"Journey's Dawn" is the first of two recap films for the 2017 anime series "Made in Abyss". It covers the first eight episodes of the series as well as part of episode nine and a bit beyond as a teaser for the next recap film titled 'Wandering Twilight', which will cover episodes nine through thirteen (the remainder of the series).
This is a fairly straight-forward recap film. There are a couple new scenes at the beginning of the film that may be interesting for fans of the series, but they don't add much. A few scenes from the original series do not appear in this film, but most of them were fairly unimportant. There are a couple scenes at the beginning of the series that did not appear in this film that I missed, but they weren't really essential scenes so it's not a huge deal.
This film also includes some new music that is about as good as the score from the original series, which is phenomenal. Overall, the sound in this film was great. The sounds of the abyss along with the score on theater speakers sounded pretty awesome. Sticking to sound, the voice acting for the original Japanese version was good, as were the subtitles. Just a heads up, the subtitles were yellow in my showing, and I expect that to be the case for most, if not all, subtitled showings in the US. I know some people dislike yellow subtitles, but I don't have a problem with them personally.
If you have not seen the original series, I recommend you pass on this recap film and just watch the series. If you have seen the series and you want a slightly expedited recap before the sequel comes out next year, this is more than serviceable. I would recommend all fans of "Made in Abyss" watch the first few minutes of this film so they can see the new content that did not appear in the original series.
