#deryn sharp

we're back with shitposts

I’m 15 again. (and I’m a Darwinist.)

I love the books and I love the anime. So I fused them both together with my imagination!!

Prints will be available here.

I read these books over 10 years ago, and they've been a huge influence on my aesthetics, tastes, storytelling and personal feelings. But they've always been an obscure little gem, a lavishly illustrated series of children's book that practically nobody knew about or had any interest in. To see this series with my own two eyes has been enormously uplifting.

Music by Joe Hisashi. Executive involvement of both Keith Thompson and Scott Westerfeld (who I'm glad is getting a W in adaptations after the calamity of Uglies). But a different writer and art director so we're not slavishly devoted to the source material. There is a significant number of changes: some were clearly made to save up on budget (fewer characters, fewer locations, fewer contraptions and beasties) while others are meant to shift the tone of the narrative.

I'll put it this way: this is clearly a 2020s production. The characters are aged up slightly from the book, and we're working from a perspective that understands it is impossible to have the sort of idealized ending the books had. But in this decade we're also desperate, starving for the kind of hope and wonder the books tried to capture and convey.

Leviathan is a conscious, insistent rejection of cynicism. This theme is not just preserved from the book, it is amplified, stronger and more impactful and all the more valuable because we live in a different world, we're older and things feel worse than they used to.

The ghibli vibes are powerful here - a wondrous fascination with the possibilities of machines, with the miracles of life, with the world as seen through the eyes of one who is growing up. It refuses prejudice and violence, but also the squeaky-clean deception of quick and easy solutions.

I wasn't on board with every change from the novels, but I don't have to be. I respect them. The team clearly had a strong love for the source material and by the end of this series I was left feeling the same joyful hope and longing that the books left in my heart over 10 years ago.