Fist of the North Star (2026) ep1
Okay, deep breaths. You really can’t talk about this one without talking about the CGI. It certainly doesn’t look great; the decision to use hard black shadows all the time on the character models is broadly accurate to the look of the manga, but just looks weird in 3D. More often than not, it doesn’t feel as if the characters and backgrounds exist in the same space, presumably because the lighting doesn’t match properly.
It’s not a complete wash though - I would even go as far as to say it looks pretty good during the fight scenes. During the main action sequence of the episode, the lighting changed to a kind of high contrast, washed out look that feels a lot more in keeping with the character art. Maybe if they’d just stuck with that all the way through, they’d have been on to something. As it is, it feels comparable with the CG used in the opening for Stardust Crusaders, which was good for its time, but we’ve just had a second season of Trigun Stampede, and that, for all its other problems, really showed what you could achieve with TV-level CGI anime.
The real heartbreaker, I think, is just that, if you were going to remake this series, the obvious thing to do would have been to get David Pro. Perhaps in 2050, once Steel Ball Run is finished, our all-powerful cyborg overlords might let them have a go.