We Are the Hunters

There’s a chant the cadets recite in Attack on Titan—Are you the prey? No, we are the hunters!—that functions as both battle cry and self-delusion. They’re clearly the prey. The titans are sixty feet tall and eat people without biological necessity, just compulsion, and the walls humanity hides behind keep getting smaller. The show knows you know the slogan is a lie. It doesn’t blink.

Attack on Titan was my favorite anime of 2013, which sounds like a statement that needs qualification. The premise—humanity’s last survivors trapped behind enormous walls while humanoid giants pick them off for no discernible reason—should produce something schlocky and disposable. Instead it built one of the more genuinely merciless narrative structures in recent animation: episodes that accelerate past the point where you expect them to stop, characters killed at moments that feel structurally wrong, violence that the camera refuses to make exciting.

The English-language release hitting North America brought the usual dubbed-anime uncanny valley—familiar emotional beats arriving in different voices, like a memory playing back at the wrong pitch—but the story’s architecture is strong enough to survive the translation. A group of American teenagers watched the first episode for a reaction video, most of them going in cold. Their responses compressed the whole experience into a few minutes: confusion, then genuine disturbance, then the specific helpless investment the show induces in everyone it gets its hooks into.

The titans themselves are what make it work. They’re not designed to look threatening in any conventional sense—proportions wrong, expressions either vacant or grinning for reasons unrelated to anything happening around them. Biologically incorrect in a way that settles into the body differently than spectacle does. You don’t get used to them. The show counts on that.