Finally, a new anime post! It feels like it's been months since I last sat down and watched a new series, so the chance to watch the intriguing Beastars was too good to resist.
I'd write a detailed synopsis, but to be fair this is just Zootopia in high school. In brief, herbivores and carnivores mix, there's a murder, and we're thrown into turmoil on campus as underlying tensions come to the surface and one group is openly distrusted by the other.
The victim is an Alpaca named Tem, a student who was also a member of the theatre club. With his demise the group is short a star, and through this group we are introduced to grey wolf Legosi who works as a stagehand. Legosi is timid as a rule, but struggles with his hunting instincts - the story centres around his ability to control his inner desires, which seems (at least in this first episode) to work as a metaphor for coming-of-age.
Our other lead is a white dwarf rabbit named Haru, a social outcast due to her promiscuity around the campus - this is how she asserts herself, though it works against her with the rest of the students, particularly other females who bully her relentlessly. Due to her small stature, she's often the recipient of unwanted "protection" from others, and this leads her to reject friends as she wants to feel validated for who, and not what, she is.
A teen drama with the added layers of species discrimination isn't necessarily new, but it does make for fascinating viewing. Beastars is a great looking show - everything from the character designs to the cute school outfits are wonderfully rendered on screen, with smooth animation and detail paid to the way each species moves and interacts with others . Their anthropomorphic world is strangely believable, and the first episode does a fine job in grounding the idea that herbivores and carnivores are living together - it lacks the sugary style of Zootopia, and this lends the show a much needed edge - we are, after all, dealing with the murder of a teenager.
The end of the first episode, which shows Legosi fighting his hunting instincts after catching the scent of Haru, is a fabulous tonal shift. The direction, which shows an x-ray of Legosi taking in the scent and commencing the chase is gripping and stylish. And though I'm not supposed to peek, the opening of the subsequent episode, a stop-motion masterpiece, does much to sell the show.
I'll certainly be watching more of this gorgeous-looking show, if only because the same ULTRA+ programming block brought us the enjoyable Relentless and the sublime Carole & Tuesday. This looks like another winner to me, and I'll be doing a full rundown of the whole series over on the UK Anime Network once I'm done.
Is it worth checking out? Absolutely.
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