Tag: pilgrim

Pilgrims flock to celebrate Virgin of Guadalupe — the ‘mother of Mexico’

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MEXICO CITY — Edivaldo Hernández Villar crawled on his knees toward the Basilica of Guadalupe, wincing and whispering prayers.

It was the final stretch of a punishing four-day pilgrimage to Mexico’s most venerated shrine, where Catholics believe the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared nearly 500 years ago.

Hernández, his wife and their teen son had trekked 100 miles from their rural village to the nation’s capital, walking with heavy backpacks all day and sleeping under the stars at night. As with an estimated 10 million other Mexicans who will make their way to the basilica this month, their journey had been an act of faith, of penitence, and of thanks.

“You endure cold, you endure hunger, you cross mountains,” said Hernández, a 34-year-old farmer. “All for her.”

There is no figure more central to Mexican religious, cultural and national identity than the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Her serene gaze is ubiquitous, adorning T-shirts, trucks and the walls of most homes. People name their children after her and tattoo their skin with her likeness: a queenly woman surrounded by sunbeams, her head bowed in prayer.

Ada Carrillo, one of the devout who crowded the basilica this week, said she unites all of Mexico, transcending political, geographic and class divides. Even President Claudia Sheinbaum, who is Jewish, has worn clothes emblazoned with the image of Guadalupe.

The Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City fills with pilgrims during the week of her feast day, which was celebrated Friday.

A few days before the Virgin’s feast day on Friday, Carrillo looked around the vast plaza outside the grand church, where Indigenous dancers from southern states mingled with cowboys from the north and cosmopolitan types from Mexico City. Competing bands played booming, brass-heavy songs. Teenagers and street dogs dozed in the sun. A priest gave nonstop blessings, flinging holy water from a pink plastic bucket.

“Here there are no colors, no classes,” Carrillo said. “Just faith.”

It was in the winter of 1531, a few years after the Spanish conquest, when the virgin was said to have miraculously appeared at the base of Tepeyac Hill, a site where the Aztecs had worshiped the goddess Tonantzin. An Indigenous man named Juan Diego said she spoke to him in his native Nahuatl, and asked him to build a church in her honor.

A skeptical Catholic bishop disregarded Juan Diego’s story at first. To help Juan Diego, who was later named a saint, prove his story, the Virgin is said to have imprinted her image on his cloak. That was on Dec. 12, a date celebrated by Mexicans ever since.

People sing in front of an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, while pilgrims stop to speak to her and ask for favors. .

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1. A man holds the cross he wears alongside a pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe. 2. Alison Juárez, 14, from Santiago Tepepa in Hidalgo state, wore traditional attire to perform with a group in a procession at the Basilica of Guadalupe.

Now, millions come to the basilica, where the cloak is displayed, each December, with most arriving in the days leading up to Dec. 12. At midnight on that day, devotees famously sing Las Mañanitas, the traditional birthday song, for the Virgin, and set off fireworks.

Pilgrims come from across Mexico, arriving on foot, motorcycle, bicycle, bus and even wheelchair. Many, like Hernández, knee-walk across the stones of the vast plaza to the basilica’s doors.

The working class La Villa neighborhood of Mexico City where the basilica is located fills with trucks festooned with with wreaths and Christmas lights and hordes of pilgrims camping in the streets.

People come bearing roses to ask for help — with matters of health, of heart, of business. They come to pray for peace for relatives who have passed.

Others come to express gratitude for miracles that they credit to the Virgin.

Carrillo, 46, had been told by doctors years ago that she was infertile. She had traveled to the basilica from her home in Tabasco state to beg Guadalupe to bestow on her at least one child.

This week, Carrillo walked the steps to the basilica with her daughter, Ximena, a busy high school school student who just celebrated her 15th birthday.

As Carrillo lighted a candle for Guadalupe, tears welled. She pulled her daughter close and murmured a small prayer. “Thank you for the blessing,” she said.

Each December about 10 million people will visit the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

The basilica is one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world, and on this afternoon drew tour groups from Vietnam, China and the United States. Inside the cavernous church, priests celebrated Mass hourly, and an electronic walkway kept visitors from lingering in front of Juan Diego’s famous cape.

Religious scholars say the tradition of Guadalupe, which mixes Indigenous beliefs with Christian ones, helped solidify Catholicism’s dominance in Mexico. It has also helped prevent the encroachment of evangelical Christianity seen in many other parts of Latin America, with few here willing to give up their devotion to the “Virgencita,” as Guadalupe is widely known.

Significantly, Mexico’s Virgin has brown skin, a detail not lost on the Indigenous population, today or centuries ago. Today some Mexicans refer to her as Guadalupe Tonantzin.

Theresa Sanchez, 66, a retiree from Mexico City who arrived with the help of a cane, said she sees Guadalupe as a connection to Mexico’s Indigenous past and views her pilgrimage to the basilica as a way to “thank Mother Earth for all that she had given us.”

She views the cult of Guadalupe as both an effort by the Spanish to promote the adoption of Catholicism in the New World and an opportunity for native Mexicans to who “couldn’t maintain their beliefs in an open way” to preserve traditions.

Pilgrims pass by a blessing station where they are sprayed with holy water inside the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Many pilgrims arrived at the basilica with artifacts of devotion — mostly statues of Guadalupe from their local churches. Safely bringing the blessed objects home was an important part of the journey. Many pilgrims take turns running hundreds of miles back to their pueblos, carrying a torch lighted at the foot of Tepeyac.

Antonio and Jesús Zamora, brothers from Michoacán state, were preparing to run 260 miles back to their hometown. Antonio, 70, had recently been declared free of prostate cancer, and said that with every step he would be thanking Guadalupe for his quick recovery. She was, he said, the “mother of Mexico.”

Zamora and his younger brother have lived for decades in Missouri, where Zamora worked until retiring from the hotel business. During all that time, he said he returned to Mexico every December to visit the shrine.

Guadalupe Ascencion from Huamantla, Tlaxcala, crawls to the top of Tepeyac Hill accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline Maximo, and their children, Astrid, Hannytzi and Angel, on Thursday. His family says he does this every year to thank the Virgin for the favors he asks of her.

He has asked Guadalupe for good health, for a strong family and for an end to the cartel violence plaguing his home state.

“I pray for peace,” he said. “For Michoacán. For Mexico. For the United States. For the world.”

This year, he said, he also thought about the immigrants in America who weren’t able to visit the basilica because they lack documents allowing them to travel between Mexico and the U.S.

The immigrant community, he said, had been battered like never before in recent months. He also asked Guadalupe to help them.

“I prayed for my people,” Zamora said. “And I prayed for Donald Trump, too.”

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Kate Linthicum

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December 12, 2025
You’ve seen Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, now watch these other great Science Saru anime

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Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the anime adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s hit comic series by studio Science Saru, premiered on Netflix last friday. Produced and written by O’Malley and co-creator BenDavid Grabinski, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off diverges significantly from the source material, morphing into an adaptation that at once functions as both a sequel and a remake of O’Malley’s original comic.

If you’re new to anime, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off might be your very first introduction to the work of Science Saru, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi. In recent years, Science Saru has garnered a reputation as one of the most memorable anime production houses of the past decade, thanks to a wildly idiosyncratic body of films and TV series and Yuasa’s flair for expressive, comically-inclined animation.

If you’ve already watched through the entirety of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and are looking for something else to watch as you puzzle over what exactly that ending might mean for Scott and his friends, not to worry: We’ve got just the list in mind.

We’ve pulled together our favorite Science Saru anime for you watch, from freewheeling romantic comedies, to macabre supernatural action dramas, and more.

Adventure Time, “Food Chain”

Image: Science Saru/Cartoon Network

Run time: 11m
Where to watch: Max

What better place to start on a journey through the weird and wild animation of Science Saru than the studio’s first production? Directed by studio co-founder Yuasa, this 11-minute episode of the beloved show Adventure Time follows Finn the Human and Jake the Dog supervising a field trip to the Candy Kingdom’s Natural History Museum. After being transformed into birds by the mischievous Magic Man, the pair experience the circle of life firsthand as they transform into bacteria, plants, and eventually caterpillars which eat and are subsequently eaten by bigger birds.

It’s a beautiful and trippy short that hones in on Adventure Time’s distinctive brand of surreal humor while coming across as a great sampler for Yuasa’s particular approach to animated comedy and storytelling.

The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl

Image: Science Saru/GKIDS

Run time: 1h 32m
Where to watch: Max

The 2010 anime The Tatami Galaxy is commonly regarded as Masaaki Yuasa’s magnum opus and one of the best anime to come out of Science Saru. Adapted from Tomihiko Morimi’s 2004 novel, the 11-episode anime follows the story of an unnamed college student who, paralyzed with indecision, is bounced between multiple parallel universes as he re-experiences his freshman year over and over again. Unfortunately, at this time of writing, The Tatami Galaxy is not available to stream. But The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, the standalone spiritual sequel to the series, is just as good a place to start if you’ve never watched a Science Saru anime before.

The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl follows a hapless senior student at Kyoto University who plans to confess his feelings to his classmate at the school’s yearly night festival. Unfortunately, the two are separated while taking in the local nightlife, creating two parallel storylines of a comedic bar crawl and an over-the-top series of mishaps and shenanigans. If there’s one anime on this list that feels the closest to Scott Pilgrim Takes Off in terms of comedy and premise, it’s this one.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Image: Science Saru/Crunchyroll

Number of episodes: 12
Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! won its way into our hearts, and onto our list of the best anime of the year, back when it first aired in 2020. Based on Sumito Ōwara’s manga, the 12-episode anime follows a trio of high school girls who form a bond over their mutual love of animation. The series follows the girls’ journey through the wild world of amateur animation, first establishing a “film club” to circumvent the resistance of their teachers and parents, before creating a short film to sell their first commercial anime project.

Aside from being a delightful anime in its own right, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is a passionate tribute to the craft and dedication of traditional cel animation that puts an unsparing focus on the struggle that goes into taking a creative vision from an idea to reality. Filled with brilliant fourth wall-breaking sequences and charismatic characters, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is as entertaining as it is educational.

Devilman Crybaby

Image: Science Saru/Netflix

Number of episodes: 10
Where to watch: Netflix

Long before Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was even announced, Yuasa’s adaptation of Go Nagai’s apocalyptic superhero manga Devilman was a breakthrough success for both Science Saru and Netflix when it debuted back in 2018. An alternate modern retelling of the original story, Devilman Crybaby centers on Akira Fudo, a lonely high school student who is transformed into a powerful human-demon hybrid shortly after reuniting with his childhood friend Ryo Asuka. A hyper violent dark fantasy with intense action sequences and an ambiguous ending that borders the line between implicitly hopeful and explicitly nihilistic, Devilman Crybaby is a modern classic that’s strongly recommended for fans of anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Chainsaw Man, and the supernatural thriller anime X.

Inu-Oh

Image: Science Saru/GKIDS

Run time: 1h 38m
Where to watch: Max

Masaaki Yuasa’s latest film is also, as of this writing, his final production with Science Saru, having announced his retirement from the company shortly before the movie’s premiere in 2021. That doesn’t necessarily mean Yuasa won’t ever direct another project at the studio again, but if it is, Inu-Oh is one hell of a way to cap off his time there. As critic Kambole Campbell noted in his review for Polygon, the film is, “a psychedelic, bombastic rock opera [that] ponders what stories have been lost as society’s more controlling elements attempt to control how art is made and distributed.” Music has always been a large part of Yuasa’s animation, and here, that love for the tightly wound relationship between the visual and the musical erupts into a howling display of breathtaking scenes and foot-stomping musical numbers. If you’re looking for an anime that matches Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’s energetic beat, Inu-Oh is an easy recommendation.

The Heike Story

Image: Science Saru

Number of episodes: 11
Where to watch: Crunchyroll

The Heike Story is an undersung entry in Science Saru’s body of work. That’s a shame, because it’s an achingly beautiful series that more than deserves appreciation.

Directed by Naoko Yamada (K-On!, A Silent Voice), this adaptation of the classic Japanese epic follows Biwa, a traveling orphan who is brought into the home of lord Shigemori, a powerful lord whose servants killed Biwa’s father. Framed as a classic tragedy, the series follows the members of Shigemori’s family as his empire crumbles from the inside out, with Biwa documenting the various twists and turns of their destruction while playing her lute. The Heike Story was one of the best anime of 2021, and for good reason: It’s a beautiful, complex story of power undone by hubris with a delicate and beautiful art style and an evocative musical score.

Ping Pong the Animation

Image: Science Saru/Funimation

Number of episodes: 11
Where to watch: Crunchyroll

Ping Pong the Animation is one of the best anime of the past decade. Based on Taiyō Matsumoto’s (Tekkonkinkreet) original manga, it follows the story of two young men: Yutaka “Peco” Hoshino, a cocky self-assured high school student who’s a local Ping Pong whiz, and Makoto “Smile” Tsukimoto, his reserved childhood friend.

The series follows the diverging lives of Peco and Smile, as the former is humbled and eventually forced to grapple with the limitations of coasting on sheer talent alone, and the latter is coaxed out of his shell to live up to his own potential as a ping pong player. Animated entirely in Flash, the series is one of the most unique productions of its era: A coming-of-age psychological drama, brought to life with idiosnycratic blend of misshapen lines and odd proportions that coalesce into an inspired display of visual and emotional storytelling.

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Toussaint Egan

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November 26, 2023
‘I don’t want to revisit myself at 25’: The story behind Netflix’s bold Scott Pilgrim anime

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By now most people know the secret behind Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Scott Pilgrim — well, he takes off. He’s gone, for most of the narrative, leaving the players as we know them to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened to him. What happens to them in his absence is usually a total flip of what we’ve come to expect: Think Gideon introducing Lucas to the slowburn anime he’s been watching for a while (or maybe just a few days).

Bryan Lee O’Malley, who wrote the original comic and co-created the Netflix anime reboot with BenDavid Grabinski, knows that sort of remake is something audiences have come to expect. “I mean, it’s in the air, right? We’re all seeing remakes and reboots of everything,” O’Malley says.

When Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was in development he says he and the team looked at everything new in this vein they could, from The Matrix Resurrections to Spider-Man: No Way Home. But just as frequently he turned elsewhere for inspiration — Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, or even Elden Ring. But none of these were quite the main catalyst, even something like Evangelion, which he calls “a good comparison, but not necessarily an influence.”

The real reason O’Malley wanted to make this story was simply: It was the only way he could see revisiting the world of Scott Pilgrim.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

Polygon: Starting off: I’m curious to hear a little bit about how you did justice by Matthew Patel, the lowest ranking evil ex.

Image: Netflix

Bryan Lee O’Malley: Our first spark of idea was to kind of take Scott Pilgrim out of the picture after the first episode. And that naturally led to the process of: Then what happens to Matthew? What does Matthew get? And then what do the other exes think about it? So yeah, it really appealed to me right away, and to be like, Oh, then Matthew should win, and Matthew should become the boss. Because we’re going through all these different reversals of fortune; so someone goes from the top to the bottom, and someone has to go from the bottom to the top. And yeah, giving Matthew kind of his flowers was so much fun.

Were there any characters in particular — like Matthew, or just generally — that you felt most excited by like, OK, if we open up this world without Scott in it, what can you do?

I was excited to take on kind of all the exes; that was one of the biggest appeals to me of revisiting Scott Pilgrim, was just — I felt like I gave them short shrift in the books a little bit. I was making it up as I went along, and I was locked into Scott’s perspective. And I was younger and didn’t really know that much about other people like that! I certainly didn’t know about movie stars, or rock stars, I didn’t really know the details of how they lived; I just saw them in magazines, or whatever or in movies.

So now I’ve lived a little more, I’ve been in LA for a long time, and met lots of different types of people. And I think that just feeds back into kind of giving these characters a little more pathos, a little more depth and nuance — and pathos also in the sense of, like: pathetic; they’re also losers. And that was always really fun for me.

One of the things BenDavid told me was you were approached to adapt this, and you were wrestling with, Well, I’ve changed since I did this story, what does that mean? And I’m curious what sort of things you were really thinking about as you’re getting approached for this series that so many people love and so many people cherish and it hits different for you now.

Well, I mean that’s the initial fear. Netflix, and our producers, Jared [LeBoff] and Edgar Wright had approached me, we had talked about it a little bit — doing a series — and they were kind of keen on on doing it much more like the books initially. And for me that just made me kind of recoil. Like I don’t want to revisit myself at 25, necessarily. And it’s all there! It’s all on the page. So why would I want to relive that? Why would I want to perfect something that was so messy; it just seems like an impossible task.

Because the messiness is such a part of it. It’s part of the joy of it, is it’s messy, it’s complicated. It’s irreducible. So when faced with writing X number of TV episodes, I just thought, how the fuck am I gonna do that? I just had no idea, so it was really not until that dinner with BenDavid that that we just kind of started spitballing — not professionally; just kind of joking around [wondering], What can we do with these characters? And then a lot of those jokes we were like, Oh, actually, that would work. So you know, the joke of “Scott dies at the end,” or “Matthew becomes the boss” — those all just became something that we can really work with.

Image: Netflix

At what point did it become clear to you that if we’re revisiting this, and we’re taking Scott out of it, and we’re giving everybody space to be a little bit more themselves, a little bit more nuanced — at what point did it kind of become: Oh, Scott might be the bad guy?

Well, I mean, that’s definitely part of the initial discussion. That’s a perception. I don’t really see Scott as the bad guy. But these days — this is a terrible thing to say in an interview — the perception definitely on Twitter and stuff kind of turned over the last maybe five years where now it’s like, “He’s a bad character!” “It’s a toxic relationship!” and all this kind of chatter.

And I think all that stuff is true. But I don’t think that people in the 2000s didn’t think it was true. Like, I think the younger generation is, like, We discovered that Scott is bad. But, you know, it says on the very first page he’s dating a high schooler; no one’s supposed to think that’s a good thing. I think in the 2000s, I took it for granted that people would be like, Oh, he’s terrible, but it’s funny. So now you kind of have to be a bit more explicit — it’s just the way our culture works, the way online works. Like, if you don’t outright condemn something, then the absence of condemnation is seen as a tacit approval.

So yeah, it was never a tacit approval. It was a tacit condemnation. But definitely in the show in the modern era, yeah, we have a scene where [we show] Scott, it’s not a good thing to date a high schooler. So — throw them a bone?

I’m curious how you interpolated but also synthesized a lot of those conversations that are happening around this property into this, since it feels like this show is so in conversation with those.

I’ve absorbed all those things over the years; I didn’t disappear after Scott Pilgrim finished. So in a lot of ways, I kind of want it to feel like Scott Pilgrim is back from the dead. You thought it was gone, but it’s back. But not only is it back, like it never left, it’s also been paying attention to you. It’s grown up alongside you.

Image: Netflix

And we had to kind of cater to so many different audiences: someone like you, who read it a long time ago, and kind of has a memory of it, of what it felt like. But also someone who just read it last week for the first time, or someone who just discovered the movie, or somebody who hasn’t seen any of it. So it was just this really complex, but invigorating challenge of: how do we make this feel fresh, and also layered — and also hopefully staggering to some people who have thought about the book, but maybe not to this degree?

Did you find yourself being surprised by your reaction to revisiting this and reframing it in any way? Were there any characters who you felt ring a little differently or sit a little differently with you?

I don’t think I have a strong memory of how it hit back then. But it was really just a fun process, writing them and, and discovering these things and challenging ourselves to find new ways into everything.

I got to write the great scene where Knives and Kim sit down and play music together. And it’s not something I could’ve done in the comic, a) because it’s music. And then just the logistical challenge of making that happen, and making it feel organic and real, was very satisfying. And then that final scene, like just made plays magically for me. It was cool to discover those things by virtue of the collaboration with all these different artists and stuff. And that was that was the big new thing. It’s just letting other people in and letting their they all have their own different kinds of love for the series. And that shows, I think.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is now streaming on Netflix.

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Zosha Millman

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November 25, 2023
‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Instant Reactions

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Jess, Jomi, and Steve are back to conquer the ghosts of their failed relationships and celebrate the latest in Scott Pilgrim lore, the Netflix animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Along the way, the Mint Edition discuss their first time watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, how the animated show differs from its predecessors, and their favorite characters of the series.

Hosts: Jessica Clemons, Jomi Adeniran, and Steve Ahlman
Producer: Jonathan Kermah
Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal

Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

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Jessica Clemons

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November 20, 2023
Will the Real ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Please Stand Up?

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Were we to outline the millennial canon—a collection of works that illuminate the generation’s character—then surely Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim would rank rather prominently. Scott Pilgrim is the story of a dweeby Canadian bassist who meet-cutes his mysterious American dream girl, Ramona Flowers, only to discover that in order to date Ramona, he must first defeat her “seven evil exes” in a series of boss fights across the mean streets and concert halls of Toronto.

These graphic novels, serialized in six volumes, released from 2004 through 2010, were a new sort of coming-of-age saga—a cute but also quite moody comic about love and video games and rock music. While O’Malley was still writing Scott Pilgrim, Edgar Wright directed a largely faithful live-action film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, starring Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Scott and Ramona, respectively, alongside a weirdly stacked cast of once and future stars: Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Kieran Culkin. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World was a box office flop in its opening weekend but then a weirdly resilient cultural object in the following decade, spawning so many GIFs on Peak Tumblr as the movie matured into a nerdy cult classic. Now, the acclaimed anime studio Science Saru, in conjunction with Netflix, has reimagined the comic as an eight-episode series, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. O’Malley wrote this new series with BenDavid Grabinski, and he also made a point to recruit all of the actors from Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World for the voice cast of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off; Edgar Wright also returns as an executive producer.

But Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, rather unlike Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, is a smorgasbord of creative liberties. O’Malley was still writing the comic while Wright’s live-action adaptation was in postproduction, and he’s recently talked about how the performances in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World gave him a new perspective and new ideas for several characters—possibilities he now gets to pursue in the anime.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was billed as an adaptation but turns out to be a meta sort-of sequel or reboot. This is the story of Scott Pilgrim in fact losing that first fight with Ramona’s first boyfriend, Matthew Patel, at Club Rockit. In this version, Scott seemingly dies in battle before Ramona discovers that Scott hasn’t been killed, but rather kidnapped. Now, Ramona must confront her own exes and solve the mystery of Scott’s disappearance.

Accordingly, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off features a lot less Scott and a lot more Ramona, especially, but also everyone else in revised capacities. The League of Ramona’s Evil Exes is in disarray, as early on Matthew leads a coup against the group’s founder and the final boss of the original series, Gideon Graves. The other exes, absent any reason or opportunity to battle Scott, instead spend much of the series catching up with Ramona. Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb, is suddenly without a bassist, until drummer Kim Pine recruits Scott’s first girlfriend and Sex Bob-Omb’s no. 1 fan, Knives Chau. (Knives is surely the most improved characterization in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, compared to her role in Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, as Ellen Wong really leans into the new format and voices the character with yandere gusto.) As a reboot, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off gets to preserve these characters in adolescence but otherwise give them new glimpses and alternative arcs. The original premise is certainly more compelling for Scott’s intense and singular determination—beat the exes, win the girl—but Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is a refreshingly loose and playful take on these character dynamics.

The very fact of Scott Pilgrim enjoying a 2020s revival isn’t so surprising, given the unkillable nature of IP these days. And the revival coming in the form of a somewhat subversive reboot also isn’t so surprising, given the meta humor of the original comic. But why anime? And why would O’Malley and Grabinski go through the trouble of reuniting the actors from the live-action adaptation for the voice cast? The answer, in both cases, is nostalgia. Scott Pilgrim and O’Malley’s other works are chock-full of homages to video games, anime, and manga; in fact, Scott Pilgrim is in large part distinguished in balancing its more novelistic aspects with good ol’ fashioned superhero action.

Anime, if anything, ends up feeling like an inevitable format for Scott Pilgrim, even if the production is something of a fluke: this sort of crossover is pretty rare, and if Netflix didn’t have this particular relationship with Science Saru, then I can’t imagine this particular anime would’ve been made some other way. Which is doubly fortunate, really, as these days I can’t imagine many other studios tackling Scott Pilgrim as capably as Science Saru, a studio renowned for its saucy and surreal depictions of young adulthood.

Scott Pilgrim is in many ways a nostalgic tour of its author’s formative influences, e.g., Scott wears an Astro Boy tee, and he’s constantly talking about Sonic the Hedgehog. This explains the conspicuous effort to hire the old cast for the new series. Wright’s cast may not have been a part of O’Malley’s original vision for Scott Pilgrim, but the cast has, with the passage of time, added a new layer of nostalgia—not for Wright’s live-action adaptation per se, but for the whole cultural peak of Scott Pilgrim in 2010. O’Malley says he was prepared to produce a version of this anime with an original voice cast, in the event that he couldn’t get each and every one of the notable actors from Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World to return for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. I’m sure his backup plan would’ve worked out well enough, but the returning cast really does bolster the series and create the illusion that not much has changed since the release of O’Malley’s final volume and Wright’s adaptation of the comic.

As I was watching an advance screener of the anime, I encountered some online speculation that its release might mark the beginning of a whole new era of Scott Pilgrim content from O’Malley—a Scott Pilgrim Cinematic Universe, even. It was an interesting thought, but also one that, if anything, underscored the limitations of these characters. Scott Pilgrim is such a distinctly adolescent saga, and it’s hard to imagine Scott and Ramona maturing into their 20s, out of their bombastic courtship and into a real relationship or, alternatively, to imagine Scott moving on from Ramona Flowers and wooing some other girl in some later phase of his life. Scott Pilgrim is these characters in this particular time in their lives.

Indeed, in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott and Ramona both confront much older versions of themselves. Older Scott is still rocking out in a ridiculous band, Older Ramona is still turning her hair purple and pink, but they’re both clearly the worse for wear, and they’re both still reeling from the later, harder work of trying—and for a period, failing—to build a life together. But O’Malley will only go so far in subverting the canonical love story of Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers. It all ends with a kiss, and while O’Malley’s comic and Wright’s movie are both invaluable artifacts of the Tumblr Era, the anime makes for a fantastic epilogue.

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Justin Charity

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November 17, 2023