Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Edens Zero’ on Netflix, a New Space-Adventure Anime From the Creator of ‘Fairy Tail’ (2024)

New Netflix anime series Edens Zero adapts Hiro Mashima’s popular manga about a boy who was raised by robots and subsequently jets into outer space for adventures with an influencer girl and her talking cat. (Dang, did someone adapt my autobiography without telling me?) It debuted in Japan earlier this year, and now enjoys international distribution via Netflix, which is already cluttered with more anime series than you can point your gigantically wide, childlike eyes at. So maybe it’ll stand out enough to warrant a watch?

EDENS ZERO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A comet or a shooting star streaks across a starry sky.

The Gist: Two robots, one of whom resembles a pirate devil while the other is dressed like a scarecrow or a poor farmer, stand next to young Shiki (voice of Takuma Terashima). The boy points up: “Shooting star!” The pirate devil robot says it’s actually a dragon, but soon reveals that he’s only joking. This is what grandfathers do — playfully fib to their grandsons. Wait, a human boy has a robot grandpa? Yep. We assume it’s adoptive, but this is anime, so we can’t be sure, can we? “My wish — is to make lots of friends!” the boy exclaims, possibly because he has no friends, or at least those that aren’t sentient mechanical A.I. things.

Cut to Rebecca Bluegarden (Mikako Kumatsu) and her cat pal Happy (Rie Kugimiya), who hop off their starship to visit Granbell Kingdom, an amusement park planet long abandoned by humans. She hopes to make some keen videos there to share on social media and get heaps of likes exclamation point! “So that’s why you’re wearing a short skirt!” chirps Happy. They’re greeted by a horde of cheery robots, who celebrate their first visitor in a century with fireworks and corny choreography, which very much resembles the crap you see at theme parks that are occupied by human employees. Meanwhile, a robot spy spies on Rebecca and then reports to a robot king

Rebecca and Happy come across a towering malevolent cat robot, which malfunctions and crashes to the ground as their eyes blank out and they fly through the air on the poof of force from the impact, jeepers! Turns out the only human on the planet was operating the robot, and it’s Shiki, now a teenager with wild hair and no social skills. The latter point becomes obvious when he’s so shocked to see another actual person, he gropes Rebecca’s breasts and looks up her skirt like a total naif but also a total creep, and gets the crap whapped out of him.

She stays the night only to wake up tied to a stake, as the robots have apparently gone malevolent overnight. They no longer want to be subjugate to humans, they bleep-blorp, angering Shiki. He jumps to rescue Rebecca, running up walls like some sort of spider-guy and smashing things with his green-glowing GRAVITY FISTS, explained by robots as being Ether Gear, explained by Wikipedia as being “a power from the universe’s dark ages” fueled by a magical energy known as Ether. Nifty! They escape to Rebecca’s starship, which is shaped like a fish, and venture forth into the cosmos to have adventures and so Shiki can make some friends. They fly along and he spots the streak in the sky and they fly close to it and whaddayaknow, it really WAS a dragon!

Meanwhile, back on Granbell, the robots reveal that this was all a phony scheme. They love Shiki and they’re dying and they wanted to devise a way to get him off the planet so he can go make some friends, REAL friends, friends who aren’t dying robots. Then they topple over and die. Back out in space, we hear a voice. It belongs to Mother (Kikuko Inoue), the goddess of everything, I think. She muses that “the boy” has left his planet, and wonders aloud and/or in her head, as such goddess-beings tend to do, about whether he’ll become a hero or bring about destruction. We shall see, won’t we?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Some have beefed that Edens Zero is just Mashima reiterating his previous manga/anime series Fairy Tail — which ran for a mere 328 episodes and became two feature-length movies — in an interstellar setting.

Our Take: Not that we should fully judge a series after only one episode, but Edens Zero doesn’t leave a significant impression with its initial salvo. It only teases the outer-space action and takes place almost wholly planetside. It establishes Shiki and Rebecca as very thin characters — naif and non-naif, possibly both quite airheaded — in sincere need of substantial development. They don’t do much here; Shiki gives us a glimpse of his superpowers, and Rebecca just stands around in tiny clothing, chattering away. Two goals are kind of vaguely established: Shiki will make some friends and maybe figure out his cosmic destiny, while Rebecca apparently stands around filming it? I dunno. I guess the optimistic view is, they’re blank slates just RIPE for whatever the universe throws at them!

The cheery tone and animation are the superior devices drawing us into this reality. Neither expands beyond the usual anime visual template, but colors are big and bold and movement is sleek and dynamic. As for character design, well, Shiki and Rebecca look like any of several dozen other heroic figures: the brooding male with unruly hair wearing a leather jacket and the upbeat female wearing very tight things. It generally aims for comedy and slapstick, although a peek ahead at the plot shows some potential for more serious subject matter.

Sex and Skin: Rebecca wears skimpy clothes, and the (kind of off-putting) groping scene pushes the series firmly out of kiddie viewership.

Parting Shot: Mother sits on a giant floating space rock in outer space smiling mysteriously.

Sleeper Star: Let’s go with Happy, a character sort of imported from Fairy Tail who functions as comic relief and who can apparently transform into a pair of nonlethal blasters. Who says cats are useless creatures?

Most Pilot-y Line: “What’s a friend?” young Shiki asks, setting a thematic crash course for the boy to make a bunch of them, hooray!

Our Call: Fans of Fairy Tale may find more traction here, but Edens Zero has yet to differentiate itself from other similar anime series. I’d give it another episode or two to establish its heroes and setting before setting it aside. So despite a few reservations, I say STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

StreamEdens Zero on Netflix