I give full marks to character figures and backgrounds, meaning the overall artwork. Victorian England looks very interesting and besides some minor anachronisms, it is very realistic in how society was running back then. High amount of detail and decoration, smart camera angles and uses of lighting and shading, plus many wonderful sceneries to just stare at how beautiful they are. Studio A-1 does wonders when it wants to. But not when it comes to animation since movements tend to have many still panels, jerky movements, low frame rate and sometimes annoying chibi comedy moments that ruin the immersion.
As for the story, unlike Sebastian, it’s very weak. The premise is about Ciel becoming a boy detective and selling his soul to the devil in order to get revenge on the dudes who killed his family. It’s also about Sebastian looking cool and that’s pretty much all of it. Ok, it’s not THAT bad but it doesn’t exactly care much about plot progression. Mystery exposition is rushed, the chain of events is loose and happens whenever the author fancies it, and the showdowns ain’t exciting at all. Want a breakdown of most episodes? Ciel is looking for a criminal, goes somewhere, meets someone, a crime happens and it is revealed the guilty one was the guy he just met. So his life is in danger and tells his butler to fix this mess because they will be late for tea time. And then it’s over, Sebastian is simply unbeatable and doesn’t even need to use strategy in battle. It’s just brute force. Basically, the detective and mystery aspects of the story are simple and come down to magic nonsense. As for the ending, there isn’t one, there are more seasons after it where the objective matters less and less. In fact, the second season is completely filler. So yeah, you end up watching it just for Sebastian giving Ciel a spongebath.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the selling point of the series is Sebastian. The anime itself is named after him. As long as you are satisfied watching him doing cool stuff with his underage sex partne…err, I mean master, then the rest become trivial. Beyond that it’s just some comic relief characters to poke fun at, which get backdrop stories at some point and gain half an extra dimension to their personality. They are not entirely stunts, basically. But since all that always happens out of the blue, lasts 5 minutes, doesn’t affect the main story, is hardly ever mentioned again, and it’s usually ridiculed by bad jokes, well, that’s as important as painting with watercolors out in the open during a heavy rain.
As a whole it is not an anime that will be remembered for anything other than its main character ass-serving Ciel. Fujoshis can adore it all they want and can decorate the ceiling above their beds with doujin pictures of those two. The rest of us normal folks have better things to watch.
