[Note: Minor spoilers in this post]
When I first watched Saint Seiya – The Lost Canvas in 2011, I liked it very much. The spinoff, set 243 years before the original Saint Seiya series, is as good as the original. In fact, it even improved on a few fronts. Top on my list is the fact that the fight scenes are not prolonged and not as painful to watch. By painful, I don’t mean the fight scenes in the original series were bad, instead it was quite realistic in conveying the pain felt by the Bronze Saints whenever they fought opponents stronger than them (being at the bottom of the Saint hierarchy that would be almost every opponent they came across).
The fight scenes in the original series had a lot of passion and emotions but outside of it, there wasn’t a lot of drama. In Lost Canvas, the drama is heightened when the human destined to be Hades’s vessel on Earth turned out to be Alone, who is the Pegasus’s Saint best friend and also the brother to Athena’s human form, Sasha. This is the central theme throughout the series but not the only one. There is also a lot of drama going on in terms of the back stories of other Saints, namely the Gold Saints as well as the Spectres, which brings me to characterisation.
Like the original series, Lost Canvas has great characterisation. I read a review where the author said that even though Virgo Gold Saint Asmita and Pisces Gold Saint Albafica only made their appearances for a couple of episodes, they were his favourite characters (up to the point the author watched the series). Lost Canvas does a superb job in delving into a lot of its character’s motivations and emotions. Not many series can do that. An anime/manga that automatically comes to mind would be Sailor Moon. It has so many great characters in its universe but they will forever be portrayed as mere supporting characters. There are never any moments where they shine apart from the token episode per season/arc. In Lost Canvas, even though Tenma, the Pegasus Saint is the main character, the series also gives ample screen time to the other characters, be it Alone, the Gold Saints and even the Spectres.
The Gold Saints definitely had a bigger role in Lost Canvas than in the original series, which really makes this series worth watching. In the original series, most of them were misguided and actually fought against Athena at the start of the Sanctuary war. In Lost Canvas, we get to see them fight for Athena right from the beginning, which is awesome. We get to see how they should have been had they not been deceived in the original series. They redeemed themselves in the end in the original series but not after a few of them had lost their lives :(
The production quality of Lost Canvas is top notch; the details on the Cloths and Surplices are adequately done. The animation is fluid and awkward movements are far and few in between. The background music is very different from the ones created by Seiji Yokoyama for the original series but it is solid. If the songs reminds you of the songs from Inuyasha, that’s because the music is produced by the same composer, Kaoru Wada.
No series is perfect and this is no exception. Overall, it is a solid animation but I had an issue with Tenma’s progression as a Saint. In the original Saint Seiya series, we saw how Seiya and his friends grew from mere Bronze Saints to Saints who could challenge Gold Saints and other stronger warriors. We saw how they struggled to attain their seventh sense. It was a long and painful struggle but the strength they gained in the end made sense. In Lost Canvas, we saw the great potential in Tenma in the beginning but after that he quickly became a Saint. We didn’t see his progression. We also saw how Sanctuary decided to protect him due to his link to Alone who had become Hades. It seemed that everyone was out to protect him, not because of his capabilities but because of his past.
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