Just to head off anyone who disagreed based on the title but for some reason chose to read this anyway, I don’t mean that Record of Ragnarok (henceforth RoR) is actually terrible or fails to capture the source material. Quite the opposite, it captures the feeling and appeal of the source material too well. There will be spoilers.
My main issue with RoR is twofold, the relative lack of animation and the slow pace. The RoR anime managed to preserve the ultra-detailed character designs of the manga and brought them intact into a show with color and (sometimes) motion – barring that horrible CG Hermes violin performance. However that level of detail came with a serious cost, in that the movements of the characters tended to be very limited a lot of the time. The worst example I can think is the Thor flashback to the giant attack on Asgard which is a lengthy flashback that looks like it was animated in Powerpoint. I understand why they might have gone that route stylistically but it was outright laughable for this minutes long scene to have each cut slowly fade into the next cut. But even outside that particular example there generally isn’t a lot of movement. Most attacks are extremely simple and straightforward, but the amount of detail in the designs severely limits the fluidity of animation. Likewise the huge flurry of blows used in certain attacks are just the same handle of cuts repeated over and over in a loop.
RoR tries to distract from this by using lots of flashing colors and shaking lines in the background to convey energy and hype – which is totally fair given the nature of the conflict between legends among men and literal gods in the battle for humanity’s continued existence. But having recently come off the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen and My Hero Academia, the difference is clear to see. There is not a lot of dynamic animation and the fights do not have a lot of fluidity and motion as you might expect from other shows. If anything has ever captured the moving manga look and feel, RoR is my new go to example of that phrase in action.
Sadly the look of the manga is not all the anime retains. It comes with the slow pace. In the manga this is not a problem, the cut-aways and flashbacks are integral to RoR, building up the combatants both as characters to get invested in and as badass warriors you get hype about seeing go head to head. RoR has an amazing formula in just how far it is willing to go keep a hype train running, or even build on that momentum by interrupting the battle to see important details about a character’s past, philosophy and so on. The constant use of crowd reactions, a common trope in battle anime tournaments, is turned up to eleven too by having the crowd encompass all gods and humanity. There are tons of fun cameos of famous people and tons of hype men in the crowd drawn from the people who personally knew the relevant fighters during a given match. The RoR anime preserves this formula to a T as well. But in doing so it both reveals one of anime’s strengths and how the RoR adaptation failed to use the medium of anime effectively.
One of the most important differences between consuming anime and manga is speed. You can absolutely blow through manga, even ultra important moments, because at the end of the day it’s still images with text. A lot can be done on the creative side to make the big moments pop and to give the reader a sense of buildup, but you can read through the hype scene just as a fast an exposition scene – faster probably even, the hype scene should have a lot less dialogue. Manga requires the reader to pace themselves to some extent, to control how fast the read through certain bits and how much time they take to appreciate all the details in a panel, to get the most out of the experience. Anime doesn’t have this problem, unless you change the video speed, you will see a scene for as long as the director has decided the scene should last. You also see what the parts of the scene get focused on, in the order they get shown to you. And while this is obviously something that can be fucked up, good directing can absolutely make an anime version of scene hit way harder than its manga counterpart.
Here’s an example I meant to write about a few weeks ago before I got sidetracked. In My Hero Academia, I was rapidly losing interest in the manga as it reached the point the anime is now covering. I didn’t end up dropping it for a while but Deku’s Blackwhip was not something which excited me when it first appeared, partly because it only reinforced some the problems I had with the manga in general but also because I could speed through it in like 30 seconds. The same scene from the anime however was the first time my interest in really picked up during the current season. Despite the fact it was obviously the same story beats the anime makes the berserk Blackwhip scene tense and terrifying. Part of this comes from the audio, the strain and desperation in Deku’s voice as he screams at people to run away and begs his power to come back under control. But more than that it was the length of the scene that made it great. This wasn’t a 30 second blurb, it was a minutes long mess that had me on the edge of my seat because all of the elements came together to portray the scene perfectly. You could feel the desperation, surprise and worry of the characters suddenly caught up in a major event that no one saw coming. What struck me the most when watching it though was that the length and pacing of the scene, in comparison to my memories of the same bit in the manga, and how it was massive upgrade to the experience.
RoR meanwhile, in attempting to capture the surprisingly slow and tense pace of the manga and bring it to life in the anime, was filled with episodes that were actually too slow. Like don’t get me wrong it did capture the feel of the manga, but to mixed results. The odd flow of RoR is part of what makes it special and what brings so much hype, emotion and meaning to the battles. And the anime definitely has captured some of that feeling. But because anime is slower than manga it has also caught some downsides of this style of meandering long battle that the manga doesn’t have. The anime actually does feel too slow, quite often. The amount of cuts to the crowd reactions and just how much time they take out of each episode, how bloat they add to the battles, frequently made me want the show to get the ball rolling faster. Keep in mind, I do want some of it, I do think that bloat and meandering is an integral part of RoR battles but both of these things feel like much more of a double-edged sword in the anime. It makes the anime too slow overall by making things feel drawn out in a way the manga never really did – or at least in the manga the parts where you could see the fights being drawn out felt important. In the anime they can just get to be too much, and director should have cut down on the amount of flashbacks and crowd commentary to improve the flow of the battles. We do need some, but maybe condense them down a bit.
Overall the RoR anime is not terrible. It captures both the ultra detailed style of the manga and the meandering pace of the battles, that sets RoR apart from pretty much everything I’ve ever seen. The color and visual design was good, and they did manage to capture most of the extreme facial expressions from the most warped panels in the manga, as well as the grandest attacks. And I did enjoy watching it. However I enjoyed reading it more, and not in the sense that anime left out cool details from the manga, if anything it is a 1 to 1 of the manga paced as an anime. But the way certain scenes and bits of the fight felt like they were dragging their heels was definitely a point against the anime, my outright biggest problem with it. Because moreso than the limited animation it was the slow feel of the that took away from the grandeur of the fights. Nothing undermines epic battles like an audience insistently wishing for the show to hurry up already. See you in the next one.
Mistakes Cheerio for Chesto 