I guess “Zombies on a Boat” just doesn’t have the same ring to it…

A few words, then, about Kuroshitsuji: Book of the Atlantic (belated though they may be).  And about Kuroshitsuji in general, which is really one of the more remarkable franchises in anime and manga.  It’s managed over the years to be both astoundingly popular and extremely good – something that’s relatively rare, at least with this much overlap between the two.  It also performs a delicate balancing act between mangaka Toboso Yana’s utter shamelessness and love of tropes and a highly sophisticated, subtle and very dark storyline.  It can be easy to be distracted by all the puffery, but once you look deeper you realize just how deep you can look when it comes to these characters.

Black Butler has thrived in every medium it’s ventured into – media, series anime, OVAs, books, live-action musicals, games.  Now its long reach finds its way to theatrical anime in “Book of the Atlantic”, and as you’d expect, it’s pretty splendid.  In anime terms Kuroshitsuji has pretty much never missed a beat as long as it stayed true to the source material (which makes the disastrous second season the stark exception).  “Atlantic” is – like “Book of Circus” – a straight-up adaptation of one of the manga’s arcs.  It too probably could have stretched to fill a 10-episode TV series with no problem, and if the movie (about 100 minutes) has any flaw it’s that it does occasionally feel a bit too busy.  But on the whole, this is a splendid fit for a theatrical film and it works well in this format.

I won’t go into great detail about the storyline here, since you’ll either know if it you’ve seen the movie, or should see it if you haven’t.  Basically we have Ciel and Sebastian boarding a luxury liner called Campania in order to investigate a mysterious group called the Aurora Society, which seems to be re-animating corpses in the name of medical breakthroughs to save humanity.  It’s sort of a twist on “Snakes on a Plane”, substituting zombies for snakes (though we have those, too) and the Campania for the plane – and pretty much every major recurring character has a role here somewhere.

There are a lot of very interesting sequences here, including some revealing flashback sequences (courtesy the various Shinigami on-hand) of Lizzie’s past and Sebastian and Ciel’s initial meeting (did we already know that was where Sebas-chan’s name came from?).  There’s no shortage of camp – stuff like Grell’s “Titanic” re-enactment being the most glaring example (as always, he’s the character who tends to overbalance the series in favor or Toboso’s overindulgent side).  It’s nice to see old pal Snake around too, he being the last survivor of the marvelous Circus Arc.  But as always, most of the antics here are stylish and very fun.

A-1 Pictures has tended to do very well with big-screen animation (their Ao no Exorcist movie was quietly one of the most visually imposing anime films in years) and while there’s a lot of CGI in “Atlantic” given how many big set pieces it features, the movie generally looks great.  More importantly, Kuroshitsuji as a move just feels right.  Everything about this series feels larger than life, including the characters – watching Sebastian and Ciel go through their paces here one almost wonders how a TV was able to hold them.

Indeed, for all the spectacle and grandiosity, it’s absolutely Ciel and Sebastian who give this story its real pathos.  It’s so easy to lose yourself in the moment and forget what the endgame between these two is, so genuine is the seeming connection between them.  Part of the magic of Kuroshitsuji is trying to reconcile Ciel and Sebastian’s actions with what they must truly be feeling inside, knowing what we know about them (which may not be as much as we think, depending on what theories you believe).  Sakamota Maaya and Ono Daisuke own these roles utterly, and they’re a big part of why the anime is such a successful evolution from the manga.

We’re eleven years on with the manga and approaching a decade with the anime, and there’s no sign whatsoever that the Kuroshitsuji locomotive is slowing down.  Everything this franchise touches sells, and the fanbase remains as loyal (and worldwide) as ever.  Toboso-sensei has really hit on a winning formula here – as a part-time BL doujinshi creator she pushes all the right buttons to draw a large audience who’s quite happy with that side of the series, and offers an entirely difference audience a complex and tragic character study of Ciel.  Everybody wins, in other words – and as long as we keep getting more Kuroshitsuji anime, be it TV or cinematic, I’m not going to be complaining.