Record of Ragnarok

The Weight of Stagnant Gods

I have a fraught relationship with tournament anime. At its best, the form is pure motion—bodies whipping across the frame, impossible force made visible, the whole production showing off. Then there is *Record of Ragnarok*, a show that keeps doing huge numbers for Netflix while often moving like a presentation somebody forgot to animate.

It should not work. The 2021 adaptation of the manga, shepherded through different phases by directors including Koichi Hatsumi and Masao Okubo, takes a premise that practically begs for visual excess: thirteen gods from across the world’s mythologies fighting thirteen humans from history to decide whether our species deserves to survive. Thor versus Lu Bu. Jack the Ripper versus Hercules. This should be all impact and velocity. Instead, a lot of the time you get beautifully drawn still images of enormous men yelling while bystanders explain what just happened.



Whether you can live with that depends on how much camp you have in your system. Because under the stiff limbs and stop-start action, the show has a weirdly stubborn pulse. It survives by personality more than craft. As *Collider* observed while trying to explain the series’ streaming popularity, "Its animation has been divisive, its pacing aggressive, and its violence unapologetic… and yet, it continues to perform." That feels right. The series plays less like prestige action anime and more like mythological pro wrestling, all entrances, declarations, and ridiculous sincerity.

You cannot talk about this show without landing on Adam versus Zeus, the second match of season one and the one that cemented its reputation. Humanity’s first father is reimagined here as a naked, leaf-wearing fighter who can copy divine techniques. Across from him is Zeus, ancient and shriveled and somehow even more terrifying for it. The stakes are ludicrous and totally earnest at the same time. Adam is not fueled by revenge. He is just fighting for his children.



The climax of that fight is a small lesson in how far sound and voice work can drag a broken sequence. Zeus and Adam trade blows at blinding speed, but the show mostly renders it as impact stills and streaking speed lines. *Screen Rant* was not wrong to call it a "colored-in slideshow of manga panels." Then one drop of Zeus’s blood falls into Adam’s eye, blinding him, and the man simply keeps going. He punches on after his nervous system has already burned out, dying upright while the fists still move. I found the scene maddening on a technical level and completely effective on an emotional one. The mechanism sputters. The feeling does not.

Anchoring the whole spectacle is Miyuki Sawashiro as Brunhilde, the Valkyrie masterminding humanity’s side of the tournament. Sawashiro has spent decades voicing poised killers, elegant royals, and severe heroes—her Kurapika in *Hunter x Hunter* is still one of the best examples of cool control in anime voice acting. Here she takes all of that composure and lights it on fire.



Her Brunhilde is vicious, ecstatic, and wonderfully foul-mouthed. The animators contort her face into grotesque masks of joy and rage every time a god gets embarrassed, and Sawashiro fills those expressions with enough vocal menace to keep the exposition from dying on the vine. When the fights bog down in flashbacks and commentary, it is her crazed momentum that keeps tugging the show forward.

I still hesitate to call *Record of Ragnarok* traditionally good. The pacing across the released seasons is bloated, and the action often feels underpowered for material this huge. But the show’s shameless earnestness is hard to resist. It believes, loudly and with its whole chest, that humanity might still be worth defending. Even if the defense sometimes looks like standing very, very still.