Made in Abyss
Directed by Masayuki Kojima
Written by Hideyuki Kurata
Music by Kevin Penkin
Studio Kinema Citrus
Licensed by AUS, Madman Entertainment, BI/NA, Sentai Filmworks
Main Characters
Riko Voiced by: Miyu Tomita[5] (Japanese); Brittany Lauda[6] (English)
Reg Voiced by: Mariya Ise[5] (Japanese); Luci Christian[6] (English)
Nanachi Voiced by: Shiori Izawa[8] (Japanese); Brittney Karbowski[6] (English)
Mitty Voiced by: Eri Kitamura[11] (Japanese); Monica Rial[6] (English)
Made in Abyss is an extraordinarily well-written manga/anime/movie/game that is both totally engrossing and very disturbing on many levels.
It’s the story of a vast caldera-like feature, some 600 meters in diameter, and of an indeterminate depth. Within it are the remains of dozens of lost civilizations with an endless array of relics. A city has grown on the lip of the caldera, and the residents make their living mining the relics from the top levels of the pit, known as “The Abyss.”
But the Abyss has a curse. While descending is easy enough, ascending brings about a series of physical ailments and deformities. The further one ascends from, the more severe the afflictions, and nobody has ever returned alive from the sixth level, some 6 kilometers down.
Riko, the central character, is a twelve-year-old girl who is in an orphanage because her father is dead and her mother is missing in the Abyss. The children are supported to be come cave raiders (Delvers), making the dangerous but profitable forays into the top levels of the Abyss after relics.
It is not a pleasant life. A routine discipline for minor infractions is to strip the child naked and suspend her over her classmates. Hard to imagine a crueler or more horrible thing to do to a twelve-year-old girl.
Riko has learned that her mother was Ryza the Annihilator, a legendary delver whose current status is unknown, but Riko believes she is alive and at the bottom of the Abyss. She resolves to find her.
She finds an incredible artifact, a human-appearing robot that she names Reg, after a dog she once owned. Reg has extendable arms (up to 40 meters), heightened senses, an immunity to the Curse of the Abyss, and he has nipples, a belly button, and even human genitals. In two separate hilarious scenes, we learn that his penis behaves pretty much the way penises behave on regular 12-year-old boys, which is to say quite badly. Reg has a fully-formed personality, and is to all extents, a normal human child in behavior. He has a laser-like device in each hand, which he calls the Incinerator, which can do immense damage but which takes Reg out of circulation for a couple of hours after discharging the device.
Nanachi is a Hollow (aka a “Narehate” or “the shadow of one’s former self”); someone who has been deformed by the Curse effect. In Nanachi’s case, this involves a full-body pelt of soft fur, large rabbit-like ears, a thick, shortish tail, and a lack of distinguishing sexual characteristics. Nanachi has an intact mind, and possesses encyclopaedic knowledge of the Abyss.
Mitty is a child all but destroyed by the Curse, stripped of human intelligence and form, in constant pain, and seemingly immortal. Nanachi and Mitty were friends before being subjected to the curse by an evil experimenter.
There is a much larger cast of characters, both on the surface and at various layers of the Abyss. Most of the depictions are nuanced and sophisticated, much more so than you might expect from a cartoon about children.
Children (human or not) may be the central characters in this story, but it is not a story for children. It has some of the most emotionally wrenching scenes this side of Grave of the Fireflies, and it does not avert its eyes from some of the worst horrors of existence. It is an extremely powerful story aimed at adults, and one of the absolute finest animes I’ve seen.
I saw the 13 episodes when they came out in 2018, and was puzzled by the absence of a second season. As it turned out, I need not have worried: 13 more episodes are coming out in 2022, delayed by the epidemic. In the meantime, a stand-alone movie (104 minutes) finished the first story arc – and it’s as elaborate and unhinging as the original series – and Hollywood just commissioned a live-action movie based on the series.
The animation is good, the art sometimes breathtaking, but it’s the plotting and overall scripting that make this an absolutely stellar production.
Season One now available on Amazon Prime, and on various anime streaming services.