Atom: The Beginning

A wasted potential.

Atom: The Beginning had a great premise. Tell the story of Doctor Tenma and Doctor Ochanomizu as they create Bewusstsein, the AI system which will revolutionize robotics and will lead to creation of one of the greatest anime/manga icons of all time, Atom.

And we get that, but we also get a lot of useless filler. First 7 or 8 episodes work in repetitive episodic format. X Slice of life situation happens. Everything goes well, until something goes wrong. A106 saves the day. The end. This would've been fine if it built the characters of the show, or the world of the ... show. But sadly it doesn't happen. After the first half of the series we enter the second half which has continuous plot up until the very end. Aaaaaaand...it's not very good either. There is some action but it's bland. Characters are mostly uninteresting, the world itself is uninteresting. The show itself is uninteresting. We don't get to see how Robots deal with gained humanity. We don't get to see early stages of AI exploration. We get a fighting tournament.

Only episode which somewhat saves this anime from being completely mediocre, is the finale which at last brings some retrospective and contemplation.


As I said, the characters are uninteresting. All of them lack depth. All of them lack originality. Only Tenma occasionally shows deeper characteristics. But these moments are rare. Usually he's just a male tsundere/genius that doesn't act as genius. Hiroshi is the good guy, Motoko is the smug girl and Ran is the shy loli.


From the production standpoint it's fine. Music is good but forgetable, animation is fine (I am glad they kept the Tezuka's trademark noses) and CGI is actually pretty good.


I was looking forward to this anime the most in the last season. Sadly it disappointed me, but the final episode gave me a little hope for the future. If the series returns for another season, I hope this will be the path it'll take. Anime about beginnings of Atom deserves something better than episode about making udon.

When a series has one of the hypest openings ever, directed by Bahi JD and worked on by legendary animators like Mitsuo Iso and all new webgens, then that opening delivers with some funky tunes and godly animation?

What could go wrong?

Oh you know they just showed off a load of Sakuga in the opening had an alright set up, dragged the filler before the actual plot out for a bit too long and then have all the attention focused around plane asf characters.
If only they had stopped there though, no they go ahead and make their roided up version of robot wars completely ... in CG.

So yeah I think I'm done here, maybe it was my own hype because of I love the opening director and animators so damn much. I was expecting a lot more from this, I think I'll just go watch robot wars instead.
Completely average and a let down is all I can say about it.