Dr. Stone is a very, very good children’s cartoon. Easily one of the best series to ever come out of the Weekly Shonen Jump. Normally, I wouldn’t care about a children’s cartoon enough to review it, cause I’m an adult (it’s a joke, it’s hard to convey the comedic intent in writing because you can’t do intonations… so you wouldn’t get it unless I explain it). But the polarized audience reaction to this show is a phenomenon interesting in itself.
Dr. Stone very vividly demonstrates that any show has two completely distinct components to it - the plot and the story. The plot is a summary of the events that happen during the show - who goes where, does what, fights whom, etc. The story is the show’s ideas, themes and messages, i.e. the point it is trying to present to us, the audience. And this is where the root of the polarized response to Dr. Stone lies. People who like it, like the story. People who hate it, hate the plot. You could say that they watched two different shows. I wouldn’t say that, though - I would say the first group watched an anime called Dr. Stone, and the second group didn’t watch anything because they failed the act of watching a TV show on a fundamental level. Because the plot is completely irrelevant, only “the point” of the show is what matters - it’s literally in the freaking name of the thing. Prioritizing the summary of events over it would also very literally be “missing the point.” Have I made my point clear? Good, I will now proceed to describe both the plot and the story of this series to elaborate.
The plot of Dr. Stone is a Sunday morning pop-science show framed as your typical WSJ battle shounen. It’s a steady stream of flashy physics/chemistry experiments meant to get children interested in science by making it look cool. It’s also a steady stream of training, battles and tournaments as you would expect of the battle shounen - but here they’re meant to show off to children the scientific method and scientific way of thinking - which is done by contextualizing those things as the means to achieving the fundamental WSJ values of Friendship, Effort, Victory (i.e. knowing how stuff works lets you save people, planning and preparation gives you the upper hand in battle, etc).
The target audience defines the show’s simplicity of presentation - clear-cut good guys vs. bad guys, absurdly over the top developments, physical comedy, etc. - and these are the parts that get targeted as “contrived” or “unrealistic” by the segment of the audience incapable of engaging a work of fiction on any level except the most literal. If you consider the “world's strongest teenager” punching a lion to death unrealistic - that’s a wrong show for you. Also, anime is a wrong medium for you, because the whole point of animation is the absence of constraints reality imposes on live-action, and any anime that has the level of realism of a TV show is by definition a bad anime, but that’s just fyi.
Incidentally, what I called “simplicity” is only simple by the standards of high-brow literature - the show’s writing is miles better than your average shounen. It stays clear from most of the insufferable birth defects of the genre - for example, it doesn’t subject the audience to any of the “narrating things literally happening on-screen right now because children can’t be trusted to process visual information.''
And here’s what makes up the story - the part responsible for Dr. Stone being one of the best series to come out of WSJ like I said above:
1) The best representation of science in a TV series, period. Characters have to slowly and painfully grind to get results, to obtain any sort of a complex thing multiple people with different skills and competences are needed, trial and error rules the day, etc. While artistic license is employed, it’s very minimal - if some process takes half a year in real life it WILL take half a year in-universe.
2) Reconstruction (as in, modification that makes it more in line with reality) of the standard shounen tropes. The protagonist is a genius kid - but his genius is a bunch of encyclopaedic knowledge. He read a lot of books, i.e. put in hard work and dedication, and got rewarded for it. No inherited genetic superpowers, no power-ups acquired by being hot-blooded - just a good old effort. When he encounters something outside of his area of expertise, he fumbles and struggles like any of us would. An actually relatable role model.
3) Campiness and unpredictability. Larger-than-life characters and over-the-top developments that keep you awake because you haven’t seen them in 500 other shows before.
4) Theme and narrative consistency. One of the main messages of the show is that science can explain any mystery with enough time and effort - there is no such thing as supernatural. The story introduces quite a few things that appear ridiculous or nonsensical (hence campiness) - and lo and behold - they do get the in-universe explanations eventually, even if it takes a lot of time.
5) It does, in fact, make science look cool. One of the best scenes of the series is a presentation on how much of a difference for one’s quality of life a simple pair of glasses makes. Teaching/reminding the audience just how amazing are the fruits of civilization that we take for granted is the most inspiring thing ever.
Some other unrelated notes:
- The artist is Korean so the art is manhwa-like, unusual by the normal anime standards. Female character faces are definitely not for the faint of heart.
- The series effectively reboots itself after ~6 episodes, to a point where I question why those early installment weirdness parts weren’t given the FMA: Brotherhood treatment. You can’t exactly skip them, cause they’re full of plot points, just a heads up that you’ll be watching a very different show after a certain point.
9/10 for “having your children watch this would be good parenting”.
