The Seven Deadly Sins (Review)
The Seven Deadly Sins Comes Dangerously Close to Being All to Familiar.
It’s hard to ignore a series with a catchy name like The Seven Deadly Sins. I personally have a dark fascination when it comes to the Judeo-Christian mythology and an anime seemed like it could do so much with such unique characters. Sitting down to watch the series I realized that this is a series that doesn’t quite know what tone it’s aiming for. It plays at having dark elements to it but feels more like the anime that used to hook me in middle school. Something along the lines of endless “classics” like One Piece or Fairy Tale. However, The Seven Deadly Sins never manages to quite make it into the same league as those long-running and beloved series.
The Seven Deadly Sins is a pure blooded fantasy anime with giants, fairies, demons, and a weird pig thing. As the title implies, it focuses on a group of legendary warriors who went by the same name but had long since disbanded. What I especially like about this aspect is that it allows the series to slowly bring up pieces of their past as needed and uses the reputation of the characters to build intrigue and paint pictures of them before their big reveal. Of course, the truth behind them is far stranger than the legends could ever do justice, especially when it comes to their leader, Meliodas (Bryce Papenbrook) the sin of wrath. He’s made out to be an incredibly fierce warrior but turns out to be a lecherous man child who panders to fan service with his objectification of the female characters. I’m all for pervy jokes from time to time in the anime I enjoy, but this is one protagonist that nearly made me switch the series off in the first few episodes with how oafishly he’s handled.
Luckily, the rest of the characters aren’t quite as poorly handled in the series, though they are all cliches. Take the character of Ban (Ben Diskin) the sin of greed who seems much more like the sin of apathy. He’s the typical “too cool to care” character who’s haunted by a dark past (similar in vein to Spike Spiegel but no where near as cool). The sin of sloth, King (Max Mittelman), is an infantile fairy king in love with a character he’s too shy to speak too but is still overprotective of. I could go on and on with these characters, but I’m sure you get the point. Normally, I try to argue that cliches are exactly that because they usually work so well. However, The Seven Deadly Sins doesn’t feel like it’s even using the right cliches for the characters since their traits don’t seem to directly correlate with their assigned sin. Sure the characters manage to grow on you, but they feel like caricatures of everything people typically make fun of in anime.
It’s easy to see director Tomokazu Tokoro influence in this Netflix series. He’s the guy responsible for bringing the OP character Alucard from book to screen (Hellsing Ultimate). He takes the same approach with a number of the characters in this series, especially Meliodas and the pride sin, Escanor (Kyle Hebert). It seems that no matter how powerful the enemy is that they come across, The Seven Deadly Sins always seem to be just a little bit stronger. This is especially evident in the second season where they introduce a Dragon Ball Z inspired power level meter the characters use to really let the audience know just how strong they all are. It’s just another way that The Seven Deadly Sins seems to cannibalizes popular tropes from much better anime series out there. Even the team’s individual special abilities feel like things you might see in Naruto.
Despite the fact that The Seven Deadly Sins is anime light, I couldn’t stop watching it. Sure, I might have claimed that I came close a few times, but I never actually did. It’s trash anime but only in a good way. I couldn’t stand the characters at first, but as the series progressed, I found myself genuinely caring about them. The same goes for the world they inhabited as bigger and badder villains were revealed. That being said, the animation is far from the best I’ve seen from A-1 Pictures (it’s been responsible for series like Blue Exorcist and Erased), but it has a certain endearing quality to how quaint it is, especially when the battle sequences really heat up. It’s not my cup of tea or what usually look for in a series, but it manages to work here. In a way, it feels like The Seven Deadly Sins is one of those anime that’s designed to inspire easy fan art and cosplays for conventions.
In all honesty, as trashy as The Seven Deadly Sins is, it’s actually pretty enjoyable. It’s such a strange amalgam of concepts that anime fans are all so overly familiar with that it’s easy to get into the series. The downside is that it never manages to be that memorable overall. Still, while it might not exactly be a good anime, it is a fun one and one that’s easy to get ahold of given it’s streaming on Netflix. While I hope that the series will continue, not getting a full 3rd season of The Seven Deadly Sins won’t exactly break my heart either.
