There's a lot of shonen out there, and a lot of people avoid it purely based on the fact it's shonen.
Like me!
However, when I stumbled across Soul Eater a while back I found something that was shonen that I liked. Perhaps it was the unique, Burton-esque art style, or maybe the consistently stellar direction and animation from BONES. Either way, this odd little series that I had no interest in before caught my eye and did some impressive things within its genre.
Click on through for the full review.
Soul Eater Vol. 4
Studio: BONES
Publisher: FUNimation
Release Date: July 27th
Amazon: $37.49, RightStuf: $35.99
While I may be specifically reviewing Volume Four, this review will cover most of the series.
Soul Eater is a unique beast. From the outset you can see the art is a bit more exaggerated than usual and a bright, punk style dominates the whole ordeal. The show plays that "punk" up and runs with it, from the behaviors of the characters to the eyecatches. But what about the underlying force of the show, the story? Well, it's pretty much generic shonen at it's most ordinary. Our main characters, Maka Alban and Soul Eater are partners in the Death Weapon Meister Academy. Maka is a meister who wields Soul, the weapon (a scythe) and their assignment as students is to collect 99 souls of evil humans and one witches soul to essentially "level-up" Soul to a Death Scythe. Sounds pretty generic (and it is) but luckily the show has the brains to toss this out as the central plotline once it no longer serves its purpose.
The first episodes feature Maka and Soul getting the last of their 99 initial souls, and their attempt to take a witches soul, which fails. Because of their inability to capture this final soul, they must begin over from the beginning, which is quite the punishment. But it's all a ploy that the writer is using to send them back into a school environment and get the story going, really, and so we're introduced to Maka and Soul's classmates. Black Star (meister) and Tsubaki (who can transform into various ninja weapons), as well as Death the Kid, the son of the headmaster of the school, and his two guns, Liz and Patty.
The rest of the show focuses on the group working their way back up the school ladder to 99 souls initially, but their plans are throw into disarray by Medusa the witch (as well as her daughter/son/whatever Chrona) and her plans to revive the Kishin, a demonic being that threatens the city in which the school is located. Certainly much more happens both ways over the course of this series (such as the teachers Dr. Franken Stein and Sid Barett getting involved), giving us excellently animated battles and cheesy "believe in yourself" moments aplenty, but suffice to say in volume four we are reaching the show's conclusion. It's not much of a spoiler to say that the show's ending is completely different from the manga, mainly because the manga is still ongoing. The final few episodes do indeed suffer from BONES-itis: a quick final battle to wrap up the series and give it closure occurs, but isn't quite satisfactory.
But while the story mostly exists as a vehicle to give our characters fights to get into, the characters themselves are fairly entertaining. They occasionally devolve into the stereotypes they originate from, but for the most part, they perform either as parodies or excellent variations of the cliche.
Voice acting on the Japanese side is good, featuring such names a Mamoru Miyano (Death Note's Light) as Death the Kid, Toru Ohkawa (FMA's Roy Mustang) as Death Scythe and Maaya Sakamoto (Arakawa's Nino) as Chrona. On the dub side, Todd Haberkorn (Baccano's Firo) is Death the Kid and Chuck Huber (Yu Yu Hakusho's Hiei) does well as Dr. Franken Stein. Also worth mentioning is Troy Baker (Schneizel in Code Geass), who does a hilarious job as Excalibur. I mean that in a good way.
...and Vic Mignogna is Death Scythe. Yeah.
The acting overall is slightly below average, unfortunately. The dub suffers from the common problem of the actors sounding like they're obviously reading a line off a script. When they do finally grow into their character later in the show (such as in volume four) it becomes more bearable, but for the most part the names I mentioned earlier are the few good actors.
Despite my complaints about the dub and the ending, Soul Eater is a great shonen series. The occasional filler episodes don't harm the main story thread and sometimes are pretty humorous on their own (the giraffe had me laughing really hard for some reason). When it's jumping headlong into fights and showing off its punk side, the anime excels and shows how self-aware it can be, too. If you're up for entertaining characters and great art, while pushing the throwaway story to side, then it's hard to not recommend Soul Eater. Compared to the usual dreck it's a wild and loud shonen that does a lot of things right. And despite its shortcomings, Soul Eater, in the end, proves to be a fun show in its own right.
Excalibuuuurrrr~
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