‘Attack on Titan’ Was One of the Most Impactful—and Polarizing—Series Ever
In fall 2014, I found myself couch-ridden for a couple weeks due to a nasty tango with bronchitis. My roommate had Netflix, and as I was scrolling for shows to help me kill time, I came across an intriguing-looking title: Attack on Titan. At that point, my familiarity with anime was limited to Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Akira, a childhood fascination with Pokémon—end of list. But somehow, the bubbling pop-culture hype around Attack on Titan had reached me, and I clicked. I sat on that couch—completely rapt, mouth agape, occasionally gasping or screaming—for eight hours.
Episode 1, one of the most engaging series openers I’ve ever seen, introduces the conceit of the world: An entire civilization is penned inside a set of high walls because, if they venture outside, they would be devoured by the creepy-looking Titans which have destroyed humanity. Yet in its infamous first moments, the unthinkable happens: the Titans breach the walls and endanger everyone living within them.
I had never seen anything like Attack on Titan before. For one, the show looks stunning. The art direction from WiT Studio (Spy x Family, Ranking of Kings), which produced the first three seasons before MAPPA (Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man) took over the final stretch, beautifully mirrors the manga: heavy shadows, exhausted and tortured characters, and carnage for days. To me, animation in the vein of Attack on Titan, which in many ways has more in common with Game of Thrones than fare like Venture Bros. and Rick and Morty, felt like an incredible rarity. (The detailed animation, alongside the anime airing concurrently with the manga’s run, also infamously led to a protracted production schedule.) And the story, centering around Eren Jaeger’s drive to both see the outside world and eradicate the Titan threat, incorporated dramatic twist after dramatic twist.