Soul Eater Episode 1 - Soul Resonance ~ Is Soul Eater
Becoming the Death Scythe ~

OP - resonance (T.M. Revolution) - oh holy moly, this is one amazingly animated OP. Done entirely by the director of Kurau, it’s an absolutely marvellous piece of animation. The song is usual TM Revolution stuff, but the show is worth watching just to see this OP (although for this season I still prefer the Macross F OP because of the song).

ED - I Wanna be (STANCEPUNKS) - generic RAGE! infuses this song, but the ED is better animated than most OPs so I’m not complaining.

The Grim Reaper has set up a school to train potential “Death Scythes”, humanoid weapons for him to use when reaping souls. “Technicians” are the humans who wield the weapons, and this first episode follows Maka, the daughter of the current Death Scythe, and her too-cool-for-school weapon Soul Eater. To qualify to become Death Scythe the weapon must consume 99 evil human/monster souls and 1 soul of a witch - witches are, however, extremely powerful. Maka and Soul Eater collect 99 evil souls and prepare to go after a witch named Blair, although her continued use of her considerable talents (in both the traditional and Sailor Moon sense) makes it very difficult for Soul to concentrate; however, the bond between Maka and Soul is strong enough to overcome even Blair’s feminine charms and eventually they manage to defeat her. However, it turns out Blair was just an extremely powerful magical cat, rather than a witch, and thus Maka and Soul Eater have to start again - leaving the Grim Reaper with Maka’s lecherous, disturbingly obsessive father as his weapon for the time being.

To be perfectly frank, I don’t think I’d have ever given this show the time of day if it hadn’t been for the absolutely incredible visuals. Not only is the animation fantastically consistent and high in quality, but the world is suitably macabre where the moon grins as blood drips from its teeth and the sun mocks the characters and the nighttime colours are like something out of Tim Burton. It’s really truly impressive (if a little bit too much visual overload) to watch.

Popular opinion is to despise Maka’s newbie nails-on-a-chalkboard voice actress, but I don’t have a problem with her at all; if anything it just sounds like she’s been recorded in lower quality than everyone else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her line readings or anything like that; if anything, it adds to the off-kilter atmosphere of the show, like Soul Eater having an incredibly deep voice when he looks like a Kappei Yamaguchi character.

However… despite the total smorgasbord of animated delights contained within this episode, I didn’t really enjoy it all that much. It’s nothing to do with Bones - it’s the story and characters. Despite the bonkers world design, it IS just another shounen action show with the usual over-the-top characters being loud and obnoxious interspersed with a bit of fighting, and it was all a bit wearing despite how well directed the whole thing is. I will keep watching for now as matters may improve as the other main characters are introduced (maybe if we see less of Death Scythe things will improve) but for the moment I’m a little tentative about Soul Eater.

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