Finding the Action, Soul Eater

One of the things that I like about the niche anime we tend to get on dvd is most of these shows weren’t expected to run very long (12-26 half hour episodes), so they would end in a reasonable amount of time. This preference meant I passed on the action/fighting-type shows like Naruto, Bleach, and DBZ that went on and on forever. Considering I primarily buy what I watch, these just weren’t things I wanted to get into, even if I probably would like at least one of those three shows.

Late night anime seems to shy away from action oriented stories with difficult to animate hand-to-hand combat. The few that air just don’t have the budget to infuse enough action to make them fun as an action piece. As much as I love Cobra the Animation for it’s past-era feel (and for Cobra himself), the action sequences are lame, so it’s less good than it could be. The wish to see more fight animation is probably why I’ve been anticipating Soul Eater. It’s an action oriented show and it’s doable at somewhere around 50 episodes.

I’ve been a Soul Eater fan for a while, even though I hadn’t seen the anime or read the manga. It started by seeing some random wallpapers, which led to picking up Soul Eater Soul Art by Atsushi Ohkubo. I love that book. Each of Soul Eater’s character designs are descriptive of each character’s traits and personalities, done with a style that shakes-up familiar elements enough to be its own thing. The drawings have a sense of outline that I find appealing. Animation studio Bones took Ohkubo’s characters and made them a little different, added emphasis on shapes, angles, and edges, making it a little less soft. The changes do not bother me.

The opening episode of Soul Eater wasted no time. Lead characters, Soul and Maka, are near the tail end of a quest. At this point, we’re not really given all that much other than the team of Soul as the weapon and Maka as the meister are hunting down Jack the Ripper, the last of the 100 Kishin souls (souls gone bad) they need to collect before going off to defeat a witch and complete their quest and shoot up to the next level of bad-assedness. In two minutes we know what we need to get what’s going on. It doesn’t go to great effort to explain the world and just tells us as much as we need for that scene. Efficient. I like that. Jack is bad, so they throw down.

What follows is a short, but sweet fight. All of the fights in this first set have been worth the watch. The scythe is a stupid weapon, but when it starts glowing large in Soul Eater, it looks awesome. That the combats feature actual animation helps a lot. I haven’t watched shows like Naruto or Bleach (so freaking long!), so I don’t know how well fights tend to be animated for shows like this, but many fights in the late-night, niche-audience animes I usually watch are more like manga during fights than they are like animation. Bones animates the attack sequences in Soul Eater and it looks real good for a tv anime. The angles, choreography and cuts make watching the fights a lot of fun.

Since the show is about these cool weapon masters, it kind of has to do the extended character introduction thing. I tend to think that the standard tv formula devotes a little too much of a series on character introduction arcs that typically aren’t that important beyond introducing the character. Lucky for me I was already a fan before watching the show. It’s just that the first thirteen episodes are oddly laid out. The main meister and weapon pair, Maka and Soul, take a backseat pretty quickly. They just weren’t around long enough to want a break from them. Instead, we spend a lot of time getting to know Black Star and his weapon Tsubaki. Black Star is my favorite character so far, so it wasn’t too bad, but I could have waited a bit longer for a Black Star and Tsubaki development arc. I kind of feel like I’ve spent more quality time with that pair than I have with Maka and Soul after the first thirteen episodes. Black Star probably gets a lot of attention early on to avoid front loading the show with Maka-Soul angst and in the end that’s probably a good thing.

With something like Soul Eater, if the fights are good and the characters make me laugh, then it’s a success. So far, so good.

Funimation’s Soul Eater Dub

I find the dub enjoyable enough. Micah Solusod plays Soul Eater and pretty much nails the character out of the box. He sounds something like a slightly lower register Johnny Yong Bosch, which threw me off during the short preview they had up months ago. It’s still kind of freaky to me. Laura Bailey is fine as Maka and I like how the pair of a cool relaxed Soul and a tensed Maka sound together with both being easy to listen to. I really like Laura Bailey and she fits Maka.

Before the cast was announced I was guessing that Britney Karbowski would play Maka (Laura Bailey lives in LA, so didn’t think she’d play a lead in a 50+ episode show). However, I love her as Black Star, such an awesome fool, and probably one of the reasons Black Star is my favorite character in the show.

Tertiary characters are where most anime dubs grate on my ears. There’s some good here. Leah Clark is pure sex (as always) win as Blair, getting under Maka’s skin. As much as I’m really sick of Vic Mignona, he made me laugh as Death Scythe. The two actresses playing the Thompson Twins (love the references in the show) also rock. Kind of didn’t care for John Swasey as Lord Death or Travis Willingham as Free, but so what? This is Soul Eater, it’s fun, and they’re playing it that way.

It’s sweet to hear Luci Christian playing the villain Medusa. While I miss hearing her as a lead character as often as was the case in the past, it’s great to hear her do these other things like playing an increasing number of characters outside of that narrow band that is the female lead character in an anime. So far, we’ve really not seen all that much of Medusa so far, but like what I’m seeing/hearing.