What is the Soul Eater anime?
The Soul Eater anime premiered in April 2008, produced by Studio Bones and directed by Takuya Igarashi, whose work on Ouran High School Host Club had shown the comic timing the series needed. It ran 51 episodes to March 2009 on TV Tokyo, in a run Japanese broadcast split into standard and late night Repeat Show versions with different theme songs.
Bones was the ideal studio for Ohkubo's art. The anime kept Death City's skewed architecture and the manga's heavy blacks, and its fight animation, especially in the early arcs and the Brew storyline, was praised for translating Ohkubo's staged, angular action into motion without sanding off its strangeness.
Music carried the adaptation's fame. Taku Iwasaki's score mixes jazz, hip hop and orchestral menace, and the openings became era anthems: Resonance by T.M.Revolution and Paper Moon by Tommy Heavenly6, with endings by Stance Punks, Nishino Kana and others. The soundtrack albums remain among the most collected anime music of their period.
The cast defined the characters for a generation: Chiaki Omigawa's Maka, Koki Uchiyama's Soul, Yumiko Kobayashi's Black Star and Mamoru Miyano's Death the Kid are the voices most fans hear when reading the manga, and the production's casting of relative newcomer Omigawa in the lead was widely noted at the time.
Because the anime was made mid serialization, its final third diverges into an original conclusion, covered in the Library's ending comparison page. The divergence is the key fact of the adaptation: the Bones series is a complete, beloved work that tells a different last act than Ohkubo's manga.
