Beastars key art Legoshi, the wolf protagonist of Beastars

(Contains spoilers)

Ok so imagine Zootopia.

This is like Zootopia, in that the show is furry as hell and focuses on the difficulties inherent in trying to organize a society in which some persons are just way, way more powerful than others, and in fact want to eat the weak,

Except it’s also a high school anime? And it’s also Twilight, with the forbidden romance between a confused girl and a tenuously-in-control-of-himself superpowered guy who is having genuine difficulty determining whether he wants to fuck or kill her.

I feel like this is two or three different shows, tbh: the opening scene makes it out like it’s going to be a murder mystery, but it turns out that scene was just a setting detail—sometimes, one of the students goes berserk and eats another student, and that’s just kind of a thing that happens, and no one likes it but everyone mostly forgets about it.

(I sincerely can’t tell whether this show is pretty smart or pretty sloppy.)

The characterization is really quite good—no one is a villain, exactly, even the assholes; people rationally pursue their self-interest, even when their self-interest is ridiculous or they themselves aren’t very smart.

The worldbuilding is pretty good, despite the inherent uphill-climb of trying to create a society which contains a hundred different anthropomorphic animals. It has nice, realistic feeling details, like a black market trade in meat and a lot of self-hating carnivores and a really grisly, uncomfortable scene where an old antelope offers to let some predator species eat off his fingers for money.

It jumps between anime tropes and shocking brutality really fast, though?

Around episode 9 it takes a sharp left and goes from PG to hard R, because apparently the lion mob has a whole kidnap-and-devour racket going on, and the city mostly pretends this doesn’t happen for the sake of minimizing tension between predator/prey species. And it’s a weirdly sexual thing.

And apparently there are places where they raise animals without language so that they’re, y’know, animals, and you can buy those animals and eat them?

And there are guns in this world, but very few of the prey species carry guns?

Man, I don’t know how much this show is a decent portrayal of different species’ psychologies—which also seems subtly possible—vs just sloppiness.

Its portrayal of high school bullshit that makes character sense, and is reasonable for the people doing it is, like 10/10, on par with Big Mouth. The worldbuilding is…I think it’s good??

The way it jumps between high school drama anime plots and…mob violence thrillers is…not great, but I guess they were trying to communicate something about the world. Or they changed authors halfway through.

Probably worth watching, 6/10, but be prepared to be uncomfortable.