Leviathan anime
Jul. 17th, 2025 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSomehow I managed to sneak in an entire 12 episodes of television - six hours!! Overall I'm glad I watched it, they did a reasonable job with it, and I liked some of their choices more than others. Behind the cut, a longer review with major spoilers for both the adaptation and the original book series.
Going to try to organize my watch notes into something a little more thematically organized.
Creatures and world design:
I thought the Huxley and Stormwalker were great. Leviathan pretty great although I would have liked a little more of a sense of motion/weight optimization or something, like, this-is-an-airship-ness. Also the books have a lot of good stage business with ropes and harnesses and descent devices and we didn't really get that, presumably because it would have been annoying to animate. But I missed it sometimes, especially when they were, like, clowning around on top of the whale with no sense of being on a fast-moving thing very high up. Herkules was good, and I liked the detail of steampipes everywhere in the Clanker town. We got elephant walkers but no Dauntless battle with fun trunk action, alas. Sahmeran was pretty good.
I was sad we didn't get Tazza. And I really wasn't into what they did with Bovril at all. I get that it was an animal sidekick in a cartoon and thus was likely to look like a cartoon animal sidekick, but, enh, I didn't like the design, I didn't like that it didn't talk, and I really didn't like the whole "it's a computer that gives its output in glowing lights on its back" thing. That felt "anime in a bad way" to me, like a bad 90s cartoon. I get that they wanted to make it plot-essential but the whole which-tower-is-the-real-tower bit was *so* dumb-movie. (While I'm complaining about the Goliath arc, I think it falls into world design that Tesla now had forcefields and rotor wings? Again, it was like we had lost the distinctive Leviathan setting and were now in a generic cartoon.)
I laughed so much about the flechette bats dropping their darts by mouth instead of pooping them. I don't know whether you even can show animals pooping on TV but they clearly decided they weren't going there.
Character design/acting:
I watched in English (although I may go back and watch some or all of it with subs) and had an immediate visceral negative reaction to Deryn's voice because it reminded me so much of Rayla's voice. Had to stop and mentally reassure myself that this was a different character on a different cartoon show with different writing and if I stuck with it I would get used to it, and indeed that pretty much happened. I was also really bothered in the first couple of episodes by Deryn's giggliness - *so* "tee hee hee I'm just a girl!". Practically simpery. But I told myself it would give her character room to develop, and in fact she did seem to settle down/man up a little as we went. Q has been watching some Pokemon show that I find nigh-unbearable due to the high-pitched anime girl voices, so possibly there are genre conventions here that they could only get away from so far without feeling really off to genre regulars.
But I also felt like we didn't get a great sense of Deryn's badassery? Like, I get that for length purposes they had to cut pretty much everything that didn't directly move the plot, but without her sled heroics and Dauntless heroics and whatnot it wasn't quite so clear to me that she was both daring and sharp, her core qualities. Also ten episodes of her shitty haircut paid off gloriously in her reveal with slicked-back hair - she looked *so good* in her suit - and then sadly she had the shitty hair back for the finale.
I have much less to say about anyone else. I liked that Alek was shorter but their hands at the very end seemed to be exactly the same size. I always pictured Newkirk as a little younger but whatever.
Plot simplification:
Please imagine my all-caps screaming in my notes in episode three. (Or, here, I'll copy/paste: "WHEN THE POPE'S EDICT WAS ANNOUNCED?? OOOOkay that's a turn.") Of course they had already killed Hoffman, an early announcement of plot departures, but the radical overhaul of the identity-secrets plotline was such a big change and I didn't find the anime version nearly as compelling as the book version. I mean, I get that they were trying to figure out how to fit the whole story into six hours, but, meh. I thought in episode one that they might be building toward Deryn giving Alek space/empathy to mourn in contrast to Volger, and that being an important part of the basis of their relationship, but... they didn't, really? Her dad's backstory felt almost absent? And then having her overhear about Alek being the heir, and Barlow figuring out that she was a girl (I really liked that she's so smart but she didn't)... I don't know, it felt like we were getting from plot point to plot point in, like, the shortest and most obvious way, rather than interesting storytelling. The singing (and especially the violin duet with Barlow watching) gave me embarrassment squick but the snuggle in the chute was lovely. Big spoon Deryn forever.
Some of it was totally fine. Moving the Huxley test to Edinburgh instead of London, moving Barlow to Paris instead of London, cutting Japan and Mexico, we ended up with a simple, straightforward flight path for the Leviathan. I liked Alek blowing their cover due to trauma rather than childishness/thoughtlessness, that's a tighter arc for him, keeps him more likeable, etc. I didn't mind cutting Jaspert and making Deryn an orphan because it raises the stakes for her, having nowhere else to go, and simplifies the whole "is her mother really okay with this" question. Klopp's death was almost comically telegraphed... maybe they were trying to pretend they were suggesting a fun "Uncle Iroh in Ba Sing Se" AU there but it was pretty clearly "I would like to see Montana", like, oh, buddy, no.
Volger... oh man. I was pretty shocked by him being like "the gold is worth British lives" (well, once I got over my annoyance of having him bringing it aboard by easily carrying a couple of suitcases rather than one bar at a time. it's only heavy when the plot says it's heavy! I guess we don't know how many trips he made with the suitcases.). I guess if they wanted an antagonist for Drama Purposes, who else, and I guess giving Alek someone to play off of was useful for character purposes. The whole Goliath arc was so wild. Volger arranged for Alek to be kidnapped by the Germans?? I can only figure that they knew that they wanted to end up with Deryn and Alek together at the climax, and then they each needed a job in the plot, and then they each needed a way to get there/get set up for their plot job, and working backwards somebody was eventually like "yeah, Volger sells out Alek to the Germans" and everybody was just like "you know what, fine". "I will make you be king" is sort of a fundamentally weird plot (does Volger think he's setting Alek up to be his obedient puppet king, or does he imagine Alek being independent at some point? also it was jarring to me that they kept saying king instead of emperor, which I can only assume was a mouth movements problem). I read somewhere that they knew from the outset that Alek couldn't kill Tesla (apparently the Japanese love Tesla?) so giving him a swordfight with Volger was... something? I guess it hung together as a character arc. The whole "I will stand by the tower because that's the only way we could possibly mark it" thing was so dumb-movie but I guess at some point you have to accept that you're watching a movie and it's going to do movie things. I have now said "I guess" a whole bunch of times which is more or less how I feel about the Goliath arc.
Alternate history, happy endings, and the kinder 20th century:
To close this out, here's some meta I wrote for Tumblr about the big changes in terms of the deaths and the ending.
I think the anime's ending fit the story they chose to tell.
As an alternate-history fan and occasional alternate-history writer, I've thought a bit about what it means to make certain kinds of choices in your alternate timeline.
The Leviathan books are WWI-lite - the war is winding down by December 1914, there's a peace conference in early 2015, there's a formal Coexistence Treaty by 2016. (No Somme, no Verdun, no Passchendaele; Wilfred Owen probably never enlists, let alone gets gassed.) And meanwhile there's a giant flying whale! The world is brilliant and fascinating but also frequently goofy in the best way.
The anime creates an alternate timeline to that alternate timeline, stepping back a bit from the romp of the books and back toward the grittiness of war. Nobody is throwing non-lethal spice bombs in Istanbul: it's a shooting battle. Hoffman, Newkirk, and Klopp now die to show us the stakes and seriousness of the conflict. And the gonzo worldbuilding is just a bit dialed back- the bats don't poop, we don't see the elephant walkers using their trunks, there is nothing horrid about the spottiswoode rebreather.
In Goliath, when Alek chooses to stay with Deryn, it's a victory for joy. (For looking toward the future instead of holding on to the past, for choosing life after loss, for personal happiness.) It's the perfect ending for their story and the perfect start to the hopeful future for their world that's become possible with the avoidance of most of the war.
But in the anime, we don't get to end on joy, because the world isn't quite as light. Alek chooses duty and responsibility over love and freedom because the heavier world makes responsibility sit more heavily on his shoulders. There is hope, but only if everyone is willing to do their part and make peace a collective priority (pursued through collective rather than individual action, as the Tesla arc hammers home).
I can only speculate why the anime team chose to make that change. Maybe it just spoke to them more as a story! Maybe it felt more realistic, or respectful of real-world awfulness past or present, to rein the story in from its wildest fantasies of a kinder world. Maybe it felt like a step too far to make a romance with a happily-ever-after out of even an alternate version of such an ugly part of real history. Maybe somebody saw Casablanca or Roman Holiday a few too many times, I dunno. One of the interesting things about adaptations is seeing what someone else thought was essential about the work and what they wanted to reimagine, and the anime team said, hey, we think this works for the core of the story we care about.
And that's great. That's fine.
But the Leviathan I love is the one that goes big; my timeline is the timeline that is so much more hopeful that we get hope practically for free, where the worst horrors can be avoided just because the world isn't that bad. My Alek chooses Deryn not to dodge responsibility but to fully embrace and demonstrate that the two worlds are better together, and also because yay. Tu felix Austria nube. It's meteoric. :)
Going to try to organize my watch notes into something a little more thematically organized.
Creatures and world design:
I thought the Huxley and Stormwalker were great. Leviathan pretty great although I would have liked a little more of a sense of motion/weight optimization or something, like, this-is-an-airship-ness. Also the books have a lot of good stage business with ropes and harnesses and descent devices and we didn't really get that, presumably because it would have been annoying to animate. But I missed it sometimes, especially when they were, like, clowning around on top of the whale with no sense of being on a fast-moving thing very high up. Herkules was good, and I liked the detail of steampipes everywhere in the Clanker town. We got elephant walkers but no Dauntless battle with fun trunk action, alas. Sahmeran was pretty good.
I was sad we didn't get Tazza. And I really wasn't into what they did with Bovril at all. I get that it was an animal sidekick in a cartoon and thus was likely to look like a cartoon animal sidekick, but, enh, I didn't like the design, I didn't like that it didn't talk, and I really didn't like the whole "it's a computer that gives its output in glowing lights on its back" thing. That felt "anime in a bad way" to me, like a bad 90s cartoon. I get that they wanted to make it plot-essential but the whole which-tower-is-the-real-tower bit was *so* dumb-movie. (While I'm complaining about the Goliath arc, I think it falls into world design that Tesla now had forcefields and rotor wings? Again, it was like we had lost the distinctive Leviathan setting and were now in a generic cartoon.)
I laughed so much about the flechette bats dropping their darts by mouth instead of pooping them. I don't know whether you even can show animals pooping on TV but they clearly decided they weren't going there.
Character design/acting:
I watched in English (although I may go back and watch some or all of it with subs) and had an immediate visceral negative reaction to Deryn's voice because it reminded me so much of Rayla's voice. Had to stop and mentally reassure myself that this was a different character on a different cartoon show with different writing and if I stuck with it I would get used to it, and indeed that pretty much happened. I was also really bothered in the first couple of episodes by Deryn's giggliness - *so* "tee hee hee I'm just a girl!". Practically simpery. But I told myself it would give her character room to develop, and in fact she did seem to settle down/man up a little as we went. Q has been watching some Pokemon show that I find nigh-unbearable due to the high-pitched anime girl voices, so possibly there are genre conventions here that they could only get away from so far without feeling really off to genre regulars.
But I also felt like we didn't get a great sense of Deryn's badassery? Like, I get that for length purposes they had to cut pretty much everything that didn't directly move the plot, but without her sled heroics and Dauntless heroics and whatnot it wasn't quite so clear to me that she was both daring and sharp, her core qualities. Also ten episodes of her shitty haircut paid off gloriously in her reveal with slicked-back hair - she looked *so good* in her suit - and then sadly she had the shitty hair back for the finale.
I have much less to say about anyone else. I liked that Alek was shorter but their hands at the very end seemed to be exactly the same size. I always pictured Newkirk as a little younger but whatever.
Plot simplification:
Please imagine my all-caps screaming in my notes in episode three. (Or, here, I'll copy/paste: "WHEN THE POPE'S EDICT WAS ANNOUNCED?? OOOOkay that's a turn.") Of course they had already killed Hoffman, an early announcement of plot departures, but the radical overhaul of the identity-secrets plotline was such a big change and I didn't find the anime version nearly as compelling as the book version. I mean, I get that they were trying to figure out how to fit the whole story into six hours, but, meh. I thought in episode one that they might be building toward Deryn giving Alek space/empathy to mourn in contrast to Volger, and that being an important part of the basis of their relationship, but... they didn't, really? Her dad's backstory felt almost absent? And then having her overhear about Alek being the heir, and Barlow figuring out that she was a girl (I really liked that she's so smart but she didn't)... I don't know, it felt like we were getting from plot point to plot point in, like, the shortest and most obvious way, rather than interesting storytelling. The singing (and especially the violin duet with Barlow watching) gave me embarrassment squick but the snuggle in the chute was lovely. Big spoon Deryn forever.
Some of it was totally fine. Moving the Huxley test to Edinburgh instead of London, moving Barlow to Paris instead of London, cutting Japan and Mexico, we ended up with a simple, straightforward flight path for the Leviathan. I liked Alek blowing their cover due to trauma rather than childishness/thoughtlessness, that's a tighter arc for him, keeps him more likeable, etc. I didn't mind cutting Jaspert and making Deryn an orphan because it raises the stakes for her, having nowhere else to go, and simplifies the whole "is her mother really okay with this" question. Klopp's death was almost comically telegraphed... maybe they were trying to pretend they were suggesting a fun "Uncle Iroh in Ba Sing Se" AU there but it was pretty clearly "I would like to see Montana", like, oh, buddy, no.
Volger... oh man. I was pretty shocked by him being like "the gold is worth British lives" (well, once I got over my annoyance of having him bringing it aboard by easily carrying a couple of suitcases rather than one bar at a time. it's only heavy when the plot says it's heavy! I guess we don't know how many trips he made with the suitcases.). I guess if they wanted an antagonist for Drama Purposes, who else, and I guess giving Alek someone to play off of was useful for character purposes. The whole Goliath arc was so wild. Volger arranged for Alek to be kidnapped by the Germans?? I can only figure that they knew that they wanted to end up with Deryn and Alek together at the climax, and then they each needed a job in the plot, and then they each needed a way to get there/get set up for their plot job, and working backwards somebody was eventually like "yeah, Volger sells out Alek to the Germans" and everybody was just like "you know what, fine". "I will make you be king" is sort of a fundamentally weird plot (does Volger think he's setting Alek up to be his obedient puppet king, or does he imagine Alek being independent at some point? also it was jarring to me that they kept saying king instead of emperor, which I can only assume was a mouth movements problem). I read somewhere that they knew from the outset that Alek couldn't kill Tesla (apparently the Japanese love Tesla?) so giving him a swordfight with Volger was... something? I guess it hung together as a character arc. The whole "I will stand by the tower because that's the only way we could possibly mark it" thing was so dumb-movie but I guess at some point you have to accept that you're watching a movie and it's going to do movie things. I have now said "I guess" a whole bunch of times which is more or less how I feel about the Goliath arc.
Alternate history, happy endings, and the kinder 20th century:
To close this out, here's some meta I wrote for Tumblr about the big changes in terms of the deaths and the ending.
I think the anime's ending fit the story they chose to tell.
As an alternate-history fan and occasional alternate-history writer, I've thought a bit about what it means to make certain kinds of choices in your alternate timeline.
The Leviathan books are WWI-lite - the war is winding down by December 1914, there's a peace conference in early 2015, there's a formal Coexistence Treaty by 2016. (No Somme, no Verdun, no Passchendaele; Wilfred Owen probably never enlists, let alone gets gassed.) And meanwhile there's a giant flying whale! The world is brilliant and fascinating but also frequently goofy in the best way.
The anime creates an alternate timeline to that alternate timeline, stepping back a bit from the romp of the books and back toward the grittiness of war. Nobody is throwing non-lethal spice bombs in Istanbul: it's a shooting battle. Hoffman, Newkirk, and Klopp now die to show us the stakes and seriousness of the conflict. And the gonzo worldbuilding is just a bit dialed back- the bats don't poop, we don't see the elephant walkers using their trunks, there is nothing horrid about the spottiswoode rebreather.
In Goliath, when Alek chooses to stay with Deryn, it's a victory for joy. (For looking toward the future instead of holding on to the past, for choosing life after loss, for personal happiness.) It's the perfect ending for their story and the perfect start to the hopeful future for their world that's become possible with the avoidance of most of the war.
But in the anime, we don't get to end on joy, because the world isn't quite as light. Alek chooses duty and responsibility over love and freedom because the heavier world makes responsibility sit more heavily on his shoulders. There is hope, but only if everyone is willing to do their part and make peace a collective priority (pursued through collective rather than individual action, as the Tesla arc hammers home).
I can only speculate why the anime team chose to make that change. Maybe it just spoke to them more as a story! Maybe it felt more realistic, or respectful of real-world awfulness past or present, to rein the story in from its wildest fantasies of a kinder world. Maybe it felt like a step too far to make a romance with a happily-ever-after out of even an alternate version of such an ugly part of real history. Maybe somebody saw Casablanca or Roman Holiday a few too many times, I dunno. One of the interesting things about adaptations is seeing what someone else thought was essential about the work and what they wanted to reimagine, and the anime team said, hey, we think this works for the core of the story we care about.
And that's great. That's fine.
But the Leviathan I love is the one that goes big; my timeline is the timeline that is so much more hopeful that we get hope practically for free, where the worst horrors can be avoided just because the world isn't that bad. My Alek chooses Deryn not to dodge responsibility but to fully embrace and demonstrate that the two worlds are better together, and also because yay. Tu felix Austria nube. It's meteoric. :)
no subject
Date: 2025-07-18 04:18 am (UTC)I think you mean to say 1915 and 1916?
no subject
Date: 2025-07-18 01:56 pm (UTC)