That Leviathan should have been roundly ignored by English-speaking anime audiences – and poorly-rated by those who didn’t – is no surprise. It has so many strikes against it. Based on a novel by an American – check. Full CGI – check. Highly reminiscent of Ghibli – check (a sort of implied agreement exists between anime hardcores and Miyazaki to pretend Ghibli isn’t anime). And equally reminiscent of 2000’s Gonzo, another hard whiff with modern audiences.  And being a batched Netflix release is the final nail.

None of that matters much to me. MAL ratings and I passed in the night aeons ago. I love Ghibli and a lot of those old Gonzo shows (especially Last Exile), which helped shape my anime aesthetic. I also, as it happens, have a real fondness for good YA sci-fi/fantasy – which is what Leviathan is. YA has produced some of the greatest anime ever (including the greatest, Seirei no Moribito) and some of the pillars of Western SF-fantasy. I’ve since started reading the novels by Scott Westerfield, and while the anime unsurprisingly skipped a ton of material, it did a very good job of capturing the characters and general feel of the piece.

In the first place, not that it matters much but Leviathan is anime, and anyone who says otherwise is full of it. It was produced in Japan by a Japanese studio, and while director Christophe Ferriera is French, he’s a well-established anime veteran. The CGI is by Orange, and if you have to go CGI they’re about as good as TV anime gets. The show overall looks great, its steampunk visual palette brought off very well in Ghibli-Gonzo fashion. And it has a terrific OP and ED by the great Joe Hisaishi, in case the Ghibli vibe wasn’t strong enough.

For the uninitiated, Leviathan is the first in a trilogy by Westerfield, though the anime pulls material from all three books. It’s a fictionalized take on the buildup to World War I, in an alternate world split between “Darwinists” and “Clankers”. The Darwinists are centered in Britain, and have marshalled genetic engineering to build a society around lab-created beasts tweaked to serve humans. Clankers – Germany and environs – are full steampunk, with mechanized walkers (which resemble animals, ironically) and other machine technology. The two principals are an English girl named Deryn Sharp (Fujiwara Natsumi) and an Austrian boy named Aleksandar (Murase Ayumu), both around 15 years old.

Each kid is harboring a secret. Deryn is posing as a boy named Devin in order to serve in the British military. And Aleksandar is the son of Archduke Ferdinand, whose assassination was the pretext for the start of the Great War. In real life he didn’t have a son named Aleksandar, but this boy is the son of his true love, who didn’t possess enough royal blood to make either she or her son legitimate. The web of secrecy goes a lot deeper, but that’s best discovered through viewing (or reading). Deryn and Alek meet aboard the titular Leviathan, a Darwinist airship which crashes in the Alps near an abandoned castle where Alek’s loyal retainers Volger and Klopp have taken him with intent to wait out the war and eventually return him home to claim the throne.

The core elements of Leviathan all work very well. The world-building is excellent, the science and politics fascinating, and the characters well-conceived. The foundation, however, is the bond that forms between the two leads. Again, it’s best to watch as there are elements of this evolving relationship which are spoilers, but suffice to say it really works – they’re great together. The series also takes a very enlightened view of women in the early 20th Century, and the struggle they faced to be considered capable and competent.

Leviathan hopscotches all over Europe and eventually New York, mixing historical and fictional characters, and its blend of period design and fantastical science is quite engaging. All in all I think it’s a really excellent series, even if it only skims the surface of what the source material has to offer. Netflix anime are usually frustrating propositions – ignored within the fanbase whether deservingly or not, and rarely adapting more than a sliver of the full story. But many of them are quite excellent, and Leviathan certainly falls in that group. It’s well worth your time, however you choose to consume it.