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This Week in Anime
The Made in Abyss Movie Will Crush Your Soul

by Steve Jones & Monique Thomas,

The Made in Abyss anime series is hardly known for its sunshine and rainbows but the new film Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul is a whole new level of hell as our spritely spelunkers finally come face to face with Bondrewd and his sinister machinizations. Will Steve and Nicky survive the film's gravitas or be crushed under its weight?

This movie is streaming on demand

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the movie ahead.

CONTENT WARNING: THIS STUFF IS G O R Y

@Lossthief @Liuwdere @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Steve
Hey Nicky! What do you say about someone who isn't showing any manners to an attractive force?
Nicky
Idk, Steve. What are you supposed to say?
You say they're being bond rude.

...look, in my defense, I'm very tired.
Aren't we all? Wouldn't you feel better if we talked about a nice happy story about kids going on a fantastic underground adventure and surviving on the power of friendship?
Absolutely not! Which is why I'm glad we're talking about Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul instead!
I mean, parts of that statement are true but it's more "as unsettling as it is heart-wrenching" than "happy". Just like the original TV series! This is a super direct sequel to everything that happens at the end of the show so if you haven't watched the show or want to avoid spoilers for this movie, beware of below or continue your descent into this article safely!
We can also chalk this one up as yet another anime film I was excited to see in theaters before, y'know, 2020 happened. At least I got to see the two compilation movies, and I am glad we finally got an on demand streaming option to see this one. I know Made in Abyss is all about ~adventure~, but there's no film good enough to make me want to brave the hellmouth that is a real theater right now.
I think this one might've been too much for a Real Theater for me even without the pandemic, it's Very Intense and anime nerds don't always make for the best theater neighbors. So I was glad to have this option even though it was still very expensive at 20 USD to just watch it at home.
For better or worse, it's certainly more Made in Abyss! To that point, the opening scene functions as a strong reminder of everything this anime is, i.e. marrow-curdling horror juxtaposed with character designs who got lost on their way to the nearest Precious Moments catalogue.
I think you mean, Funkos for grandmas.
To-may-to, to-mah-to. Of course there's plenty of emphasis on the natural beauty of the Abyss as well, and the way it calls to cave raiders like Riko and her mother. And calls to me to salivate over the background art yet again.
So after spending the entire first season trying to get to the fifth layer with the pretty flowers with a lot of heartbreak, arm breaks, and euthanizing your horrible tiny eldritch friend via compact incinerator, they finally made it!! But what lays beyond that exactly is the question that no one can answer.

The kids have made it pretty far down even to most professional adult delvers, including some unfortunate victims by BUGS, but in order to make their last dive into the sixth layer, they're gonna need some assistance from an enemy.

Enter, Bondrewd and his men, the Umbra Hands. Yes, THAT Bondrewd, the one who turned Mitty into a pile of meat-y, turned Nanachi into a furry, and basically kills orphans for fun. Even indirectly, his villainous presence was deeply felt in the last season and so here we get the much awaited confrontation.
Yep it's the bad dude bone daddy himself, and to top things off, he has an entire posse of followers who wear even creepier masks than his own. There's a lot to hate about these guys, but I love them from a design standpoint. It certainly exhibits the story's flair for depicting imposing figures across both human and nonhuman spectra. Also, mercifully, not everyone on the fifth layer is a supervillain.
Upon appearance, they give off more of a militaristic vibe for what are essentially a bunch of underground mad scientists. We don't really see much of the Umbra Hands or the base on the deepest part of the sixth layer, the Ido Front. Instead the kids spend most of their time playing with Bondrewd's young daughter, Prushka. How or why Bondrewd has a daughter so deep below is certainly a mystery. Nanachi was actually completely unaware of her existence until now.
Her presence contrasts with what we expect out of Bondrewd. She and Nanachi together actually provide the film one of its crucial thematic backbones, which is interrogating the meaning of family in these extreme conditions. Nanachi's deeply uncomfortable relationship with Bondrewd is at complete odds with Prushka's apparently happy one, and that's as interesting a mystery as anything the Abyss itself presents.

Like, whew, all of Nanachi's interactions with Bondrewd are rough to watch.
BIG PROPS to Bondrewd's JP voice actor. You'd expect him to just play him as straight-up menacing but his voice goes between being this almost warm and benevolent patriarchal figure like a heavenly father, always speaking calmly and positive tones no matter what horrible thing is going on-screen, until it's downright creepy and inhuman. Backed by some from simply awesome pipe organs by Kevin Penkin's godly soundtrack, Bondrewd is a captivating and confusing presence for every second he's on screen despite the fact that his face is a singular glowing vertical line.
Oh yeah, Toshiyuki Morikawa knocks his performance out of the park. A lot of Bondrewd's dialogue with Nanachi is textbook abusive, made all the more menacing by Morikawa's unfalteringly affable tone. He's evil, but possesses every conviction that what he's done has been for the greater good. And there are few things scarier than a man with that kind of blind conviction.
He's always looking for ways to add insult to injury, by calling Nanachi a prodigy, gifted, and blessed. But for Nanachi it always sticks as a reminder for all the curses others have suffered. For Mitty, or the other children he's sacrificed. It makes you really suspicious that Prushka is so relatively normal and pure despite never having seen the surface and the fact that they're not actually blood-related. This is not uncommon patterns for an abusive parent, who will sometimes make up for their bad treatment of other children by essentially love-bombing a more worthy child.
And unsurprisingly, Prushka's happiness ends up being another factor in Bondrewd's schemes, but that doesn't change the fact that she's a good kid. She quickly becomes a friend to Riko and the others. She's even kind enough to give Riko a big ol' hit of her secret stash.
Ah yeah, huff that floof.
Meinya's good, and it's refreshing to see an Abyssal creature who doesn't look like an eldritch monster or some kind of mutant genitalia.
Look, don't get me started on the Freudian imagery in this movie. If you've seen the trailer, you already know that there's a piss machine.
Oh yeah, this is as good a time as any to remind everyone of the across-the-board content warnings for anything and everything Made in Abyss. And yes, that includes robot piss extractors.

Poor Reg cannot catch a break.
Nanachi and Bondrewd are talking and Riko and Meinya are having happy adventures of figuring out how to safely cross the VERY child unsafe flight of stairs. Reg is uhh, suspiciously missing, until Nanachi is like "Hey btw I'll help but please don't hurt my friends", to which Bondrewd responds like your dad when he unknowingly ate the last bit of pizza you were saving in the fridge.

Unquestionably his realest dad moment in the whole movie. Too bad, however, that it's less of a pizza whoops and more of a "I accidentally the arm of your robot friend" whoops.
Same thing, both are filled with tomato sauce. Though they really should avoid trying to get it all over the furniture.
They also might as well rename this show Mess In Abyss, because things do not get any cleaner from this point onwards.
This is absolutely the kind of wake-up call Prushka needed though to try and help her friends leave the home of her shitty mad-scientist dads.
And this instigates the part of the movie where our scrappy main trio finally gets the hell out of there and instead tries to kill Bondrewd in a number of increasingly byzantine ways. Which Bondrewd absolutely loves, because he's nasty like that.
He's absolutely armed to the teeth with all sorts of weird toys he's collected from years of searching and studying the abyss. They're also at a slight disadvantage because one of them allows him to spy on their party through Nanachi's eyes.

The kids are quick-witted and tough though. They haven't made it this far down for nothing! They have more than a few tricks of their sleeves. Even while missing an arm and being low on battery for the incinerator, Reg is able to put on a good show, taking Bondrewd off guard without his precious "cartridges" so he could take the full brunt of an ascent.

To picture the results, go into your favorite search engine and tell it to find you some freshly cut meat. Same diff.
Truly, nothing tastes sweeter than a dose of one's own medicine.
Mmm prosciutto.
Nothing, except maybe using a Relic to divide your soul evenly among a bunch of spare bodies, in essence granting yourself effective immortality. Which is unfortunately exactly what Bondrewd already did.

I'm not gonna say Ozen is right about everything, but I'm not not gonna say it.

And by this point, we've seen the many ways the Abyss warps the minds and bodies of those who are drawn to it—in particular the White Whistles—but Bondrewd's soul alchemy definitely takes the cake. He's barely human now, and that's exactly how he likes it.
What's worse is that he uses this EXTREMELY TRAUMATIC experience for Prushka to foster their connection. He once again repeats the duality of curses and blessing and that the reason Nanachi was able to grow strong against the curse of the abyss was because of the intense "Love" they had for their friend. Taking something as precious and beautiful as love and twisting it into a tool for something unholy.


It also brings into question how fucked up all the other White Whistles have to be to get where they are!
Right? And we also continue to interrogate how much of this we can blame on the Abyss, and how much of it we can blame on people. Basic human curiosity is what drives us to explore uncharted regions like the Abyss, but left unchecked by our moral foundations, it can also lead us down innumerable dark paths. Made in Abyss is fantastical and extreme, of course, but there are plenty of very real and very horrifying examples of people abusing their power in the name of discovery and advancement. The buried lede of this film is that Bondrewd lovingly raises a daughter for the express purpose of sewing her into a Curse-warding suitcase, purely for the sake of his research.
There's a second one though, namely, the mystery surrounding the White Whistles. Earlier we learn that a White Whistle is required to get down and perform the ritual that is The Last Dive. The TRUE point of No-Return for most people. Riko already has her mom's white whistle but apparently that won't do because it's very unique to each person.


Bondrewd's whistle appropriately looks like a pair of hands clasped in prayer. Accentuating both his god-complex and undying faith in The Abyss.
And their creation is also a very important thematic point for the movie, because—unsurprisingly—it requires the willing sacrifice of another person dear to the eventual White Whistle. In other words, there's a barbarism present here that predates Bondrewd, and is bigger than any one person. These are the lengths people have gone to in order to reach the depths of the Abyss.

I actually would have liked to have seen Riko be forced to reckon with this moral quandary more, because it's a pretty freaking big one. Bondrewd even shrewdly calls her out on her aptitude.
Bondrewd, who had already attached himself to the "Soul Slave Machine" weird vulva flower, the zoaholic, literally tossed away his own physical body and therefore his humanity.
There are a lot of neat concepts introduced in this film, but neither we nor the characters get a whole lot of time to meditate on them. The latter half of the movie jumps from one (admittedly great) fight scene to another, so we lose some of the quieter moments that really attracted me to the first season.

Damn the fights look good tho.
Yeah, that's one of the problem of condensing this into two hours instead of just having it be its own second season. However how deep and dark the Abyss gets though, we still did get many wonderful moments of character building. Like someone finally asks Riko what she even plans to do if or when she finds her mom and give a surprisingly honest answer. All of this and serves to cement the strong friendship between Prushka and Riko in such a short amount of time even if it was somewhat manufactured by Bondrewd.

It's a really good scene! And I wish we had gotten it before it became obvious that Prushka was gonna get turned into sausage meat.
The Child Meat Processing Plant scene is VERY UNCOMFORTABLE. Maybe even worse than PISS CHAIR. It gives me the same vibes of some of the most harrowing episodes of Penguindrum.
Nanachi's reckoning with their past trauma is also probably the most compelling through-line throughout the film. Seeing Riko and Reg support them and help them stand up to Bondrewd makes for a really satisfying character arc. Even if I wish we got a tad more Nanachi focus.

Let my fluffy Heybot!-voiced child have peace.
Nanachi at least got to save Reg from being Hollow Knight and have him come back to his senses.

Except actually, it was about child boners. It's been fun, y'all, but it's def that 20% of the series that makes me want child protective services to take me away just for watching it.
-sigh- It's simultaneously weird and unfortunate that THAT'S the thing stopping me from recommending it across the board to other people, and not stuff like the little worms wriggling in Bondrewd's eyes. There's so much raw, evocative material in Made in Abyss. I don't think we need things like piss machines on top of that. We're good, thanks.
The creepy child-leery stuff also isn't complete thematically since Made in Abyss is a series about bodily BloodBorne-like imagery, the pain of growing up, and the darkness of becoming an adult. There's also a serious implication that Bondrewd's abuse is metaphorically sexual. Depiction is not necessarily condoning these things but since anime is such a sloppy and indulgent medium it's very YMMV. Though, if you've already gotten into the series, you might be in too deep already.
True that. On a significantly lighter note, however, I do think we need to point out that Bondrewd's grand master plan is, without the slightest bit of exaggeration, becoming a furry.

Apparently the Ultimate Lifeform is very fluffy. Who knew.

Who knew something so fuzzy could be so FREAKY
And so susceptible to lasers!

This leads to the best part of the movie, which is Nanachi telling Bondrewd to shut the hell up.
Bondrewd is a fuckin' monster but the worst part is how the movie goes out of his way to show how his affection is genuine. He remembers the names of all the kids he mutated and mutilated, he praises the kids for their efforts and calls Nanachi adorable, he gave Prushka a home and made her believe she was loved. He sees pain and love not in conflict, but in duality. The same duality that grants him a transformation, and the team their very own white whistle in the form of a friend.

But it also shows that in there is also hope. There's a light in the Abyss. Prushka was able to make a real friend and have real adventures all in the deep part of the underworld and I'm still able to enjoy this movie despite all it's horrors.
Yeah, Made in Abyss is all about characters digging themselves out of worst-case-scenarios by virtue of their bonds. Even defeating Bondrewd wouldn't have gotten Riko and the others to the sixth layer, but Prushka's love and friendship—in the darkest of situations—did. Maybe Bondrewd's affection for his victims is his own way of coping. It doesn't excuse his actions—if anything, his genuine belief in his kindness makes him all the more despicable—but it would explain why he is the way he is. It also explains why Nanachi ultimately walks away instead of pulling the plug on the Zoaholic. This problem was always bigger than Bondrewd, and now they'll never have a reason to interact with him again.

Personally, I probably wouldn't have let the dude with the functional child organ packing plant to go unscathed, but that's just me.
However, to the team, the only thing they care about is what next fun and exciting thing lies in wait and you have to admire that kind of spunk and determination with all that they've been through.
Riko's gonna Riko.
Which is good because the quicker the movie ends the more I got to see the character everyone wants to see: Ozen. Albeit, briefly in the two shorts after the credits.
Lol yeah it's...jarring...to get two Marulk-centric shorts after the credits roll and I'm all emotionally hopped up on Kevin Penkin, but I'm also not one to look a gift Ozen in her delightfully creepy mouth.

I just want my tall scary Abyss mom to cradle me like this, is that too much to ask?
We all love an Ox Grandma, it's okay.
Anyways, Made in Abyss continues to be the "Top Anime I Can't Recommend to Anyone" but this is a great and thoroughly well-executed movie if you're already totally mystified by the series in all it's horrors and wonders. I'm sure there will be a lot more buzz when it finally casts a wider net, whether it's physical theaters or general streaming platforms.
Yep, I don't think it quiiiiite hits the devastating highs of the first season, but it's still a heartfelt and exquisitely-crafted film. And it's definitely pumped me up for whatever emotional wrecking balls (and gross-ass food) season 2 has in store.
There's definitely a lot of moments that made me want to cringe and made me want to cry. It's an extremely duality, but as an anime fan, with my own adventurous heart yearning for a little sense of the new, strange, and beautiful. I'd be lying to say I wasn't looking forward to this movie and also to whatever's next. Even if I wasn't, there's plenty of other brave souls who are willing to go to the deep-end for this series, in spite of it all, and to those I will say:
Curses, Blessings, and Fluffiness.
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