Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga

Episodes 1-2

When Rin embarks on his tour through the past at the start of this latest iteration of Blue Exorcist, the demon Mephisto Pheles warns him to remember what he'll see will end in tears. So far, there's no chance of forgetting that. Part one sets up a lovely trio of homeless people who take in a foundling girl; shades of Satoshi Kon's film Tokyo Godfathers. A few minutes later, the three adults are (apparently) dead in a fire, though the child survives. She's Yuri Egin, who's destined to produce Satan's children, Rin and his brother Yukio.

Part two gets darker still. It focuses more on Shiro, who's far from the heroic patriarch depicted in the series. By now we know Shiro was created as a clone, a potential vessel for a god-level being, and the subject of terrible experiments. This echoes other anime –you may think of characters in Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist, as well as the situation in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go. But it's also possible that the horrific “Section 13” refers to one of those terrible parts of real Japanese history that the country seldom brings up directly. Unit 731 was the Japanese Army unit that carried out unimaginably cruel “experiments” on Chinese civilians in the 1930s and '40s.

Much of the fictional backstory was revealed last season, and at first, I felt slightly impatient to see it recapped. But it's important that now these things are being shown to the horrified, sickened Rin, who was previously so innocent and ignorant of Blue Exorcist's darkest corners. Finally, the show's hero is forced to watch the horrors that made him and to grow up enough to deal with them, without his True Cross friends' support. It's very poignant.

One thing I missed in my Preview Guide write-up of episode one was how much I liked the episode's music. It was so different from the normal Attack on Titan-ish fare by Hiroyuki Sawano and Kohta Yamamoto that I wondered if another composer had taken over. (Not so, it appears from the credits.) The music when Yuri enters the mountainous True Cross building for the first time is movingly evocative, with whispered vocals and mournful beauty.

Part two's music is in far more familiar Titan mode. This makes it especially amusing when the episode's last battle also feels so like Titan, only with far more limited animation. Studio VOLN is getting good at making a fight engaging with a fraction of the visuals of MAPPA or Wit Studio. When Mikasa – sorry, Shiro - delivers his finishing move, chucking a grenade into a monster's maw, the music doesn't pretend to sound like anything other than the giant-killing anime.

The monster, incidentally, is an enormous, furious mobile tree. That's no problem, but what took me aback is that it's called an Ent, both in the Japanese original and Crunchyroll's subtitles. I'm no copyright expert, but my understanding is that using names that (arguably) derive from the good Professor Tolkien's work can be a risky business. The word “Ent” comes from the Old English for “giant,” but that didn't stop more woody Ents from being renamed Treants in RPGs ever since the 1970s.

So if that particular monster name gets changed on Crunchyroll a few days or weeks down the line, either to “Treant” or something else (Tree-Wolf?), then we'll know why.

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Blue Exorcist: The Blue Night Saga is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.