary, and the grade sits where the reviews do, on a beautiful show that is not quite the great one its production implies.