I honestly can’t understand all the criticism Dr. Stone gets from the other reviewers. After watching episode one, you exactly know what kind of show this is. I mean come on, one of our main characters stays alive being petrified for thousands through sheer willpower because he couldn’t confess to his crush yet, while the other one knows exactly what date it is when he breaks out of petrification after millennia by simply counting continuously the whole time. Yeah, sorry guys, you are not goanna get a super serious plot here. You know you are in for a silly Shonen Anime with a lot of whacky humor. If you expected something else just stop watching now.
After watching a couple of episodes, it becomes apparent that the main point of Dr. Stone is intended to be a fun way to get young teens interested in science. After setting up the premise we follow our heroes’ journey to rebuild society using science while explaining and reinventing basic scientific breakthroughs in human history along the way. Being a scientist myself I find it fun to them move along and trying to solve the problems they encounter using scientific methods. And if not successful on the first try, they continue to try until they do. This basically describes the life of every scientist, although things are obviously significantly way more specialized today and it takes a lot more failed attempts to get something that works. Considering what the show is, the story is actually pretty well thought out with multiple factions that follow different ideologies. There is also the overarching mystery of why the petrification catastrophe happened, which kept me interested.
Titular, and also most interesting, character in Dr. Stone is Senkuu. He usually behaves like a too cool for his age teen featuring an unweaving believe in science and the progress humans are capable of. Contrasting this is our main antagonist, the physically very strong Tsukasa, who wants to keep human development to a minimum and create a world ruled by the young and strong. Fortunately, he is neither insane nor dumb so this winds up to be an interesting conflict. The other character are less interesting and more like we are used to from other shounen like the slightly dumb, work hard and scream louder character that is Taiju.
A lot of love went into the production of this Anime. The color scheme is vibrant, the character faces are expressive, and music fits the Stone World the characters live in very well. I didn’t find the OP and ED to be particularly outstanding, but you can always skip those anyway.
TL;DR: Fun to watch and well produced shounen Anime that should not be taken too seriously. Features a lot of science propaganda that I strongly approve of.
