Escape from the Grace Field house arc review

"You mean, in exchange for spying on us, they won't get shipped out and are allowed to live?"
- Emma thinking about what types of motives the spy has (The Promised Neverland).



The Promised Neverland (2019) is the animated version of one of the newest best-sellers on the Weekly Shounen Jump magazine. The manga has been written by Kaiu Shirai and illustrated by Posuka Demizu and it has sold millions of copies between 2016, which is when the manga first started, and 2019. I’ve been a big fan of the series for a long time now, ever since the first arc finished in the manga as the amount of atmosphere, storyboarding and character writing the authors did in the first 37 chapters (length of the first arc is 37 chapters) was phenomenal. 
Normally series don't start out strong because the authors either are novice or they create a story that is supposed to get better and better (rarely they do). In my opinion, as far as series in the shounen demographic go, the first arc of this series stands at the top along with series like Death Note in how amazing the first arc of the series is.

This blog post will be talking about the first arc of the series which has now been animated by A1-Pictures into a 13-episode TV series that adapts the Escape from Grace Field house arc. The story continues beyond the Escape from Grace Field arc and a second season has been confirmed for 2020, but that's a story for that year.


Emma, code number 63194, is a bright and cheery young girl who loves her family. In the Grace Field house where she lives, Emma’s large family consists of Isabella, whom she and everyone else in the house calls 'mama,' along with Emma's dozens of brothers and sisters whom Emma plays with all the time. Grace Field house is said to be an orphanage in which every singleday there are IQ tests being done by the children. The children doing those IQ tests is the first ominous thing in the manga that tells the reader that this series isn't as rainbow and sunshine as it's made out to be. 

One day, Conny, one of the younger sisters of Emma, assumedly get adopted and leave the house, but Emma notices that even though Conny was supposed to take it with her, Conny’s stuffed toy rabbit is still in the Grace Field house when the girl has already left through the front gate that leads out from the Grace Field house’s large gardeny-foresty area. No child that has lived in the house has ever left through the gate because of warnings and creepy stories the children are told by mama Isabella.

As Emma and her brother Norman decide to go to Conny to give her the stuffed rabbit back, they come across something very dangerous and creepy. Conny’s cold corpse is found in a truck with a rose penetrating through her heart, and as Emma and Norman hear voices they decide to go under the truck to spy on the ones that have potentially killed their sister Conny - only for them to see that there are large, crazy looking creatures next to Conny that drop her corpse into a large bottle of liquid. Those creatures can speak human language and are seen to be talking with mama Isabella by Norman and Emma. Those creatures are literal demons. 
This is when Emma and Norman get the realization that they don’t in fact live the type of happy family life with a great mother that they originally thought they did – no, the children of the Grace Field house are actually food to the demons, they are cattle who now must escape from this prison, they must escape from the clutches of the demons and mama Isabella before it is time for more imminent deaths of the children that get regularly "adopted."


Basically: once a child reaches a certain age (related to their IQ but still at oldest they are 12 years old) they get picked by the demons, killed by putting a rose through the children's hearts and then the entire dead body gets bottled and taken away only to be sold to the the rich demons, due to the delicious brains that humans have.


The Promised Neverland series has three easily recognizable and memorable main characters with Emma, the loud-mouthed and caring protagonist, Ray the cool-guy-looking silent book-worm, and Norman, the mastermind of the series - even though Emma, Ray and Norman are all peak-level students, Norman is a god tier even among those three when it comes to outsmarting your opponents. The series still manages to have certain equal mind battles between all three of them when it comes to emotional level. This is also the first time in Grace Field history that three extremely smart children exist at the same time.

The story also has couple of semi-memorable side characters in Don and Gilda. The three main characters are the smartest characters in the Grace Field house, as I already mentioned, they are always scoring top scores from tests, but Ray and Norman especially are fantastic to watch or read about with their mind games, which I won’t be talking about in detail because of their very spoilerish nature as they are very important parts of the plot of the first arc. All I can say is that Norman and Ray make the series for me, which is why I believe that after the first arc of the series has really fallen off a lot, honestly. But aside from the character writing, there are many cool-looking and -feeling parts in the first arc as well, the presentation of how messed up the world is to the characters being psychologically challenged is beautiful to look at and think about more deeply.

The Promised Neverland is a shounen series with a gripping and dark atmosphere that plays on the psychological aspects of the characters. 
The artist of the series, Posuka Demizu, also really shined and will be remembered for what she pulled off in the first arc of The Promised Neverland. The artwork of TPN doesn't stick to a certain mold, so it's very different from most series. Even though it's not similar to Hunter x Hunter, it can be likened to it because Yoshihiro Togashi, the author of HxH, also has art that doesn't look the same all the time, both of these artists can really hit the bullseye with character expressions that look really deformed but great. 

There are crazy pages, spreads, paneling styles, and so on in TPN. The art at worst can seem kind of mediocre and at its best it can feel like something you have never seen before. There is a panel where Norman is walking through a hall of the Grace Field house with a glass of water in his hand. As two children run past him playing games, the walls of the hallway Norman is walking through feel as if they are becoming deformed and the face of Norman is seen reflecting on the water on the glass he's carrying. There are quite a few pages of fantastic stand-out art like that in the series, and mostly all the color spread-pages of the series are like that.


Yeah, all in all there is a lot of good to say about the first arc, the Escape from Grace Field house arc, of the series, but as most things do, the series in my mind really should have ended there at the end of chapter 37. The manga did not have any that relevant plot lines left that would have excused the continuation of the story at this point. The series is 100 chapters past the first arc and not even a fragment as well written or presented as it. The characters are also shadows of their former selves. Look at Don and Gilda or the main characters; they all feel underutilized, irrelevant and just... waste of space. The series should have focused on fleshing out other characters and introducing them over time rather than dump dozens of characters in the group that the readers have no emotional attachment to. There is another arc in the series that is also an escape arc, but it lacks all the qualities, the psychological aspects and so on that the first arc did. I am usually the kind of person that appreciates when an author can change the way they write things, monotonous writing can be pretty boring after all, but the next escape arc is a downright downgrade of the Escape from the Grace Field house arc, it would have been better if it was entirely different arc from an escape arc, I guess. Didn't like that arc at all. Also the series has been skipping arcs and events that it should have shown us by now as the Promised Neverland manga is right now in its final arc.

The series started out strong with the authors clearly having planned many plot lines throughout the first arc which kept the series fresh and interesting to both the authors and the readers, but as soon as the first arc ended with that amazing ending, the series was not the same ever again.