Ultraman

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Alternative Titles

English: Ultraman

Japanese: ULTRAMAN

Information

Type: ONA

Episodes: 13

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Apr 1, 2019

Producers: Dentsu, Tsuburaya Productions, Fields, Bandai Namco Arts, Netflix

Licensors: None found, add some

Studios: Production I.G, Sola Digital Arts

Source: Manga

Genres: Action, Sci-Fi, Seinen, Super Power

Duration: 23 min. per ep.

Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older

Statistics

Score: 6.85¹ (scored by 6,073 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #4083²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #3901

Members: 0

Favorites: 53

6.85

Ranked #4083Popularity #3901Members 0

ONAProduction I.G, Sola Digital Arts

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Episodes: /13

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Synopsis

Fifty years ago, an extraterrestrial giant of light known as Ultraman saved the earth but vanished. Ultraman's human host, Shin Hayata, was left with no memory of his time as a hero. Hayata's young son, Shinjirou, is found to have been born with a more powerful and durable body than any normal human. The organization who aided Ultraman, the SSSP, reveals Hayata's past to him. His father then dons a power suit again, assuming the role of Ultraman once more.

One night, Shinjirou is attacked by an alien named Bemular and rescued by his father, who is severely injured in the battle. With dangerous aliens lurking in the city and Hayata out of commission, it falls to Shinjirou to pick up the torch. But in working with the SSSP as the new Ultraman, Shinjirou finds himself wondering how far is he willing to go to help people.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

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Related Anime

Adaptation:	Ultraman
Alternative version:	The☆Ultraman
Sequel:	Ultraman 2

More characters
Characters & Voice Actors

Hayata, Shinjirou

Main

Kimura, Ryouhei
Japanese

Hayata, Shin

Supporting

Tanaka, Hideyuki
Japanese

Moroboshi, Dan

Supporting

Eguchi, Takuya
Japanese

Kurata

Supporting

Sekido, Hirokazu
Japanese

Jack

Supporting

Takeuchi, Ryouta
Japanese

Adad

Supporting

Tsuda, Kenjirou
Japanese

Endou, Yousuke

Supporting

Hanawa, Eiji
Japanese

Ide, Mitsuhiro

Supporting

Uo, Ken
Japanese

Shiraishi

Supporting

Shiraishi, Minoru
Japanese

Bemlar

Supporting

Soze, Kaiji
Japanese

More staff
Staff

Kamiyama, Kenji

Director

Aramaki, Shinji

Director, Storyboard

Sunayama, Kurasumi

Script

Higaki, Ryou

Script

Edit Opening Theme

"CoreFade" by OLDCODEX (TV Broadcast)

Edit Ending Theme

"CoreFade" by OLDCODEX (TV Broadcast)
"my ID" by Void_Chords feat. Ryohei & Foggy-D (TV Broadcast)
"Sight Over The Battle" by OLDCODEX (Netflix)

More reviewsReviews

Apr 2, 2019

13 of 13 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 7

Karhu (All reviews)

45 people found this review helpful

I expected Ultraman to be some type of lame superhero anime, but instead, the series shows respect to its audience since the very beginning. It quite clearly asks the viewer to just to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride without asking too many questions. Its approach made me go in with the preferred mindset effortlessly, and I found our series terrificly entertaining.

The art and animation are one of the strongest merits. The fight choreography are insanely detailed and visually fluid to a point it can hardly be called an anime. Punches during fight scenes truly deliver impact and shit explodes at ridiculous magnitude. CGI read more

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Apr 1, 2019

13 of 13 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 7

SingleH (All reviews)

33 people found this review helpful

I don’t know about you, but I’m not really feeling the whole CG thing. I’ve seen so many productions with so many talented teams bring CG to heights I’d never guess it would reach, and every time the master creators behind these works exceed expectations I didn’t even know I had, I think to myself, “Finally. This is some good CG.” However, when I settle down off that high, and I calm down, my jaded nature takes back over and turns me back into a critic, if only for the fact the proportion of quality to quantity is so soul crushingly uneven. For every Land of the Lustrous, I’ll get a couple dozen of Berserk 2016. CG integration suffers from this unbalance as well, even when minimal. For every Psycho-Pass, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, or B: The Beginning I get to see, I'll get at least a hundred of Overlord III. The trend continues with 3DCG environments. Every time I'm blown away by a Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress or Attack on Titan, I have to survive the fever dream that is the Gantz or Inuyashiki anime adaptations. The only type of CG I feel has truly found its stride is experimental CG, which simply isn’t trying to quote unquote look good. SSSS.Gridman or Gatchaman Crowds are two perfect examples of shows with creative, talented, and ambitious staff behind them, but which simply lacked the funds or technical means to produce anything better than what they did. Even in the hands of a Production IG subsidiary studio, it seems I still cannot tell you "This is some good CG."

You can’t even imagine how high my expectations were for this. Kenji Kamiyama, the man, the myth, the legend, is finally back in the director’s chair…on a full CG show?! I was already completely hysterical first reading the headline, but I was blown away all over again with the headlines which followed. Kenji Kamiyama loved working in 3D so much he personally pushed to use it to bring back his greatest masterpiece, as well as my favorite anime of all time, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but seeing the final product I can actually kind of understand. Aside from the most minor of nitpicks like millisecond by millisecond frame rate complaints or something, the combined efforts of Production I.G. and their associates at Sola Digital Arts (the people who produced all the high budget international adaptations including but not limited to The Animatrix, Halo Legends, and more recently Blade Runner: Black Out 2022) have brought to screen one of the better CG anime out there. The digital effects are as clean and crisp as a ufotable show, and the 3DCG environments are the likes of the Kizumonogatari films, if only slightly worse. The character shading fixed the Polygon Pictures face for the most part and made the characters able to emote like few have before, allowing the cast to come to life nearly on the level of those from Land of the Lustrous. All these small improvements on the medium’s past standards just kept on adding up until I considered this a genuine step forwards in the medium of 3D animation thanks to the one aspect which I can call truly outstanding: the character acting. Rotoscoping 2D animation is one thing, but they actually use MoCap animation for the cahracter acting, and it actually made the characters move naturally, even if the CG made them unable to strictly look natural.

Finally putting the visuals aside, the rest of the production was stellar in its own right, leaving said 3D characters (and vehicles) the only real downside. The sound design is sharp and highly, highly detailed. While, a lot of it is for the spectacle, like the sound of concrete slowly crackling underfoot the heavyweight body mechas all the characters fight with and their own personal sound effects such as their pounding footsteps, sparkling metal armor, and electrifying sound effects, which is something I mean both literally and metaphorically of course, there’s also a lot for the rest of the show as well, parts which most anime—2D or not—often overlook. Even the smallest most tedious little noises down to the differing sounds a coffee cup makes depending on the surface on which it’s placed, Shinji Aramaki's team of sound designers really put some effort in to make this as audibly stimulating as they could without getting overbearing. The soundtrack is phenomenal as well, and it made so much of the action hit harder and so much of the emotions run higher, which was certainly something I did not expect at all from this innocuous looking superhero show. The orchestral tracks sound like Hans Zimmer’s Man of Steel and the electronic tracks sound like Daft Punk’s Tron:Legacy. It’s seriously awe inspiring and made the less than impressive, and certainly less than unique visual direction leave a bigger impact than it would've without such attention to detail.

The voice acting was above average, though not the most praiseworthy voicework I’ve ever heard, which is why I’ll use it to segue into something which was: the dialogue and character writing. It’s Ultraman, just any other classic superhero story. I went into this new adaptation with the expectation this fact would hold it back a ton, not because I think it’s inherently bad, but because as an American I’ve seen it done more times than I could even think to count. I come to anime because the Japanese are fifty billion times more creative than we are, and anime as a medium allows infinitely higher levels of unfiltered imagination to shine, so the idea Ultraman was the likes of any other dime a dozen American Superman really left me listless on concept. Luckily, the characters holding this story up were more than worthy to. Our main character Shinjiro is the newest name I get to add to my list of shounen leads who actually deserve the title of “hero” and does more than simply piss me off. Most shounen leads are indecisive, melodramatic, whinny, and generally immature, but not in a way which is constructive to character development. Whenever I get to see a Kamille Bidan, or an Edward Elric, or an Eren Yeager, or a Banagher Links, I get to see a hundred thousand Izuku Midoriyas or Kaneki Kens. Thank God Shinjiro belongs with the former. He's awkward and unsure of himself like anyone his age, but he's a great kid, and it's not just him either. So much of the supporting cast feels so such more well realized than many who share they're archetype, like Agent Moroboshi and especially Rena, the main heroine. If you’re an American like me, and you can empathize with my lack of care towards commonplace superhero stories, then you can probably also agree the genre is plagued with the issue of one dimensional female leads. The girl is only there to be a pretty face and a worthless damsel in distress just so the hero can come and save her. Forgetting about how grossly misogynistic that trope is, it’s just straight up boring from a narrative perspective, and if you’re going to do it, it may as well be with a human character who you actually care for and who the creators actually put effort into building for you to do so, and like Shinjiro, Rena delivers. She has character, persona, actual relevancy, and honestly puts more thematic meaning on the table than any male character in any body armor in the entire show.

The story, as I’ve brushed by here and there, is just the standard superhero vs alien invaders flick. I’m not about to lie to you here and tell you it’s something it’s not, because then you’ll just be disappointed when you go and watch. What I will say, though, is what I tell people about Haikyuu, the shounen volleyball manga adaptation for those of you who somehow aren’t familiar with it. This show is all tropes, but it knows which tropes are actually good, it knows specifically WHY they’re good and why screenwriters have used them for ages, and most importantly, it actually has the tact and talent to take that knowledge and deliver it to screen in the exact manner in which it was meant to be. Kenji Kamiyama is the man for the job, and I’d say he made it impossible for you to argue with that statement. If I had to describe Ultraman (2019) in one word, I would say loved. Kamiyama’s direction is utterly nonexistent from a cinematic perspective, and Shinji Aramaki seems to have basically been the true director in practice, which is not a good thing, as the man is the reason why this show is so bloated with action and 3D flexing, but he obviously grew up loving Ultraman, as every single frame just screams dedication, and while, sure, Kamiyama's involvement was much less than what I'd hoped for, his inspiration is very much weaved throughout the scripting, and if anything impresses me the most, it’s the fact I could even begin to respect him more than I already did given work on a CG show. Of Kamiyama's many masterpieces, Ultraman (2019) couldn't even dream of coming close, but I don't think he wanted it to. Just as he held back his experimentation in the anime original episodes of Guardian of the Sacred Spirit out of reverence for author Nahoko Uehashi, I think Kamiyama stuck to the formula and treaded no new ground with Ultraman out of respect and care for the series and its genre legacy, and for that, I can't possibly fault him.

Thank you for reading.

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Apr 4, 2019

13 of 13 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 7

Tripl3R (All reviews)

15 people found this review helpful

yay, its Spring 2019 ! Netflix what do you have? NETFLIX's Orginial Ultraman ? lets give it a try...

.. what is ultraman? it's a Japanese live action science fiction television series...Netflix has adapted the live action into an anime for us ... thank you Netflix .. V-E-R-Y... N-I-C-E....

Its a CG anime... Its CG , i mean its a full CG anime...... i won't really hate on it... coz you get accustomed to the CG ... and its not really that bad...

The "FIGHTS" are really boring...i didn't find anything amazing or spectacular about the fights...they are all CG fights anyways... and ...they are all average... read more

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Apr 3, 2019

13 of 13 episodes seen

Overall Rating: 7

darkfeatherX (All reviews)

12 people found this review helpful

Ultraman is a callback to a simple era of superhero shows. Where heroes would come to grips with their powers, fight bad guys and save the day. And yes there's a ton of fighting.

Gloriously choreographed action sequences set against the backdrop of not too far into the future society where aliens are slowly assimilating with humanity. The show looks beautiful with high quality models, perfectly suited backgrounds and fitting lighting. Almost every scene in the series will undoubtedly look good.

Unfortunately there lies the show's most divisive aspect. It's stylized low frame animation. It often feels choppy and takes time to get accustomed to. Thankfully read more

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Netflix's 'Ultraman' Renewed for Second Season

A second season for Netflix's Ultraman was announced at the 2019 Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France. Production I.G and Sola Digital Arts rem...read more

Jun 12, 2019 11:20 AM by ImperfectBlue | Discuss (8 comments)

PV Collection for Mar 4 - 10

Here is a collection of promotional videos (PVs), TV ads (CMs), and trailers for the last week. This thread excludes videos that have already been featured in an art...read more

Mar 10, 2019 4:29 PM by Sakana-san | Discuss (11 comments)

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	Poll: Ultraman Episode 13 Discussion uninstallthegame - Apr 1, 2019	22 replies	by Ashhk »» Yesterday, 1:11 PM
	Poll: Ultraman Episode 12 Discussion Tsarko - Apr 2, 2019	4 replies	by Ashhk »» Yesterday, 11:38 AM

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