Hell’s Paradise

First of all, a quick writer’s note, as I’m writing this, it is June 30th, and it’s late at night, and I’ll be heading to bed right after I write this. The final episode of Hell’s Paradise airs in around nine to ten hours, and I’m just starting on my review. I did this intentionally though, to imitate a MAPPA style of production, rushing and submitting the work just a bit before it’s due to see how poorly this review will turn out.

Studio MAPPA has been known for taking on big name action or shounen titles as of late, with the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen, Attack On Titan, Chainsaw Man, Vinland Saga, and now Hell’s Paradise. They've taken on so much that they have become a popular name amongst anime fans. While their shows generally look decent, it is clear that because they’ve taken on so much, their production schedule has been a literal hell, with very overworked staff, and poor working conditions. Of course, I’m sure many other studios experience these kinds of things too, but MAPPA has been brought into the limelight due to how many popular titles they’ve done recently. Clearly, Hell’s Paradise was not their favourite child, as this show looked considerably worse visually than their other shows.

But before we get to all the production things, let’s talk about the story. On paper, this looks like a somewhat generic action shounen, with a death convict in Gabimaru being tasked, along with the rest of the death row convicts to find the “Elixir of Life” on an island called Shinsekyo, in order to escape their death sentence. Obviously, the convicts fight amongst each other, as only one can have this elixir to evade death. This island looked very interesting and colourful, with some scary creatures around them, all around a very intriguing, perhaps a unique setting. However, what this anime fails at is the most important narrative technique, which is “Show, don’t tell”. Time and time again, we are told about what this environment is like, the religion aspects, the creatures, how the world works, but we don’t really get enough showing of the environment itself, either through simple background shots, or just cutting back on the expository dialogue. There is no need to spoon-feed the viewers every single narrative detail about what is going on, people can figure things out. There was solid potential in what the environment could bring us, but I wasn’t really invested due to the overly saturated dialogue.

The characters felt interesting at first, but slowly also devolved into being rather gimmicky or generic. Gabimaru is the typical protagonist who starts out cold but ends up warming up to people and becomes more kind. For the female characters, there is a sense of empowerment that they were trying to go for, especially with Sagiri looking to escape gender norms and become a samurai, instead of the “norms” that this anime instills upon women. While on its own this would be a cool concept, the fact that all the female characters were so sexualized, and somehow getting saved via princess carry, defying all logic of physics by the men just felt a bit hypocritical to the potential message the show was trying to convey. Furthermore, people died before we could even really have a chance to know them, and adding a sad backstory to try and make us feel emotions just felt like such a weak way for characterizing them. At least the backstories weren’t too saturated after the first few episodes.

From a production standpoint, the show looks fine, but disappointing by MAPPA’s standards. Some of the fight scenes were genuinely very decent and tense, but the other moments of the show had this very weird filter where the characters didn’t really “fit in” with the background art. The compositing was awful at some points, and characters went off model a lot. It was clearly the product of rushed production, as most episodes were outsourced to between ten and twenty different anime studios and animation directors, which signalled how poor the production schedule was. It more or less just felt like MAPPA gathering up all their buddies to finish their homework just as the teacher was coming to collect it every week. This might feel a bit harsh and nitpicky, but if we’re comparing it to other MAPPA works, this is probably one of their worst productions, but from a wider perspective outside of MAPPA, the show looks average to fine visually.

Overall, there is decent entertainment value to be seen here, but it could have been so much better with more time spent on production, and more showing instead of telling. This will undoubtedly get more seasons, so I just hope the next time this show comes around, it’ll be a much improved product compared to what we got this time around. MAPPA, you just got to chill with the amount of projects you got.