Review of Attack on Titan
My problem with Shingeki No Kyojin is that it doesn't work as an anime, and I'm going to explain this quite briefly. First of all, I would like to tell what I really like about this anime, and I think that we should agree about one thing: the combats are amazing. Differently from the cinema, we see movement in quite every moment; we don't have the feeling of the character moving while attacking, but we directly see it. This is quite a hard job, since in the cinema, our first and closest reference, we only get a perception and a lot of cuts in thescreen don't allow to see every single second.
Next, I would like to talk about the Female Titan. I think that the two blocks in the story that concern this character are very well made, the first one being in the forest, with this scene where the characters are the Key to throw, and then when it comes into the city (not because of the plotwist, because I don't really care about who this character really is, but about how it is taken into a little screen, TV).
And last but not least, the quality of the drawing of Attack On Titan is really amazing.
But as an anime, I don't think it does really work and I'm going to explain why, and this last good point on the anime allows me to introduce the first bad: as the drawing is that well made, it is impossible to have the rest of the series well animated. If we do not look the combats, the rest of AOT is really mediocre. In the most part of episodes, we have an scenario that tries to open slowly and not certainly, but we do not see life in it. The characters talk and nothing around moves. The serie is basically limited to an horizontal or vertical movement of camera with a drawing that does not move, and this is not animation.
There is also a thing that enervates me about AOT, and it is the flat resources it uses. The characters only move their eyes to show feelings (fear, sadness, whatever). I know this is a technique used in most of the shonen, but here, they go too far. If we take off this flat ressource, there would be 5 episodes less.
And finally, I have to talk about how superficial AOT is. It tries to talk about serious subjects, but it does it in the clumsiest possible way. We see gore, we see children crying and whatever, but it only stays in the background and it never deepens about it. I have to add that almost no character is well developped. We have for example Eren Jager: he sees how his mother dies and seeks revenge against the Titans. The only thing he does is to cry and scream (this is what characters do all the time: they scream a lot and they move their eyes). He joins a group to face the Titans and that's all. It is true that he becomes a Titan himself, that it adds a couch of interest to his charecter, but everything he does is because of the anime script's needs, and not because he is well developped as a character. In the other side, we have Mikasa who talks a lot less and who seems mystic. She works a lot better than Eren as a character because all she does is physic, but she has no development as in the first episode she is exactly the same that in the last. We have Armin, and he is the only one to be a bit developped as he is a boy who suffered from bullying, he sees a lot of things that make him go crazy and this is moderately well done, not incredibly because the anime is as it is and we can't ask much of it. When I watched Serial Experiments Lain, Paranoia Agent, Madoka Magica, Death Note... Well, a lot of animes that I like much more than this one, I remembered the names of the characters becaue they were interesting. In this case, I don't care if a Titan takes Eren and rips his head off (this does not happen, hm).
So in the end, is Attack On Titan a bad anime? Not a bad one, but a mediocre work. I'm not criticizing its adaptation as I have not read the manga (and I don't care about it). What I am talking about is the anime, so anything against this last argument won't be taken as true.
Nothing less to add.