The Summer 2019 Anime Preview Guide

to the abandoned Sacred Beasts

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A century after the continent of Patria was settled, the discovery of a new ore split the continent into the Nothern Union and Southern Confederacy and a civil war ensued. Outmanned, the Union resorted to forbidden science to create super-soldiers who could assume the forms of legendary creatures to do battle. Their ability to turn battles deemed impossible got them labeled Incarnates because they were perceived as close to divinity. The problem was the side effects of the transformations, which eventually drove some berserk and caused most to have problems fully reverting to human form.

Though they effectively won the war for the Union, their creator, Elaine, decided that they - including Hank, her love and the Incarnate's commander, and herself - should all be killed off before that eventually happened to everyone. But not everyone was on board with those plans. Following a vicious betrayal, Hank now finds himself in the postwar era seeking to carry out a promise: that Incarnates who go bad would be killed off by their own. And a certain young woman, who is the daughter of one of the Incarnates, is about to him. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts is based on a manga and streams on Crunchyroll at 11 a.m. EDT on Mondays.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

If there's one thing I ire about To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts, it's its willingness to just throw subtlety out the window with an anchor around its neck by naming its villain “Cain Madhouse.” Talk about a loaded name – if you weren't expecting Cain to betray someone the minute you heard his name (and saw that he was basically the third wheel in the Hank/Elaine relationship), you are far less cynical than me. Then we find out his last name is “Madhouse;” in the parlance of the time period the show is not-so-gently hinting at, the 1860s, that is one name for a facility for the less than sane, and at the time they were truly horrific institutions. So his name is basically “Betrayer Insane Man With Bad Reputation.” Oh, he's going to be a great guy, I can tell.

Sarcasm aside, To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts is a good first episode that I didn't like. What that means is that it is quite well done, from the interesting use of the American Civil War with war scenes that look very much like photos of the era to the way that veterans can feel displaced or abandoned by society when the war is done. In the case of this story, that's because Hank and his men were of a special troop of “Incarnates,” human/animal/monster hybrids developed by Elaine. The Incarnates were the extra push the North needed to win the war, but the drawbacks were more than anyone wanted to deal with, namely that the Incarnates gradually became more and more like their fused beasts than their original selves. If it's a metaphor for PTSD, it's an interesting one, and if the series treads carefully, it could also be somewhat effective.

I say “somewhat” because this is where the story falters for me. Apart from the fact that most of the Incarnates started waving death flags the minute we meet them (“This is my wonderful daughter!” “I love your daughter!” “I'm going ask Elaine to marry me!”), Elaine's decision to kill all of the soldiers before they fully merge with their monsters sits somewhat uneasily. When Hank, who has miraculously survived her bullet, then takes up that mantle in the end of the episode, the Incarnate's language about how he was a hero but now people fear him speaks to a humanity that may still exist within him. The plan to just wipe out the remaining Incarnates, to not try to find another solution or to help them in any way, feels too pat, and like the story is looking for a reason to continue to be violent now that the war scenes are over. This absolutely may change going forward, as the title would seem to imply, but this really isn't a premise that makes me want to see more. War stories, no matter what war, need to be handled carefully. I'm not convinced that this will do that.

Nick Creamer
Rating:

It's always a bit tricky to rate the first show of a new season, given the inherently fluid, debatable nature of a reductive rating, as well as the fact that each new season will have a distinct overall distribution of quality. If you overrate that first show, you stand the risk of being unable to properly express how exceptional future shows are - if you underrate it, you might end up coming off as a cynic if few future premieres actually sur it. In light of all that, I appreciate To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts for offering pretty much the platonic ideal of “it was okay” with its first episode. That crucial three star bar has been officially set.

To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts stands as this season's requisite “self-serious dark fantasy/action” contender, replacing the exiting Attack on Titan. In fact, Sacred Beasts actually seems to share some Titan DNA, from its focus on a quasi-industrial age faux-European empire to its titular transforming monsters. In this first episode, we meet Captain Hank and his team of shapeshifting Incarnates. In a war between the Northern City of Industry and the Southern City of Mining (worldbuilding is clearly not this author's strong suit), those Incarnates end up turning the tide for the north, only to succumb to their bestial instincts. And so, some number of betrayals later, we arrive at an era of peace where Hank's former squates are now wreaking havoc, and both his former partner and would-be lover have disappeared.

The best element of this episode was likely its sympathetic portrayal of Hank's relationship with his squad, as well as their steady deterioration over the course of the war. The show's art design is only so-so and animation fairly limited, but I appreciated how clearly we could see the physical progression of the Incarnate virus over the course of the war. A few well-chosen incidental moments at camp went a long way towards humanizing this team, and the sequence of an Incarnate first losing control was a genuinely horrifying and very effective moment.

That said, it felt like this episode mostly just avoided doing anything profoundly wrong, as opposed to doing anything compellingly right. Sacred Beasts' narrative is both extremely familiar and executed without significant energy; both the direction and the dialogue are too mundane to bring much life to familiar beats like supersoldiers being hated or childhood friends being torn apart. There were also no particularly impressive cuts of action animation, and the show in general stuck to a muted earth-tones aesthetic that was likely intended to convey dramatic seriousness, but mostly just resulted in a visually bland production. If you're a big fan of these sorts of grim fantasy action shows, Sacred Beasts seems like a able but altogether unexceptional example of the form. If you're not, you can probably skip this one.