Review: Attack on Titan “A Dim Light Amid Despair – Humanity’s Comeback Part One”

Is this a 30 minute training montage?

After the up and down roller coaster of the first two episodes, we finally get into Attack on Titan. The question still remains, though: Is it worth the hype? Unfortunately, we don’t get very far into answering this question with this episode.

It’s training day, and Amin is getting railed by Keith Shadis, his commanding officer, on how much Armin’s hated him for naming him that. As Keith is going through the recruits, we get a look at the other recruits, including Thomas Wagner, and Jean Kirstein. The introduction to Jean is pretty funny, because he eats an headbutt from Keith. This guy is ruthless. Every person who he yells at, either gets their dreams stomped on, or gets knocked to the ground in the case of Jean. We then see a girl nervously eating something, who catches the eye of Keith. It turns out to be Sasha Brown, who stole that steamed potato to eat, in formation. The guy is flummoxed, and even more so when she offered half to Keith. That little stunt earned her a run to the sunset, and loss of meal privileges for five days. Eren, Armin, Mikasa, and two other recruits watching a wagon bringing dropouts back to the human farm of a city.

Then, the news spreads that Eren saw the colossal Titan, and people start to flock to him, especially at the mess hall. They were asking questions, making him relive his mother get eaten. After he recovers, Eren says that he is joining the scouts to send the Titans back to hell. That catches the ire of Jean, who dismisses the Scouts as a death sentence. I smell a rivalry, especially when Eren comes back with practically calling Jean a coward for wanting to hide inside the wall with the rest of the MP’s. They go at each other, about to fight, until a bell rings. For whatever reason, that stops the fight, and they exchange half-assed apologies. Eren walks out, and Mikasa walks past., catching Jean’s eye. After Jean stammers out a few words about her hair, he gets a cold thank you, and she walks out of the hall. Jean finds Mikasa and Eren walking away, and he looks rather pissed at the matter.

In the dead of night, Sasha finally comes back into camp, and passes out next to a street torch. She sniffs the air, and her eyes go red, and she goes super fast, catching what was in this girl’s hand. It turns out to be bread and water, because she has been running all day with no food or drink. They are seen by someone, who questions the blonde’s reasoning to break rules for Sasha, calling it a meaningless act of kindness. The Girl, named Ymir, helps Sasha only so she is owed a favor later.

The next day, we witness the training for the aptitude test. There are a lot of decent recruits, but what really catches is Eren’s complete lack of ability on the vertical maneuvering equipment. The two instructors note it, and of course, so does Keith. After giving us the best line out of Full Metal Jacket, “What is your major malfunction, Private Jaeger?”, Eren starts to panic, and hard.

Mikasa and Armin are trying to help Eren by giving him pointers on balancing on the equipment. That did a whole lot of nothing, considering the second Armin lifted him, Eren fell flat on his face.  Everyone is ripping on him, because he can’t even use the equipment. Mikasa gives Eren another hard dose of reality, saying he may not be cut out for being a soldier. She says it would be hard to give up, because wherever Eren goes, she will too. Too bad he didn’t hear it, but Sasha did. Sasha almost gets the bread that was on the table, until Mikasa takes it for herself. At the barracks, Eren is still trying to get help, but he is getting it hard from the other recruits. They get a story from Bertholdt, about his village and the attack on his village. Bertholdt is a hardened man because of this, and keeps going. Reiner, his friend, is from the same village, and has the same drive. They make out on a field trip, walking towards something. Reiner, Bertholdt, Armin, and Eren make it to an open clearing, where I can only assume the help Eren figure out the maneuvering equipment, because it happens off screen.

The next day is the actual test day. All eyes are on Eren, after all of the bragging and failures from the past few days. He starts out doing well, except he falls. Keith tells him to trade belts with Wagner, and after the belt switch, Eren does it flawlessly. Keith tells him that his belt was defective, meaning it had a broken belt clip. Everyone is amazed, because he was able to keep it going for a bit even with a broken belt. Eren is ecstatic, with everyone reading his eyes as “Check me out,” while Mikasa sees it as relief that he doesn’t have to leave her.

This episode was a stereotypical training episode you can find from many different cartoons and movies. I think that this was done on DBZ more times I can count, same with Bleach and Naruto.  There really isn’t anything that moves from the formula. I didn’t really dig it too much. I do have to say, that the writers actually did make me think there was a possibility that Eren couldn’t make it. Then I realized that Eren is all over the intro in that maneuvering gear. Yeah, that was a lapse in good judgment there.

But what really pissed me off about the episode was the lazy animating that we got in the second half. It happened three times, once with Sasha and Mikasa in the mess hall, the next with the group excursion to that clearing, and the third at the end of the episode. It takes a bunch of stills, with the conversations still going, and tries to pass it off as an animated scene. This is just fucking lazy. If I wanted to watch slide shows, I would just hook up my slide projector, and listen to my family tell me stories from 50 years ago. I don’t want that when I am watching television, you know, a medium that uses moving pictures.

This series still has fantastic animation from Production IG, who has a stellar track record of past shows, including the Ghost in the Shell series that was also on Toonami. But, the animation can only go so far when you have to revert to slide shows.

Sasha was a pretty funny character. I think that it was one of the few high points of the show whenever she had a scene. Why, do you ask? This kind of sums it up:

Unfortunately, the show just lacked on a lot of levels. It just seems to me that this show is just going to be lackluster for a long while.