Made in Abyss: Akihito Tsukushi and the Cute-But-Grim Register

When Made in Abyss Season 2, subtitled The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, aired across July to September 2022, the divided reception that had characterized the franchise since its 2017 debut intensified rather than resolved. Reviewers who valued the series’ worldbuilding, animation, and Kevin Penkin’s score ranked the second season among the strongest dark-fantasy anime of the early 2020s. Reviewers who found the franchise’s content concerning argued that the season’s particular sequences made the underlying problem worse rather than better. Both responses are, in their own terms, reasonable. The franchise is structured around a contrast that does not resolve. That is what Akihito Tsukushi designed it to be.

Four years later, in 2026, Made in Abyss occupies a specific position in the medium’s landscape. The series is widely cited as a foundational text of the cute-but-grim register in modern anime — the register in which children’s-book visual design is paired with adult dark-fantasy content. Whether one regards the register as a meaningful artistic mode or as an unstable combination is a question the series itself refuses to settle. A third season has not been formally confirmed as of mid-2026, but Tsukushi’s manga continues to publish.

This is what Made in Abyss is, how its contrast is constructed, and what its polarized reception tells you about the medium.

The 2012 webcomic origin

Akihito Tsukushi (a pen name) began publishing Made in Abyss as a webcomic on Manga Box, Kodansha’s digital platform, in October 2012. Hardcover collected volumes followed from 2013. Tsukushi’s prior career as an illustrator had emphasized cute character design — the kind of round-faced, large-eyed art used in children’s media. The webcomic deliberately repurposed that visual vocabulary for a story that was not for children.

The premise: an enormous pit, called the Abyss, sits at the center of a coastal town. The Abyss is divided into seven descending Layers. Each layer is more dangerous than the last, and ascending from below the deeper layers inflicts increasingly severe physiological effects on human bodies — the so-called Curse of the Abyss. The orphan protagonist Riko, daughter of a famous Abyss diver, encounters a robot child named Reg with no memory of his origins. Together they descend, looking for Riko’s mother in the lower layers.

What this premise produces, as the descent continues, is a structure where the story’s natural progression is into territory that is increasingly hostile to the child characters at its center. Tsukushi’s manga uses the descent as a literal device for moving the work into darker material. Each layer the protagonists reach is more dangerous than the last. The visual design — round, expressive child faces drawn in a register borrowed from children’s illustration — never changes. The contrast intensifies as the descent proceeds.

The contrast as authorial choice

Tsukushi has stated, in interviews and in commentary attached to collected volumes, that the work is intended for adult readers despite its visual style. The contrast between cute design and severe content is not an accident of style or a marketing decision. It is the authorial project. Tsukushi has argued that the contrast intensifies the emotional weight of the dark material by attaching it to characters drawn in a register that triggers protective response in adult viewers.

This is a defensible artistic position, but it is also the position that generates the franchise’s most consistent critical resistance. The discussion of children-in-peril content in narrative fiction has long-running terms, and Made in Abyss is unusually direct about pairing its children-in-peril material with visual design that emphasizes the characters’ childhood. The series does not soften its content with stylized abstraction; nor does it adopt a more mature visual register that would distance the viewer from the characters’ youth. The contrast is the work.

What the contrast accomplishes, when it works, is a form of dark-fantasy storytelling that refuses the genre’s typical strategies of distance. Most dark-fantasy stories soften their material through narrative framing — by treating the dark content as adventure stakes, or by using older protagonists, or by adopting visual registers that pre-signal seriousness. Made in Abyss does none of these things. The viewer is asked to hold the cuteness and the darkness at the same time, without resolution. Some viewers find that productive. Others find it unworkable.

The 2017 Kinema Citrus adaptation

The first anime adaptation arrived in 2017 from Kinema Citrus, a studio founded in 2008 by Naoki Amano. Kinema Citrus’s prior work included Yuyushiki, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, and Black Bullet — a mix of registers that did not obviously predict Made in Abyss. The studio’s direction on the project, led by Masayuki Kojima, foregrounded the worldbuilding and the descent’s visual scale. The Abyss itself, in the anime, is treated with the production care of a landscape painting. The lower layers, particularly the upper few that the first season explores, are realized with detail that gives the descent genuine spatial weight.

Kevin Penkin’s score is the production element most consistently praised across all critical positions on the franchise. Penkin, an Australian composer who has since become one of the more in-demand anime composers internationally, gave Made in Abyss a score that operates on the same dual register as the visual design. The score’s softer passages match the children’s-book art; its more severe passages match the dark-fantasy material. The score is, in many viewers’ accounts, what makes the contrast emotionally legible rather than merely jarring.

The first season, thirteen episodes covering the early descent through the upper layers, was received as one of the strongest dark-fantasy anime of 2017. Critical consensus at the time was largely positive, with reservations about specific content already present in critical writing but not yet dominant in the discussion.

Dawn of the Deep Soul and the franchise inflection

The franchise’s inflection point arrived with the 2020 feature film Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul. The 2019 film Wandering Twilight had been a recap film summarizing the first season; Dawn of the Deep Soul, by contrast, contained new material adapting one of the manga’s most discussed arcs.

What Dawn of the Deep Soul depicted was the protagonists’ encounter with the antagonist Bondrewd in the fifth layer, and the consequences of that encounter for one of the central child characters. The arc is the manga’s most direct treatment of bodily harm to children, and the film adapted it without significant softening. The reception of the film is where the franchise’s polarization first became fully visible in critical discussion. Viewers who had defended the first season’s content as proportionate to the work’s stakes found Dawn of the Deep Soul a harder case to defend. Viewers who valued the franchise’s refusal to soften its material found the film one of the more substantive anime films of 2020.

The film also generated significant external commentary from critics outside the regular anime audience, much of which was negative. This widened the franchise’s polarization beyond the boundaries of anime fandom and into broader discussions of what serialized fiction is permitted to depict.

Season 2 and the continuing argument

The 2022 second season adapted the next major manga arc, the Sixth Layer material that gives the season its subtitle. The production retained Kinema Citrus, Masayuki Kojima’s direction, and Kevin Penkin’s score. Twelve episodes covered the protagonists’ arrival at the village of Iruburu and the resolution of that arc’s central conflict.

The season’s reception followed the same polarized pattern that had defined the franchise since Dawn of the Deep Soul. Defenders of the franchise pointed to the worldbuilding’s continued depth, the score’s continued strength, and the new arc’s structural ambitions. Critics of the franchise pointed to specific sequences that intensified the existing concerns about depictions of children in peril. The two sides did not converge.

What the second season accomplished, structurally, was a continued commitment to Tsukushi’s authorial project at the cost of any reconciliation between the franchise’s critical camps. The manga continues to publish, and the descent continues. The remaining layers are, by the work’s internal logic, more dangerous than the layers depicted so far.

What the polarization reveals

The Made in Abyss critical division is interesting because it is not, principally, a disagreement about quality. Both camps acknowledge the production craft. Both camps acknowledge the score’s strength. Both camps acknowledge the manga’s worldbuilding depth. The disagreement is about whether the contrast at the work’s center is artistically legitimate.

This is the kind of disagreement that has long-running terms in adjacent media. Literary fiction has had similar debates about specific works for decades. Comics have had similar debates. What is distinctive about Made in Abyss is that the disagreement plays out within anime specifically, in a medium where the dominant visual conventions encode characters as younger than the content they appear in routinely is.

The franchise’s contribution to the medium, regardless of one’s position on the central question, has been to make the debate impossible to avoid. After Made in Abyss, the question of what cute-but-grim narrative is doing, and whether the register is artistically defensible, has been part of the medium’s critical vocabulary in ways it was not before.

The Otakira encyclopedia entry covers Made in Abyss’s full publication history, the manga’s ongoing serialization, the anime productions, and licensed availability across regional markets, on the Made in Abyss anime page.

The cute-but-grim register and its inheritors

Made in Abyss is the foundational text for a specific register in 2010s and 2020s anime: cute character design paired with severe content. Other works occupy nearby territory in different ways. Goblin Slayer pairs standard fantasy-anime visual conventions with extreme violence. Re:Zero pairs an isekai premise with sustained psychological suffering. Sonny Boy pairs slice-of-life visual design with existential dread. These works are not direct descendants of Made in Abyss, but they all operate in adjacent territory, and the critical vocabulary that emerged around Made in Abyss has been applied to all of them.

What this register is doing, when it works, is using visual softness to extend the emotional reach of dark material. When it doesn’t work, the register reads as exploitative or unstable. The question of which case applies, and to which specific work, is one that anime criticism continues to argue. Made in Abyss did not invent the register, but it produced the most discussed case of it.

What Made in Abyss means for serialized dark fantasy

Five years after Dawn of the Deep Soul and four years after Season 2, Made in Abyss remains the reference case for cute-but-grim anime. The manga continues. The third season, if it arrives, will adapt arcs that are by the work’s internal logic more demanding than the arcs adapted so far. Tsukushi has not signaled an intention to pull back from the work’s central register, and the manga’s continued publication suggests the descent will continue on its established terms.

What the franchise has demonstrated, regardless of one’s position on its specific content, is that serialized dark fantasy in anime can sustain a critical conversation across nearly a decade without resolving its central question. The franchise has not converted its critics. It has not lost its defenders. The disagreement is now part of how the franchise is understood. Whether that is a successful outcome for the work depends entirely on whether one considers Tsukushi’s authorial project legitimate in the first place. The work itself does not adjudicate the question. It continues.