By Matthew Moorcroft

No Recommendation

All images are courtesy of Crunchyroll.

Fantasy anime has a dire problem. For every Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End or Delicious in Dungeon, fantasy anime for the past decade have seemingly been made on autopilot, existing for the sole purpose of filling out a seasonal block or some kind of adaptation of a popular light novel. I don’t really need to describe these shows cause you probably know the kind I am talking about. Generic fantasy world with different traditional races, magic that feels video gamey, usually involving a protagonist that’s either reborn from our world or has knowledge of their own reincarnation, you get the gist. Honestly we get so many a season it’s easy to miss most of them as they slip through the cracks, forgotten to time as the “Re:Zero” killers that never were.

The latest addition to this pile is The Beginning After the End, which is based on a Korean manhwa written by an American but has far more in common with Japanese light novel tropes, which has one interesting thing going for it, and that’s it’s central conceit. While the reincarnation trope has been done before, the idea here is one that provokes the debate of nature vs. nuture as it’s main story and focal thematic point – can a man whose past experience hardened him be a different, kinder soul in more loving circumstances?

If you think this sounds a lot like Mushoku Tensei, you’d be right. The Beginning After the End may lack that series’ thornier, even problematic elements, but this also means After the End is not nearly as interesting nor as meaty as Tensei despite covering similar ground, mainly because After the End is so concerned with setup and exposition rather then character or story. In fact, what little character there actually is here is so barebones that the small cast introduced here are nothing more then puppets. The mother is a generic, doting mother, and the father is loving and protective, while also maintaining a bit of a silly personality. And then there is Arthur, or King Grey, himself, who has inklings of good ideas scattered here but is mostly just reduced to “prodigy who can read a book at age 2 and blow up a house”.

Most of this is disappointing especially as, through the grapevine, it’s impossible to not hear stories about the original manhwa and it’s seeming psychological complexity and intricate storytelling, particularly the further it goes. While I believe it’s fans, there is unfournately none of that here, which is very likely a case of stuff just missing in translation and failing to come across properly in a visual medium like this. So much of this is in voiceover that it becomes dangerously close to an audiobook at points and that likely hampers much of the appeal of giving visuals to something like this.

Doesn’t help that it just looks ugly and stiff as sin. Studio A-Cat have never been exactly great but with the same directing and writing team as the equally ugly (and somehow even worse) Highspeed Etoile working on this it’s clear that no matter how faithful this was it was likely doomed from the start. For the very small bits of action cuts in this none of it moves; each punch or sword movement still frame with some speed lines. The characters designs border on generic, and the magic animation feels almost splattered on with no depth or contrast to everything around it. Sure, it’s great to have the ever reliable Keiji Inai on the score here (who contributions are unambiguously the one major highlight of the episode), but it’s surrounded by dead weight at every single turn on a production end.

If The Beginning After the End is destined to become yet another isekai/reincarnation fantasy doomed to the bargain bin of streaming glut, that’s a real shame for it’s very vocal fanbase who have championed it’s manhwa for years and likely won’t ever received a properly great adaptation if their cries are to believed. But as it stands here, as a standalone pilot episode, The Beginning After the End does very little to encourage me going forward, as I suspect it’s lackluster production and generic fantasy tropes are difficult pills to swallow. I’m curious to see whether or not it can beat those allegations going forward, but as it stands this is a complete wash and not a very healthy start to the season.