Japanese Title: Dr Stone
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Related: Dr Stone: Stone Wars (season 2 – included in review)
Dr Stone Season 3 (TBR)
Similar: Log Horizon
Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Ascendance of a Bookworm
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Watched in: Japanese & English
Genre: Adventure Comedy Science Fiction
Length: 35 episodes (2 seasons)
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Positives:
- The science focus is fun and different
- Commits to the premise
- Protagonist and antagonist
Negatives:
- Female character designs are weak alongside the males
- Drags at times
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Are you tired of battles in your shounen anime? Has Mr Young Hero pulled out a few too many new super techniques in the middle of a fight for your liking? Has your shounen been too shounened? Then science is your answer! Dr Stone takes the typical shounen style and substitutes battles for science.
After a mysterious green light leaves humanity petrified in stone, teen whiz kid Senku awakens millennia later as an unknown fluid de-petrifies him. The world he once knew has long vanished under the unrelenting might of nature. If he revived, then everyone could come back. He makes it his mission to bring all seven billion people on Earth back to life with the power of science!
Unfortunately, he’s a weakling and can’t lift a pebble to save himself. So, he first revives his friend from the old times, Taiju, a guy perfectly suited to grunt work. Sturdy back, simple brain. All seems to go well until the wildlife sniffs manflesh and attacks the pair. Senku revives the one guy he knows able to fight lions with his bare fists – Tsukasa, “The Strongest High School Primate.” This “teenager” is equally strong in muscle and conviction. While he does save them, he disagrees with Senku’s notion that all of humanity is worth saving. His philosophy is that adults had screwed up the world before and this was a chance to fix it without them. A rift forms, and as Senku tries to revive adults, Tsukasa is shattering them to pieces.
The pressure is on in a battle of science versus muscle. And what of these other people already alive in the world? Did some resist the light?
(Fun fact: There has never been a moment when all of humanity was on Earth together since 31st October 2000, after the first set of astronauts set off for the International Space Station. The ISS has had a crew aboard ever since.)
The “what if” presented pulls you in immediately. I love the progression from one invention to the next, as if following a tech tree in an RTS. Dr Stone is over the top. But it’s over the top in the right way, as it commits all marbles to the bet. If it had been more serious, then the silly shounen side would have been farcical by comparison. Everything commits.
You do have to not think about the petrification part too much. There are holes even by the show’s logic. It glosses over the rather convenient solution to broken statues, for instance. Similarly, the science is simplified to varying degrees. The principals, formulas, and ideas are sound, but the process is like those drawing guides that go from two ovals with sticks in one step to a fully detailed horse in the next image. The author paid more attention to accuracy in chemistry than he did to biology and physics (shounen physics still prevail here). Once you roll with it, Dr Stone is a fun anime! And it’s different from other Shounen Jump offerings. I never felt like I was watching the same thing, yet again, from adaptations out of that magazine.
Dr Stone is still very much a shounen in spirit though. Grandstanding, ridiculous proclamations, reality-breaking abilities, shouting for dialogue, and that hyper shounen aura abound in this adventure. This isn’t a science documentary.
The main turn off I could see for viewers once latched onto the initial premise would be the science/experimentation segments. They are the equivalent to shounen training episodes, though learning about chemistry is far more interesting than seeing a ninja repeat the same action a thousand times. I had watched the first season when it was current in 2019; however, the season was mostly an incomplete building up towards the grand conflict with Tsukasa. See, if the first big battle was just another shounen battle, then Dr Stone would have been a waste of time. The 11-episode second season caps the arc to a satisfying point. Looking back over the total 35 episodes, I think this arc could fit in a single season were it not for the aforementioned drag during the science sections. An alternative is to extend the runtime a little, cut back on some of the experimentation, and break it up with more character work. The science over punching approach is fun – I love it – but everything needs the right pace. Being able to binge the series now does alleviate the problem a little. The cast also outgrows the character development available. At least three-quarters of the cast is comedic relief with singular personality quirks, many of them blending into a forgettable blur.
On the other hand, Senku and Tsukasa receive plenty of development and make for good leads. That said, even they could have done with more interaction to explore their ideologies in greater depth (we see plenty of their ideologies in isolation, but not enough in opposition on screen together). The more important support characters are also quite good. Once you hit tier three importance, then we meet the blur.
We see this degradation in character designs as well, where the tier one and tier two (most of them) characters have fantastic unique designs that lean into the hyper energy, while everyone else – particularly the girls – are bland, even off-putting.
My headcanon on the character design meeting:
“Artist, you know that You-Gee-Oh kid? Give me his vegetable cousin. He will make for a mighty protagonist!”
“Oh venerable author, what of the girls?”
“Eh, don’t care. Just make sure their eyes are too far apart half of the time.”
I still enjoy Dr Stone and will be watching the next season, so I do recommend it to just about anyone who doesn’t hate shounen energy. It does help to go in knowing the contents and setting expectations accordingly.
Overall Quality – High
Recommendation: Try it. Dr Stone may be shounen anime to the core, but the focus on science over action has it stand out from peers and deliver something fun.
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Awards: (hover over each award to see descriptions; click award for more recipients)
Positive: None
Negative: None
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