This one is going to be from the perspective of a Manga reader, be warned.
So, Kaiju No. 8 is a story about Kafka Hibino. Here at the outset, he’s a member of a cleaning team that works to dispose of the corpses of Kaiju that attack Japan and are downed by the Defense Force – evidently a fairly regular occurrence in this world.
Here at the start, we see mostly Kafka’s daily life after a Kaiju attack, working on deconstructing the massive, reeking carcass. It’s a thankless and dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. He’s introduced to a new recruit, and through this we learn that he wanted, as the new recruit wants, to join the Defense Force and actually fight the Kaiju. Kafka has washed out of the attempt, though a change in the rules could now give him another chance, and this has left him with hangups around his childhood friend Mina, who he promised to fight alongside, given that she’s now the mightiest up-and-coming Kaiju killer.
As they work, Kafka and his newbie friend, Ichikawa, are set upon by a lesser Kaiju. Barely managing to survive, they end up in the hospital, where a strange creature appears before Kafka and forces itself down his throat, transforming him into a humanoid Kaiju creature. As he and Ichikawa (who he convinced of his sanity) flee from the appearance of a monster being called in, we cut to Mina, seeing both her current resolve and that the hangups around her and Kafka’s shared past aren’t totally one-sided.
So, without getting ahead of myself and into manga material, the first episode was really strong. It was colorful and well-designed, with plenty of horrific images to really go to town with. The detail in the dead Kaiju that frames most of the scenes is very well executed. The emotions in here are well-displayed and well paced. We don’t just dump everybody’s dirty laundry on the field and we don’t really force things to go down your typical paths. This isn’t a show that can be trivially likened to a lot of others. There are comparisons, but it isn’t a cookie cutter template.
Now, what about negatives? Honestly, nothing huge is showing in just one episode. It takes its time with this setup, but doing so is clearly establishing atmosphere and character. Could you get to the first Kaiju transform in half the time? Probably. Would it lose something valuable? Absolutely.
That said, one episode is a short sample to judge an adaption. There are a lot of places where the anime could still stumble. The pacing is actually a big one: there’s a time to go slow, and also a time to get through things, and we’ll see if the director here knows which is which.