When it comes to reviewing TV series, I don’t cover single episodes. I don’t cover entire shows. On the few occasions I have reviewed TV, I’ve found it preferable to review a single season. In this era of overarching storylines, reviewing a season isn’t that different from reviewing a film.

However, if I review the first season of a show then you can be sure that it’s good because if it was bad, I wouldn’t have made it to the last episode but that’s not to say I won’t have any criticisms. Of the few first seasons I’ve reviewed on this blog, Skull Island is definitely one of the worst. By the time you reach the cliffhanger ending, you’ll be curious enough to want a season two but to get there you have to sit through a lot of dull moments and poor animation.

This anime series from Netflix takes place within Legendary’s MonsterVerse, specifically between Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla Vs Kong. It centres on a crew of explorers who get shipwrecked on the coast of Skull Island. They encounter a group of mercenaries who immediately pursue them. The show chronicles the group’s struggle to evade not only the mercenaries but the swarms of abominable wildlife inhabiting the island. 

The Characters

Our crew of explorers consist of two men and their teenage sons; one wants to follow their father’s footsteps and chase monsters, the other just wants to go to college and have a normal life. They rescue a woman adrift in the ocean. When she regains consciousness, she calls herself Annie and claims that she’s fleeing from mercenaries. At that moment the ship is attacked by an unseen creature. When the ship is destroyed, Annie, the men and their sons are swept up onto Skull Island.

The fathers want to find their sons and the sons want to find their fathers. All together they just want to get off the island. That’s the arc of four of our principle characters in a nutshell. They’re not totally boring, just mere vehicles for the monster-laden survival plot.

Annie is a lot more engaging. When we meet her we know nothing about her so we’re immediately curious. What’s better is that we don’t stop learning about her at the end of the first episode. Her backstory is shown in a series of flashbacks, which are cleverly scattered throughout the 8 episodes. She has a deep connection to the island and the mercenaries, she is the most active character as everything she does has a genuine consequence, some of them very personal. She’s probably the best thing the series has going for it.

If you’re expecting to see a lot of Kong then you will be disappointed. In the first half of the series, it’s clear that he’s the ruler of the island but not a concern for the mercenaries. Our characters only have a handful of encounters with him, initially he’s no more important than the other monsters.

In the last couple of episodes however, Kong takes centre stage and it’s great. The seventh episode is focused on Kong entirely, showing us what he was like between the events of Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla Vs Kong. He has some of the strength and tactics he displays in Godzilla Vs Kong but he also has the gentleness he expressed in 2017’s Skull Island. The last two episodes absolutely make the series worth watching.

The Animation

Despite Skull Island being the first anime I’ve ever reviewed on this blog, I should explain that while I wouldn’t call myself a fan, I believe I’m familiar enough with the anime medium to give an informed opinion.

Like any kid born in the late 90s’, I lived through many Anime-fueled fads whether it was Pokémon, Digimon, Beyblade or Yu-Gi-Oh. I wasn’t in love with those franchises but I got the gist of them. In my late teens I watched more anime features, varying from prestigious family films like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle to more mature films like Akira and Barefoot Gen.

I’d seen enough to recognise what anime looked like on the big screen and what anime looked like on the small screen. Skull Island is blatantly television standard anime and for that, it looks ok. For the most part.

The animation is noticeably unconvincing whenever it’s mixed with 3D animation. This typically occurs when a character is sprinting through an environment. The environment will essentially be a three-dimensional map, which makes the 2D animated character look ever more crooked and lifeless.

Another weakness lies more in the design of the animation rather than in the animation itself. On a few occasions, Kong’s scale changes drastically, even more so than it did in 1933. In some scenes he’s around the size he is in his 2017 MonsterVerse debut but in others he’s as big as he is in Godzilla Vs Kong. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a homage to his fluctuating size in the original film and merely a lack of consistency.

Not the best debut the MonsterVerse could have in TV but for me it gets enough right to stay tuned for another season. Hopefully a few lessons have been learned in this season that can be applied to future ones.

I give Season One of Skull Island a chest-beating 7 out of 10.