Scott Pilgrim takes off is an anime adaptation of the popular Canadian manga series of the same name. Like in the books, it focuses on Scott Pilgrim wanting to date Ramona Flowers, but in order to date her, Scott must defeat Gideon and the league of evil exes. Its set in Canada too just like in the books.
There Is only so much a beat em up game could show with only tidbits and pieces of the characters personalities. The characters were not really that likable as you thought they would be the moment you start seeing more of the source material. Ramona is pretty manipulative and not really that pleasant of a person to be around. Scott isn’t really that good either he’s pretty much the type of guy who just keeps chasing after women no matter how mean they are and sees no wrong in any of their unseeming behaviors.
Scott is the type of person who complains about the situations he willingly puts himself in and even if he gets whatever he desires, he’s the one to ruin things just out of his own compelling impulses. Ramona’s exes too are not anyone to sympathize either as each of them had their own narcissistic tendencies.
Now the story is said to be focused on Scott Pilgrim as that’s the character in the name, but instead it oddly focuses more so on Ramona than it does on Scott oddly. In fact, he only really shows up at the final parts of the series as a result of a cheap cop off death the writers randomly wrote in. It strays quite a bit from time to time from the original manga which is pretty deceptive how it was marketed as an adaptation of the manga and not a reimagination.
The only character who had a modicum of sanity and level headedness in the series was Knives Chau. She is pretty much just there to have fun and enjoy her hobbies while everyone else just keeps starting drama for the sake of it. You think the chemistry between Scott and Knives would be cute but really he only likes her just because she has a worships him.
The animation by Science Saru is pretty solid and the artstyle too was good.
The movie’s original cast reprises their respective roles despite the actors being like really big, the dialogue sounds more like they were reading off a teleprompter than actually putting in any effort into their roles. I’ll give credit to Weird Al’s cameo though, Weird Al has always been known to be fun in anything he’s involved in. Just like in the book, there is some moments that were trippy to the point it just becomes more confusing and left more questions than answers.
The music the same people who did the music in the game did the music here in the anime and even Metric had a cameo which was pretty interesting. The action was generally fine and stylish as expected from the series. The series is fairly short with just 8 episodes as it is in a more condensed format.
It gets 3 out of 5 stars.
I wonder if they were really planning on making it into a faithful adaptation, but it was really due to Netflix's executive meddling that cause this adaptation, needless to say I don’t think I plan on doing any future reviews of Scott Pilgrim or anything from Oni Press anytime soon.
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