If your expectation for Attack on Titan is an anime you can watch on a screen and hear with speakers, then this season will do you well, but if your expectations are a well directed, well organized story brought to life with beautiful animation crafted by a passionate team of talented artists and genius creatives, then you will be sorely disappointed, because unlike previous seasons, this production is so hideously ugly, you’d think Attack on Titan wasn’t the defining masterpiece of our era, which it most certainly is.
There seems to be this odd and ignorant consensus pervading the fandom which suggests any and all criticism aimed at a poor product is somehow a direct insult to the workers who made it, and this is a shockingly immature worldview to espouse. Let me get one thing straight: you can say whatever you want about WIT Studio falling victim to Kodansha’s unfair and unreasonable production scheduling in the third season just like MAPPA is now, and how that lead to a double split-cour which ultimately wasn’t even enough to assure consistent quality throughout part two, but you must also admit pointing out these things is nothing more than a diversion from the far greater travesty of animation before you now. Attack on Titan: The Not-So-Final Season is a disgrace to the franchise which came before it on every visual level, and to say so is in no way to deride the overworked animation staff at MAPPA. Am I going to sit here and deny the existence of the throngs of rabid keyboard warriors on social media sending them death threats for producing such appalling CG and embarrassing 2D animation? No, but those people are foolish children with too much time on their hands, and by echoing their indisputably warranted criticisms, I and others like me are not justifying their acts of disrespect and harassment, so I urge you not to feel sorry for saying what you see clearly in front of you and criticizing it for what it is: an ugly, cheap anime.
After episode six, I officially became a manga reader, since I simply could not let this atrocity be my first experience of Attack on Titan’s brilliant story, and what I found in the manga was absolutely stellar shot composition which I had previously thought was simply a product of Tetsuro Araki’s adaptation. Obviously, Araki’s heart-stopping visual direction and irreplaceable cinematic instinct made the anime adaptation what it ultimately was, but Hajime Isayama’s knack for framing an iconic single image when it mattered most still shouldn’t be overstated when the final season here has neither directorial flow nor memorable cinematics. The new character designs which pride themselves on their close resemblance to the original artwork found in the manga simply cannot use their adherence to the source material as a defense of their janky anatomy and inferiority to the beautiful artwork of Kyoji Asano, and the new music cannot use its passable composition as a defense of its utter incompatibility with Hiroyuki Sawano’s constantly recycled tracks. I understand this is a somewhat particular distinction to be made, but with the sheer amount of blatant animation shortcuts used throughout this season—not even counting the CG—season three part two looks like a studio trying their hardest while grappling with a ridiculous time table, whereas this looks like a studio using a ridiculous time table as an excuse to not try their hardest.
But nevertheless, does the masterful writing save the day and make this thing worth watching? With how much is cut out, rearranged, and left unfinished, I would say no, but that doesn’t make it bad. If anything, the narrative has only gotten better and the themes have only gone deeper. With the basement and its contents finally revealed, the series had to occupy the world it so suddenly established and situate the story as we knew it within that world elegantly, and even with the content from the manga which got butchered in translation, it absolutely achieved this feat. As it demystifies Marleyan society and rationalizes the international bigotry towards the Eldian people, it builds the foundation for one of the most interesting and morally provocative conflicts I've yet to see portrayed in fiction, and it does so with complex characters who never fail to inspire emotion, or inspiration itself. While Attack on Titan: The Not-So-Final season is, indeed, not the final season, it’s still an adaptation of a manga, so it continues the story with more or less the same degree of excellence as the first three seasons did, and while it abruptly ends on a cliffhanger mid-arc, that’s more a testament to the fragile production than the source material, its quality of writing, or the acuteness with which said writing was brought to screen. One thing’s for sure, though, narratives as enthralling as this come once in a generation, and it’s a shame this one is receiving such paltry treatment.
This review was originally going to be a lot more sentimental than it turned out to be. To cope with the extreme dejection I felt after watching such a dishonorable end to this once-great adaptation of an unequivocal masterpiece, I was going to try and write this review to examine the final season as a standalone work while simultaneously offering an all-encompassing retrospective on the modern classic that is Attack on Titan, but after WIT Studio dropped it and MAPPA shit it back out in such a visually repulsive and structurally incomplete fashion, I accepted the fact I couldn’t really do that anymore, and my enthusiasm burnt out along with the quality of the show itself. I’ve lost my motivation to even mind it anymore, and if the fact this season is among the highest rated anime on MAL didn’t make this obvious enough already, you all don’t seem to mind Attack on Titan anymore either. The reality that such a magnificently made work of art could receive such a stark downgrade yet still be well received by the exact same fanbase solely because they enjoy entertaining the mere idea of it is not only a sad reflection of the culture surrounding the work, but a cruel insult to the first three seasons which were only able to be the dazzling spectacles they were thanks to the back-breaking work ethic and tremendous talent of the original staff who so naively thought their admirable labor and impressive results weren’t lost on the audience, who’s appetite all can now clearly see as being apparently, totally mindless.
Thank you for reading.
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