To be honest, there aren’t that many shows this summer that really matter to me.  But the ones that do matter rather a lot, at least.  And among those Made in Abyss: Retsujitsu no Ougonkyou stands so far out in front of the others that it’s basically in its own category.  My feelings about the first season are reflected in the fact that it was my #12 series of the 2010’s.  And the third movie (which is the only essential – read, “non-recap” – one, truthfully) certainly didn’t miss a beat in continuing Tsukushi Akihito’s beautiful and terrible story.  One knows what to expect from The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, and that’s greatness.  And greatness is a rare commodity in anime these days.

All the names that matter are back of course, and that’s a dream team consisting of geniuses from the likes of Studio Ghibli, Bones, Production I.G., and Gainax gathered together for this remarkable production at Kinema Citrus.  The most important among them for me are director Kojima Masayuki and composer Kevin Penkin.  The deeper one gets (no pun intended) into Made in Abyss the more one realizes just how vital Penkin’s ethereal and haunting soundtrack is to the alchemy of this series, and that’s prominently on display in this premiere.  Made in Abyss is one of the most visually stunning series in anime history, but it sounds every bit as beautiful as it looks.

As someone who’s not familiar with this part of the manga, I was a bit surprised by the course of the first episode.  For well over half its length there’s no mention of any familiar characters.  Rather, it’s mainly the story of a young orphan girl named Vueko (Terasaki Yuka).  As if to remind us it’s still Tsukushi in charge, her introduction finds her being raped by the man who’s “taking care” of her.  He’s a total scumbag – MiA is peppered with those – and generally treats Vueko like human garbage.  Eventually the man, a fisherman, comes across a burning boat with only one survivor – an old man  carrying the “Star Compass” he says will point straight up at the location of the Ougonlkyou – the city of gold.  After giving the compass to the fisherman the old man promptly dies.

The elephant in the room with Made in Abyss is the way it depicts the brutalizing of children, and Tsukushi makes it hard to ignore most of the time.  This is a thorny issue for me and always has been, and it’s far from simple.  There’s certainly good and evil in this mythology, and Tsukushi never leaves any suggestion that he’s endorsing the behavior of the latter.  But the way he lingers over these moments with seeming relish is almost fetishistic, and that’s always been an issue for me.  Not so much that I don’t consider myself a huge admirer of the series (obviously).  And in point of fact, the mangaka’s ruthlessness unquestionably heightens the emotional impact of the story.  It’s not an easy thing to resolve one’s feelings about.

While it’s not immediately clear, it seems as if this prologue sequence happens some time in the past.  Vueko (her guardian is dead for reasons unexplained) finds herself on an ocean voyage of outcasts in search of the legendary Ougonkyou.  The leader is a mystic named Wazukyan (played by the peerless Hirata Hiroaki), who munches on live bugs for health reasons and predicts the future, and at least seems not to be a sociopath.  Vueko is closest with a silver-haired youth named Belaf (Saiga Mitsuki) who speaks in somewhat mystical terms himself.

Several ships start the journey but it’s Wazukyan’s that’s the only one to arrive at the island which lies where the compass points straight up.  It’s clear from the behavior if the natives that this isn’t the first group of outsiders to show up looking for the golden city.  The village elder offers to tell the group the way in exchange for the compass, to which Vueko acquiesces.  He also saddles the group with a village child (Kuno Misaki) being exiled because she’s incapable of bearing children.  The villagers call it the void, but we know it by another name – and their reaction when they see it suggests that these events are taking place a good while before the series’ present day.

Finally, we’re reunited with the main trio – just as Riko is passing through the same membrane into the weird eyeball thingy as Vueko, which will take them deeper into the Abyss, another indication that we’re looking at different timelines.  There’s not a lot of time with Riko, Reg, and Nanachi – though it is long enough for Tsukushi to indulge another of his weird fetishes – but it’s clear that we’ve joined them just after their encounter with Bondrewd (the subject of the third film) ended.  The big question hanging over the premiere, then, is how Vukeo’s story will reach across time and intersect with Riko and Reg’s.

And so we re-enter the strange, disturbing, and alluring world of Made in Abyss – a place and a state of mind quite different from anything else in anime.  This episode is mostly table-setting stuff but the impact of being back in this world is quite profound.  This is one of the most immersive series in anime to be sure – “world building” seems a comically inadequate way to describe what it does.  It’s quite inescapable in watching an episode of MiA that it’s simply operating on another plane from most TV anime – to the point where even comparing it with all but the very elite series seems pointless.  It’s mostly competing with itself, and while that’s one tough opponent, Made in Abyss – with it’s God-tier creative team – has never given the slightest indication that it’s not up to the challenge.

OP: “Katachi (かたち)” by Riko Azuna