Some background for those who are not yet aficionados. Attack on Titan is an anime series about a dark future in which the Earth has been overrun by giants (the Titans) who eat humans, and the remaining human population has withdrawn behind a series of massive walls. The Titans vary in appearance: some have idiot grins plastered on their faces while others glitter with sadism They vary in height, with the so-called �Colossal Titan� reaching over fifty meters tall. It�s this Colossal Titan that first drew me into the show. He looks like this:
It�s probably a failure in terms of my skills as a critic, but I can�t quite articulate the feelings that that image evokes in me. It�s unsettling and maybe uncanny. It�s also somewhat moving. It reminds me of the giants that Goya painted, and which evoke a deep pathos.
And as long as we�re on the subject of Goya and titans who eat people, we mustn�t forget Goya�s famous painting of Saturn devouring one of his sons (which Goya painted directly onto the wall of his house; he theoretically looked at it while eating dinner):
Now, the Saturn picture is just gruesome. But if we can turn back to his giants, we find a far greater complexity. They�re these towering piles of flesh and musculature; they�re big, puffed-up towers of humanity. A giant is likely to have giant-sized feelings: gigantic melancholy, gigantic rage, and gigantic caprice. It�s this capriciousness that can prove especially deadly for us regular-sized humans, as Goya was quite aware and as proves to be the case in Attack on Titan. Eren, the protagonist, makes reference to the horror of �living at their mercy.� One has no peace of mind with monstrous forces like this on the loose. They can kill you at their leisure. At the time of this writing, I am seven episodes into the series. Maybe the Titan killing machines will develop a more Goya-esque complexity, as the seventh episode suggests will be the case.
