Übel Blatt

When I first heard that Übel Blatt was set to get an anime adaptation two decades after the manga started, I was honestly in disbelief. I thought it was one of those manga that just would never ever get an anime. I was hyped beyond belief, but I also feared the idea that it would get butchered, and the reactions I had seen online from the first episode would seemingly confirm my worst fears.

Then I actually got around to watching it and…I actually ended up having a good time, with it being nowhere near as bad as people made it out to be. I ... continued watching the anime, and it kept getting better each episode, eventually hitting its stride halfway through. I’ll make a list of what I liked and what I disliked about this anime adaptation for the sake of making this review more objective.

What I liked
- The pacing and universe of the manga are generally well respected.
- The fight choreography is simple, but effective. The anime also doesn’t shy away from gore and bloodshed, so the tone of the manga is fairly well respected as well.
- The voice direction is absolutely stellar (with an honorable mention to Yuya Hirose as Köinzell, he really captured the essence of the character and gave a spectacular performance)
- The soundtrack is pretty damn good and fits well with the universe depicted.
- The animation is decent. Sure, it’s not the same quality you’d get from ufotable, Bones or Madhouse back when that studio was in its golden age, but it gets the job done for the most part. That being said…


What I didn’t like
- The sex scenes and the nudity present in the manga have been mostly censored. That was one of my greatest fears for the anime, but honestly, I came to expect as much the moment I heard it was set to stream on Amazon Prime (and since these scenes are mostly relegated to the early chapters of the manga, it’s as much of an issue as it is a non-issue).
- …the budget for the animation was seemingly limited, and sometimes it shows (especially in the first few episodes). I’m not particularly picky about animation ever since I saw Ex-ARM, but I know it might put some people off so I put the animation in weaknesses as well for the sake of objectivity.
- The production team relegated the prologue volume to the OP, which may confuse newcomers. I personally still have hope that they end up adapting it as an OVA, but until then, I recommend newcomers to start with Volume 0 before diving into the anime proper.


Overall, I give it a 7/10 (and if not for the average start, it would easily be a 9 to me). If you’re not picky about animation quality and are looking for a fantasy anime that isn’t an isekai for once, you might want to check that one out. Sure, it’s not gonna be AOTY anytime soon, but you’ll have a good time regardless and frankly, that’s all that really matters at the end of the day, manga purists be damned.

When this was announced, I saw the cover art of a cute elf boy (he's actually demonic) with long braids and thought- oh yes sure this looks interesting. When I learned it was an epic fantasy, I was excited. When I found out it's actually a very long manga series that started in the early 2000s- I was surprised. When Amazon picked it up- I was apprehensive- but I have access to someone's ^_~ so no problem there. But when I saw the first episode of the anime.... I was laughing.
How does this look so terrible? Why is that monster head just sitting there ... on the ground and why does it look so goofy? Why is everyone in this show so dead serious, but I'm finding it hilarious?
Ubel Blatt (which I quickly nicknamed Ubel SPLATT, then Ubel BLEAAAAAARGHHHH!!!) is one of the most perplexing viewing experiences I've had this year. I'm still on the fence about whether it was actually good or not. To determine that- normally I look at the production, everything I see on screen, how it flows together, how well it's written, being as objective as possible then adding in how entertaining it was overall as a more subjective take and score it that way. But here; the two sides of that are REALLY far apart. I mean really, really far.

So, the animation. This is a pretty big studio eh?
I mean, the titles I see under Satelight aren't small properties. So what the hell happened here?
The first problem is with the set design: most of the backgrounds are fairly standard fantasy-world architecture; wooden houses, stone fortresses, cobblestone streets, wagons and horses (and elephants... oh you just wait- we'll get to that!!!!) Well there's nothing wrong with the world, but everything is covered with this purple and black goo THE ENTIRE 12 EPISODES and it just makes the whole thing look dim and difficult to see. It's trying to be GRIMDARK, okay fine. Then there's the characters- they're a mix between very pretty attractive characters like Koinzell, the main protagonist who is a reincarnated (not in the isekai sense trust me) warrior in the body of a demon boy. Aht, an equally cute warrior with a skimpy outfit, and a pink haired girl (unfortunately named Peepi... just roll with it) like most of the female and Demi-human characters look nice. Then there's the men, who all look like they came from Berserk. Big, muscular, ugly bastards. But none of the characters move well. At times, they make a shocked face and just stay still; and 2D cutouts of the characters are just moved up and down on the screen without any of their limbs moving!!!
It's alright when they're flying over scenery or just walking around a town, but when they start fighting (which happens in this anime A LOT) things really fall to pieces. A good chunk of the action actually is stills- just stills, no movement, and it looks so cheap and flat it just brings out laughter again and again- for scenes that are supposed to be dramatic and momentous.
The storytelling. Here, I'm afraid it's not much better.
I don't need to spoil this in a review, but I can say it really does storytelling the same way it does animation. It just jumps from scene to random scene, showing people running going "RAWWRRR!!" and knaves getting slashed in half etc, then Koinzell or another character will jump off a dragon or something and slash someone- then there's a scene with two people talking to each other- only to realize it's a flashback or something shoved in. It's an absolute mess. The pacing, the dramatic timing, it's all over the place. It basically just feels rushed. Like the studio got commissioned to adapt several volumes of a manga but with just 12 episodes. Rather than pick one arc, they decided to just jam as much as possible into this and run.

But over all of this, there were moments Ubel Splatt JUMPED THE FUCKING SHARK so high I could only put my hat on and tip it to the man who thought "Oh yea, I've done a good job on this"... and no moment captured that feeling better than the invasion of one of the cities by enemy troops, who deploy a couple of ELEPHANTS with their cavalry..... Oh sweet Jesus.... I don't think I've ever laughed harder watching an anime in my life. That there, that was some God Tier level of GOOF.
They don't move (obviously) but oh man ...

So was it entertaining? Hell yes. That's what makes this weird- it's another one of those so-bad-it's-good experiences; except it shouldn't have been bad in the first place. It SHOULD have been better. At no point was I ever bored watching this, I liked and cared about the characters, only for the flaws of the awful animation and the clumsy pacing to SUBTRACT FROM THAT EXPERIENCE.
"Just go read the manga" is what I'm going to be told, but I'm watching the anime, and no matter how good the manga is the anime has to be judged on its own merits and I'm afraid- it's just average.

Übel Blatt — Congrats on conducting a speedrun that'll lose your audience right from the get-go. How did this happen and go so out of hand?

I am a firm believer that when shows present their content in the typical fashion, it needs to be in the 3Cs: clear, concise, and consistent. Yet, some people just don't share that sentiment and proceed to yank the standard that's given in the vein of The Promised Neverland's bastardized sequel, rushing through the source material and providing little to no context; that, at the end of the day, may be what the anime envisioned it to be, but with ... many crucial sacrifices along the way. And in this Winter season, there's one very respected work that got the Promised Neverland treatment so bad that I don't even know where to start: mangaka Etorouji Shiono's Übel Blatt (Evil Blade in German), one of the earliest dark fantasy stories serialized from 2004 to 2019 that saw its success internationally, to the point of being awarded in the seinen category of the Japan Expo Award in 2008 and even making it to France's Top 15 manga at one point.

Let's go from the top: being Clear of the story.

With Übel Blatt being one of the forefronts of the dark fantasy genre, giving way to series like mangaka Daiki Kobayashi's Ragna Crimson (which received Silver Link's adaptation from Fall 2023 to Winter 2024), you can tell that the manga series was at one point a huge influence on people wanting to create stories in the same vein, which is a clear sign that there's a fandom out there for such stories of violence, gore, and sexual predation that are unapologetic and captivating. Such is the likes of author Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, which is how the revenge story of Köinzell, a half-elf child most distinguishable for the scar over his left eye, is on a quest of revenge against those who betrayed and killed him in the medieval fantasy landscape.

At this point I must warn you that although much of the review's context is from the anime, the manga itself provides so much depth that it's most baffling how director Takeshi Naoya could offer to re-edit much of its story to the point of being unexplainable (please refer to the ANN interview that's done recently).

If you thought that the series' story is just too much of an infodump to understand, the anime started at Volume 1, gravely skipping Volume 0, which provides context for how everything came to be, and it's important context that was sadly missing in the anime. The TL;DR is that there were 14 elite warriors (dubbed the Fourteen Lances) commissioned to deal with the evil nation of Wischtech that manifests itself in dark magic and powerful weapons. But the same group of warriors faltered along the way, losing some to the gravities of the land, leaving only 7 out of 11 heroes who abandoned the quest and the remaining 4 warriors eventually finishing the deed. However, it's at this point that the 7 warriors would ambush and eliminate the 4 to steal their credits and accomplishments and dub themselves the Seven (False) Heroes that supposedly were the ones who defeated Wischtech while branding the 4 as Traitorous Lances who had sold their souls to the evil nation itself, despite being the ones actually credited for the quest completion. And one of them is Ascheriit, a young boy whose potential is seen in swordsmanship to be tuteled from and help out the elite warriors and unceremoniously branded as a Wischtech defector. The years of betrayal lasted for 20 years, which is when Ascheriit came back as the half-elf Köinzell to exact revenge on the Seven Heroes who claimed credit for the work that they did not conduct.

The concise portion is overall done rather subparly, though to the extent of the limited runtime when it comes to anime, it's a much-needed sacrifice, or does it feel intentional to cut content and leave it as it is?

Going through much of Köinzell's revenge story against the Seven Heroes should tell you that he's really out to get their heads, and his half-elf self being able to be empowered by the twin moons of the world for some serious power. The journey that takes him to cities and nations wherever each of the Seven Heroes resides, while being on the chase as the glorified "Hero-Child" alongside his aides of smuggler Wied and underground tavern owner Altea, as well as Peepi, who has been with him from the very beginning, as well as the young and promising girl of Aht, Köinzell can't clearly do his revenge story on his own and needs help from all avenues that he can muster to deal his captors a serious blow.

Director Takeshi Naoya even goes so far as to do a switcheroo around the characters for Köinzell's personal growth, which clearly is evident of the evolution of the MC himself. And yet, because of the extensive focus on him, bringing in censorship to remove all traces of sexual and erotic elements serves as his answer, alongside his idea of using iaido for swordsmanship skills and even going as far as to draw inspiration from his childhood love of Knights of the Zodiac for this. In other words, the de-sanitization of the source material itself...which, as you can tell, is NEVER good to draw out the full potential of the work itself (which is actually doable but omitted for reasons we'll never know).

The consistency, however, brings about all of the negative connotations of why the anime is ultimately inferior to the manga.

At first, I thought that Satelight and Staple Entertainment coming for a collab would help give the series some oomph, but it's undoubtedly clear that little to no effort was put into the anime at all. Sure, Takeshi Naoya did quote the statement of Satelight's involvement being only in the CG department and the artwork being "beautiful, perfectly capturing the fantasy world," for which I'll give credit for the cinematography here. However, that's no excuse for bad production, which in this show, is ALL OVER THE PLACE, and you can't shake it after seeing through the piss-poor animation, especially for a high-octane fantasy series like this one.

At least music composer Shun Narita had the composition alright for the anime, which may still not serve as a sigh of relief given all of the issues involved in other areas. And as much as I can praise GARNiDELiA's long-awaited return for the OP, which is a good song, Hina Tachibana's ED song just left me with mixed feelings of how to be properly engaged for a soothing song in the midst of such violence and gore.

Ultimately, what you get from an Amazon Prime exclusive show is the pandering of expectations with a more-than-complicated story and premise (that's not hard to understand, just interpreted VERY differently from the source material), compelling but unfulfilled characters (that are not explored much), and a production so off the charts that you can't even fathom surviving on the 3-episode rule.

Just read the manga from scratch; the anime should be avoided AT ALL COSTS for being butchered recklessly...unless you're like the director himself to say, "If you can enjoy it, then that's a stroke of luck."….to which I say: "Please don't push your luck."