The new season is doing really great.
Summary:
- The Black Butler: Public School Arc adaptation is praised a lot.
- The new art style is an improvement over the old one.
- The new season is faithful to the manga and has high quality.
Black Butler: Public School Arc (Kuroshitsuji: Kishuku Gakkou-hen) premiered on April 13, 2024 on Crunchyroll, and the MyAnimeList score of 8.12 can tell us at least one thing about this season: the adaptation is going strong.
The Public School Arc is very special for the Black Butler fandom indeed. There hasn’t been a new anime for years, and fans didn’t even think that there would come a day when they saw Ciel and Sebastian animated again. But 2024 is full of surprises, huh?
New Art Style Is Stunning
The biggest worry about the new season was the animation studio and thus the art style change, but the first broadcast of the Public School Arc proved that there was nothing to be anxious about: the anime looks stunning.
The new style fits Black Butler extremely well. All the characters have kept their features, so they’re easily recognizable, but new touches make them look fresh and even more modern. We should’ve never doubted CloverWorks.
Of course, it’s also a matter of time, since Black Butler Season 1 first aired in 2008, and there’s been a lot of animation advancement in the industry since then. And it’s been 7 years since the last Black Butler anime project, which was the Book of the Atlantic movie, released in 2017.
True to the Manga
The new visuals are not the only thing that makes Public School stand out, it’s also the quality of the adaptation. Black Butler has suffered from canon deviation a lot in the past, and the first seasons of the anime can hardly be even considered adaptations. They were mostly just inspired by the manga.
But the new season is nothing like that. It’s a faithful adaptation of the source material. There are slight changes, but it’s natural, since almost all adaptations do that to adjust to the anime format. And Public School is exceptionally good at that.
Moreover, a lot of manga readers think that Public School is one of the best Black Butler manga arcs, that’s why the story this season is also much better than in some previous parts of the series.
The Book of the Atlantic movie was incredible, there’s no doubt about that, but some fans disliked the zombie elements of it. But the Public School doesn’t have it. It’s trying to focus on the mystery and the investigation for now, and viewers are really digging it.
On top of that, the currently airing season has one major advantage: the sense of nostalgia. Fans have been dreaming about an anime sequel of Black Butler for ages, and finally seeing their dream come true makes them beyond happy.