Attack on Titan opens on a world that lost its fight a long time ago. Centuries before the first episode, giants nearly finished off the human race, and the survivors answered by shutting themselves into a single city, ringed by walls raised past the height of the tallest titan, and calling the inside of them the world.
The series aired from April 7 to September 28, 2013, running twenty five episodes, with animation by WIT STUDIO. A titan stands about as high as a few floors of a building. Nothing about one suggests a mind at work. Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert grew up inside the walls, and Levi turns up alongside them.
Action and drama sit next to fantasy and mystery in the genre listing, and the mystery is the part that stays. The titans eat people, yet nothing about them reads as hunger. What it reads as instead is appetite taken for its own sake, and that keeps the quiet years inside the walls from ever settling into safety.
