Karen's Anime Blog

I’m a sucker for anything about a baby. Call it nature doing it’s thing, but whenever I see a little baby on film, animated or not, I turn into a pile of goo. However, I’m not so keen on violence and gore. What then do I do about Clevatess, an anime featuring a baby that also features a giant Beast Lord brutally slaughtering people on the regular?

We start with Alicia, a girl who becomes a heroic warrior, something rare (or unknown) for women in her world. Alicia is going with a bunch of her fellow warriors to slay Clevatess, one of the Beast Lords that keep the humanoid races penned into their kingdoms. Killing the lesser beasts goes swimmingly, but once they meet the giant Clevatess, their numbers are up. Clevatess goes and kills the king as payback for the attack on his land, only as he’s destroying the city, he comes across a dying woman and a baby. The woman implores Clevatess to spare the child, and for some reason– one that he doesn’t even understand himself– Clevatess listens to her. Recognizing that he needs some help with raising a humanoid child, Clevatess magically resurrects Alicia, and the three of them begin a strange journey.

“Please, take my kid. He’s been crying non-stop for 48 hours and frankly, I don’t want to live anymore. You did me a favor.”

Visually, it’s an interesting show. While there’s plenty of zest in the animation, the visuals look kind of dated– like, 90s-era dated. There seems to be a blurry filter over the whole thing, which I kind of appreciated– it makes the gore less visceral. Still, there’s quite a lot of blood and people being impaled; no question that this is dark fantasy. Still, I never felt the feeling of creeping dread that I felt watching shows like Claymore and Attack on Titan.

Look at cute little Alicia. What a charming image, I bet nothing bad is going to hap– oh.

What’s hilarious about it is that once Clevatess “adopts” baby Luna, suddenly this dark fantasy becomes all about the humbling experience of having a squalling infant on hand and not knowing quite what to do about it. I think it’s clear that the experience of raising Luna is going to humanize Clevatess, and the Mom in me is interested in seeing how that plays out. I think we can all agree that at some point, some human is going to do something to hurt Luna, and Clevatess is going to make sure they have a rather bad day. Maybe by episode 6?

There is one uncomfortable bit– assuming the gore doesn’t count as “uncomfortable” to you. When Clevatess revives Alicia, he assumes that she will be able to breast feed Luna, clearly not quite knowing that much about human biology. He commands her to bare her breasts, and my, is it awkward. It’s laugh-out-loud funny when he first says it, because it’s shocking, but the bit drags on too long and it’s just creepy. The show really doesn’t go for fanservice at all so far, so it feels really out of place. It hardly ruins the show, but I wish this part of the scene were handled differently.

I think one of the reasons this show doesn’t hit as hard as something like Claymore is because for all the violence, there isn’t a real sense of evil here. Clevatess sees humans as little more than insects, and doesn’t kill them out of malice; they attack him, so he gets rid of them. From his perspective, the humans just came in and murdered a bunch of his subjects, so he’s perfectly justified. He’s inhuman, but he isn’t cruel; I got more of a sense of menace from the fourth-grade bully in Tacopi’s Original Sin.

“You humans think I’m a beast, yet someone designed that suit of armor for you that impractically highlights your boobs; who’s the real monster here?”

On the whole, I enjoyed this super-sized premiere episode and look forward to seeing what happens to the intrepid trio on the road. I plan on covering this one.