Soul Eater Not! is certainly a debacle that everyone up to and including Bones should be anxious to forget.  But Ohkubo Atsushi is actually a pretty solid mangaka, and it’s been so long since it aired that it’s easy to forget that the original Soul Eater adaptation was quite a good anime.  It’s interesting that Enen no Shouboutai seems not to be an especially well-loved manga, at least if you go by reviews and volume sales, yet this series is one of the more hyped of the summer season.

That kind of fits, because it seems to me that to an unusual degree, the buzz around this adaptation is more about the anime itself than the manga it’s based on.  David Production has certainly done some good work (and some not so good) but the previews for Fire Force have made quite an impression on viewers both in Japan and overseas.  The staff here is largely comprised of ex-SHAFT (which has a growing reputation as a black company, even by anime studio standards) refugees, but more than SHAFT the look and style of this premiere put me in mind of Gainax.  And indeed, a couple of the key staff do have some Gainax experience (though SHAFT is certainly the larger slice of the resume pie).

For starters, the visuals here are definitely impressive.  There’s some CGI for sure (with the usual suspects, like moving trains and crowd shots) but the action sequences and character animation are mostly hand-drawn, and damn well at that.  One of the characters describes the crew’s about to be fight a blaze as going into combat, and that seems quite apt to me – these folks take the term “firefighters” very literally.  That’s in part because of the nature of the fires they fight – sentient ones, in effect, caused by humans turned into “infernals“.  It’s the job of the Shouboutai not just to put the blaze out, but (supposedly) save the souls of the infernals.

The protagonist of Enen no Shouboutai is Kusakabe Shinra (Kajiwara Gakuto, a relative newbie and quite good here), a teen and “third generation pyrokinetic” (those who’ve seemingly channeled their infernal potential into an ability) who can shoot fire from his feet and move at blazing (seriously, who could resist that) speed.  His mother and brother (who, we’re told in Chekhovian fashion, “not even bones remained of “) died in a fire Shinra was accused of starting but which he apparently did not (a mysterious “other” is the culprit).  Shinra’s face contorts into a rictus grin (Ohkubo-sensei does love his shark teeth) whenever he’s nervous (which is pretty much all the time), which generally causes folks to get the wrong idea about him.

Shinra is a likeable enough protagonist, though his quest to be seen as a hero rather than a devil and to atone for failing to protect his family feels pretty standard.  He joins Squad #8 of the Fire Force, and that’s a likeable enough group as well, played by a very familiar group of seiyuu.  Nothing about either they or the premise really stands out though, at least for me – it’s all relatively generic shounen fodder so far.  As we see with Kimetsu no Yaiba though, that can be fine as long as the execution makes up for it.

What does stand out are the visuals.  Not only are the firefights beautifully drawn and animated, they’re staged with an almost balletic grace and fluidity of movement.  As someone who cut his anime teeth on Gainax explosions these sequences – especially the extended one in the factory, which caps the episode – are really a joy to watch.  I don’t know if David has the budget and scheduling discipline to keep that up for two four cours, and I’d certainly like a little more spark (again, my apologies) from the story and characters.  But that may still come – it did with Soul Eater – and as long as the show looks this good, Enen no Shouboutai is going to be an entertaining diversion at the very least.