Thread by @Yuyucow

Been really looking forward to the Tengoku Daimakyou adaptation - out of excitement due to its interesting high-profile team, but also because I was curious how they'd navigate such a tricky series to adapt. So far, the anime's qualities far outweigh the compromises. Great start!

TDM is a dense series with maniacal foreshadowing, but at the same time a breezy and comfortably paced read. The manga balances the page-turner side with laid-back postapocalyptic adventures very well, and with just 1 cours for this long arc, the anime has to shift the approach

That makes me appreciate the involved series composition over just speeding through the manga as it was. The way they're finding new points to connect the two storylines & coming up with very effective cliffhangers of their own tells me they do get (at least part of) the appeal

And what you're exchanging for a more frantic rhythm is so far excellent execution. Series director Hirotaka Mori is like an elegant hammer: blunt with the impact, but graceful in how he visually conveys it. Always readable, while also tending to avoid invasive direct portrayals

Visually, the highlight is the background artwork led by Yuji Kaneko & the team at Aoshashin. They've proved their range in recent years, but an overgrown post-apocalypse plays to their traditional strengths so well that the project always felt like a freebie for them, lol

Makes you appreciate the contrast with the much more sterile-looking institution. Only the wall leading to the Outside of Outside is similarly textured to the world seen in the other storyline

Episode #01 succeeded at making various styles (personal animation quirks but also the integration of the original work's expressions) feel like they belong together. This cute Shuto Enomoto sequence has a sense of individuality, and also evokes Ishiguro's art without copying it

The original fight scene is a fun concession that adds to the spectacle. It's an amusing addition knowing that Tetsuya Takeuchi has felt unsatisfied with the way anime action is staged for many years, so smart directors can bait him into boarding & (co)animating his own sequences

Also have to shout out this series of pages because it's one of my favorites in this early part of the series. Neat usage of silhouettes and negative space for the gradual reveal, showing how TDM can handle short-term turns just as well as the obsessively planned long plays

The anime has to take a slightly different approach since the techniques the original uses don't come as naturally to animation, but the result is imposing regardless. At the same time, it saves the close look at the monster for the cliffhanger - thoughtful storyboard overall imo

Anyway Tengoku Daimakyou is cool, weird, funny, sometimes horrifying, and revisiting it since the start lets you groan at all the obsessively planned details