My Review Academia S6 E1: Calm Before the Storm

It’s that time again, ladies and gentlemen. Season six is upon us. Hopefully, this one will capture that spark that’s been missing for me in seasons four and five. Given how crazy the material was in the manga, I’d say we’ve got a decent chance!

The stage is set for war. Shigariki and the League of Villains now lead an army, and the time is near for their plans to sink Japan into chaos to commence. Luckily, the Heroes are poised and ready to strike. It’s the calm before the storm, with the Class A kids caught in the middle.

Right off the bat, this season is off to a great start. Rather than opening up with a filler recap episode, it cuts straight to the chase. After a three-minute recount of events, we go right into the OP and the story proper starts. No swimming contests, no nosy reporters, no time wasted at all. Just going straight into it.

Most of this episode is all about setting the stage. You’ve got plenty of characters exchanging information and talking about what is going to happen and what could happen. There’s not a whole lot of personality going around with the cast this episode, mostly just exposition. A necessary evil, and one that will hopefully pass now that said information has been delivered.

Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t any character depth at all this episode. Hawks gets highlighted early on as the show puts his relationship with Twice on full display. Present Mic and Eraser Head both get their emotional beat as they confront the man who turned their dead friend into a monster. We even get a scene of Kaminari pissing himself. It’s not much, but it does add a bit of life to keep things from getting too boring.

Writing wise, that’s about it. Which is to be expected from the first episode. Major character moments and jaw-dropping reveals are going to happen later. This one had one goal: to finish setting the table. And it accomplished that goal very well.

Animation wise, this episode was actually really good. It only had one sequence that was truly impressive, all the way at the end of the episode. But the rest of the episode was consistently solid. No shots stood out as being truly ugly or stiff. They all looked solid and flowed smoothly.

The new OP gives me some hope that we’ll see some cool stuff later, given the extremely high animation quality it presents. It’s among one of the stronger series OPs for me, blending MHA’s signature anime style with the traditional look of the western comics that inspired it. The accompanying song is just okay, though. Overall, a decent OP.

Don’t ask me about the ED, though. I already forgot about it entirely.

Season six is off to a pretty good start. It didn’t waste our time with yet another recap filler episode. Instead, it did what we all wanted to do: get straight to the point. It set up the events to come and then set them into motion, and it looked pretty good doing it.

We’ve hit the ground running. Let’s see if we can get far without tripping.