Zack Snyder is undoubtedly one of the most prominent figures in genre filmmaking, but who knew that his work would even influence something like Attack on Titan, much less the work on its final season?
That indeed seems to be the case, according to director Yuichiro Hayashi, who revealed in a recent interview that the highly popular anime took inspiration from Snyder’s 300 to tell the story of Ymir the Founder.
“I struggled a lot with what to do with the visuals of that scene. I didn’t want to make it an ordinary flashback. I wanted its look to be more striking. The characters look darker because they’re all against the light, while the sky is glowing brighter. We wanted it to look like some images from the movie 300. It looks kind of like bleach bypass. It has created an extraordinary ambiance. I thought that the ordinary blue sky would not fit that scene. We needed a world with a tense, unsettling atmosphere to show something unusual is happening.”
The second part of the final season finally revealed the truth about Ymir Fritz, the girl who originally stumbled upon the power of the Titans and changed the world forever. The sequence that depicts her story is brutal and tragic, underpinned by an animation style that draws a strong contrast with the rest of the story.
Now we know how MAPPA came up with the unique undertone for the flashback episode, though most viewers will still find it difficult to make the connection given the huge differences between live-action and animation.
Attack on Titan will continue next with the 84th episode. After that, we’ll only have two other outings separating us from the series finale, which many fans believe will be a feature-length episode.