Not so long ago, in the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada, Scott Pilgrim was dating a high schooler.  Well, I mean, they were dating, but they were also kind of not dating.  They haven’t kissed or hugged or anything, but they held hands once.  She was also a fan of the band he was in, because yeah, Scott Pilgrim was totally in a band.  It was terrible.  He had a cool roommate...  By which I mean he was a broke leech crashing at the apartment of his much cooler gay best friend who paid the rent and owned all their stuff.  Yeah, when you really break it down, Scott Pilgrim’s precious little life actually kinda sucked.  That was, until he met the girl of his dreams...  Both in his dreams, and then again in real life.  Infatuated at first site, Scott Pilgrim soon became obsessed by the mysterious rainbow-haired Ramona Flowers, who he stalked until she agreed to date him.  She even agreed to go see his terrible band in concert, where he was challenged to a fight by one of her ~~ex-boyfriends~~ exes, and he was then promptly killed...  Or was he?

Not so long ago, in the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada, Ramona Flowers had to solve the mysterious disappearance of Scott Pilgrim.

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this animated series doesn’t really look like an anime.  Well, appearances can be deceiving, because this series did air simultaneously in America and Japan, and thus, it is registered by all legit sources as an anime.  I went into this series pretty blindly, and I figured out fairly quickly that Netflix itself MUST have had a hand in it’s production, due to what absolutely had to be an insanely high budget.  I’m not just saying that because of the animation, we’ll get there.

But yeah, I was partially right.  My initial assumption was that Netflix might have commissioned this series, like Marvel did with Ironman and Wolverine, and like Cartoon Network did with season 2 of The Big O, but the truth is actually a lot stranger.  Netflix was directly involved with the production of this series, with animation help from Science Saru, a Japanese animation production company that has done some interesting projects both in the eastern and western markets.  I haven’t seen very many of their anime-specific projects, but from what I have seen, I think it’s fair to say there's a spark of insanity in everything they’ve had their fingerprints on.  For this project in particular, the lead man in charge was the Spanish born anime director Abel Góngora, and it was his second gig as lead director following Star Wars: Visions a few years ago. 

For the most part, like I said before, this doesn’t look like your typical anime.  It looks, to me at least, like someone copied the visual style of the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and animated them like a Genndy Tartakovsky cartoon...  Or at least, an anime mock-up of that style, like Panty and Stocking.  To its credit, if you were ever going to see a Scott Pilgrim animation, this is what it SHOULD look like, as the animation style flows perfectly with the somewhat blocky and cartoony character designs.  The actual movement of the characters is fluid and consistently competent, and the cinematography is on point.  While most of the material is straightforward in the way it’s shot, the animators clearly weren’t afraid to change things up in the action scenes, especially as it begins to look more and more anime-like in the final episode, and it can also take on an unnerving experimental feel whenever needed.  It’s a really good looking adaptation that perfectly handles the transition from page to screen.

The musical score is mostly video-game inspired, which shouldn’t be a surprise, as most of it was pulled directly from the movie.  As for the stuff that wasn’t, well, remember when I said this show probably had a massive budget behind it?  Well, there are quite a few licensed songs in this series, including one that I used to like but then completely forgot existed(but you know, whatever).  Yes, one of them was just a cover(albeit a really good one) but I can’t imagine any of these tracks came cheap.  The opening also slaps, but what I’d like to call your attention to specifically is that there are several shots in the op video that are very obvious and deliberate references to the opening theme of Beck; Mongolian Chop Squad.  This is kind of amazing, because there are a lot of bizarre similarities between that show and Scott Pilgrim, which I noticed years ago, thank you.  Koyuki was younger than Scott, but he WAS a directionless loser in a thrown-together band who had a hipster rebel love interest from New York.  You can’t not see it now.

The other telltale sign of a massive budget is the fact that for the English dub, they actually managed to bring everybody back.  Everybody.  Well, everybody except the actors who played the Katayagani twins, but close enough, right?  It’s been thirteen years since the live action Scott Pilgrim movie came out, and the actors involved have gone down wildly divergent career paths...  I mean, okay, not all of them became mega-stars or anything, but most of them have been working consistently, and two of them landed major roles in the MCU!  So the fact that they’re all back is kind of a miracle, even if it is true that they all had a blast working together and kept in contact ever since.  Personally, I still don’t think it was a great idea.  I’d say about half the cast either slipped right back into their roles or figured out how to tweak them for a new medium, especially the ones who’ve done a ton of voice acting like Mae Whitman, but there are others that just don’t sound right when they’re thirteen years and a whole physical presence removed from their characters.  It feels the most awkward in the first episode, but thankfully, it does get better after that.  Still, I know I'm in the minority on this, so I'm happy for anybody whose heart skipped a beat when they saw the cast list.

So I was a pretty huge fan of the Scott Pilgrim movie when it came out.  I had not previously heard of the comic, me being a filthy casual and all, but a few years later, after hearing no small amount of people complain that the movie sucked because the comic was better, I did manage to acquire a complete set of the comic so I could see what all the fuss was about.  Having experienced both, I will concede that the comic was objectively superior, but the movie was still a borderline perfect cinematic interpretation OF the comic.  It was kind of like Watchmen, in the sense that the movie may have fallen far off the mark of the source material, but I still can’t imagine a better theatrical version than the one we have, and by that standard alone, it’s pretty awesome.  Still, if I’m being completely honest, I have always expected that one day, we were going to get an animated series based on the original comic, that would swing closer to the original style.  So, when I heard Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was about to debut on Netflix, I was thrilled to finally be seeing the definitive version of the original story, and that is NOT what we got.

Well, it started out that way, and if I’m being blunt, I wasn’t feeling it.  Don’t get me wrong, it was the same story I wanted to see, but the first episode felt kind of rushed and muddled, like they were trying to cram a bunch of story into one episode.  I wasn’t feeling the pacing, and I mentioned before how the original cast returning felt hit-or-miss for me, but whatever.  It didn’t matter if it was going to have an awkward start, I was on board.  Call it loyalty to the franchise, but I was in it for the long haul.  And then the episode ended with Scott Pilgrim being instantly killed by Matthew Patel, leaving me sitting there shocked, speechless, with no idea what to think or how to react.  I didn’t yet know what I was in for, and I’m going to try and speak in vague terms to preserve spoilers from this point forward, but suffice to say I was NOT about to experience the same story I was already familiar with.  This was going to be uncharted territory...  A brand new entry into the Scott Pilgrim series, for better or worse, which I was simultaneously excited and terrified to traverse.

Also, just throwing this out there, the first episode was a lot better the second time around, when I knew where everything was going.

This is not the first time something like this has happened.  Sometimes, a series creator is so deeply entrenched in the immersive world and relatable characters they created that they can’t help coming back to it and reimagining everything from different angles.  A good example of this is Hideaki Anno and his Evangelion series, which has not only two separate endings, but a film series reboot that started off the same before diverging hard in a new direction.  Bryan Lee O’Malley, the original author of the comic, was the main creator behind this new series, with help from the live action film director Edgar Wright, so if nothing else, you know this isn’t just some third party fanfic.  Granted, the original creator being in control of a new project doesn’t always prevent it from fan backlash...  Just look at The Last of Us part 2...  So is this new entry in the series any good?

Well, the basic premise of this series is that Scott Pilgrim loses his first fight faster than CM Punk in the UFC, but Ramona notices something mysterious about the whole thing, so she starts to investigate, which means three things are going to happen.  Ramona Flowers is going to be the main character, we’re going to be exploring the rest of the cast in depth, and a lot of the stranger elements of the franchise that have never been examined in-universe before are going to be put under a microscope for the first time.  Every little inch of this premise is promising, and they deliver on all of it.  This isn‘t just some cash grab, it is a smart and self-aware reexamination of one of the most memorable and iconic franchises of the early 2010’s. 

One of the most interesting little facts I know about this franchise is that just like Excel Saga, the adaptation came out before the source material was finished, and the original creator was actually inspired by the adaptation, incorporating elements from the anime/movie into the latter stages of the graphic novels.  There were elements of the Scott Pilgrim movie that wound up making their way into the coic, which is something O’Malley has been unashamed to openly admit to.  Keeping this in mind, with O’Malley’s willingness to change his approach to writing based on outside forces, it’s no wonder that he was able to pick up his pen thirteen year later, from a place of far greater maturity, and use the few lingering questionable elements of his old work to enhance, and ultimately complete, his magnum opus, coming full circle with a smarter and richer franchise over-all.

If that’s too broad and vague for you, then I’ll go into some light spoilers regarding some of the questions this story asks.  For one, what the fuck were the League even trying to accomplish?  I mean we get that they wanted to control Ramona’s love life, and Gideon wanted her back, but what about everyone else?  Well, the second episode delivers a hilariously epic answer to that question, and Ramona’s interactions with her exes throughout this new story offer some some surprisingly in-depth looks at who these people were before, what their relationships with Ramona were actually like, and it goes a long, long way in humanizing some of them.  Another question, are Scott and Ramona a good match?  You will not, in a million years, guess how this series explores that question, but what they come up with is mind-blowingly well thought out and introspective.  And to make things even better, this series has an almost chibi-esque quality to it...  You get to see these characters interacting in brand new ways that you’ve never expected to see, and it’s all weirdly satisfying.

So you may be wondering, after all of that, what exactly IS this series?  Is it a sequel?  A reboot?  An alternate timeline?  I’m not going to tell you that, as the specific label would be a massive spoiler for the final two episodes, but there is one thing I will say with complete confidence:  This series completes Scott Pilgrim.  I’ve personally never seen the movie and the graphic novel as competition for each other, in fact, I’ve always kind of pitied people who picked one side and hated the other.  The way I looked at it, the movie and the comic were two sides of the same coin, and they complemented and elevated each other in order to offer a stronger experience than either side could offer on their own.  Hell, throw the video game in there too, it was also awesome.  But with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the experience is now complete.  You have four wildly different versions of the same story, all of whom work together in perfect harmony, and in my opinion, Take Off did everything right to make this happen.

I give Scott Pilgrim Takes Off a 10/10.