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Beastars Season 1 Review

Beastars is a 2019 fantasy coming-of-age drama anime series that premiered its first season on Netflix in 2019. It contains 12 episodes and it’s a very interesting experiment.

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“The right move is always going to be the hardest, but it’s worth it“

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Based on the manga of the same name, the story takes place in a modern world of civilized, anthropomorphic animals with a cultural divide between carnivores and herbivores, and where eating meat is strictly illegal. Going into this show I’d expected a somewhat darker anime take on Disney’s ‘Zootopia’, but what I got was an even edgier version of this concept than I’d initially anticipated. I was both intrigued and somewhat repulsed as some of these adult scenes were definitely done for the shock value.

This is a very mature show that is for adults and older teenagers only. Its main subject is sexuality as it explores the sexual taboo of a carnivore being attracted to a herbivore. This is essentially my first furry anime watch and I have to say that I am both amused and grossed out by these anthropomorphic animals having sex. At least the series is open and honest in its treatment of sexuality in all its different assets and how it relates to violence too.

The show is also very much about racism and the cultural divide. It depicts these animals being in a civilized society, but it’s all just a façade to hide their deeper urges, especially those of the carnivores. The series cleverly posits that in order for the civilization to function let alone flourish we all need to control our inner beasts.

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But even though Beastars has these interesting themes in it, hardly ever did I feel that they were fully explored. This is because the second half of the season became concerned with an abduction storyline way too much to the point that it fully morphed into an action revenge story. While I definitely found the action scenes surprisingly solid and this overall plot was a lot of fun and probably the highlight of the season, it still led to the themes and plot points of the first half being underdeveloped and rushed.

Let’s talk about the characters. Legoshi is excellent. He’s the heart and soul of this anime and most of the plot is from his POV and concerns his fears, insecurities and conflicted feelings about Haru, who is this female rabbit he has a crush on. Haru is nowhere near as well developed as the protagonist is. Sometimes the show became a bit too exploitative in the overly sexualized treatment of this rabbit character, but their romance still ended up being quite sweet and powerful, especially in the finale.

Other characters are underutilized for the most part. Louis is a somewhat unlikable, but important additional romantic interest of Haru, Juno is underdeveloped as this love interest of Legoshi, and Gohin is such a memorable panda side character who is cool, but again underutilized. The criminal gang of lions was quite menacing as villains.

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Beastars is gorgeously animated. It features a mix of 2D animation in character designs and 3D animation in backgrounds. The result is a modern look that still felt very anime. The character designs worked for me and were richly detailed while the background work is lush, polished and beautiful to observe. The score is also pretty good and the voice acting in the sub version is fantastic. The writing on this series is excellent, especially on dialogue, but the pacing and structure left a lot to be desired as the show tackled way too many characters and ideas, a common issue of coming-of-age narratives.