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Attack on Titan is all the rage right now, and it’s only apt to celebrate The Final Season Part 2 in great style with the Attack on Titan: The Exhibition. From its bold, masterful exploration of moral ambiguity to well-developed characters, there’s plenty to like about the post-apocalyptic series—so much so that Singapore’s ArtScience Museum has taken up the opportunity to honour its legacy.
Attack on Titan: The Exhibition, organised by SPACELogic, is the art space’s very first manga showcase. Running from 19 February to 3 July 2022, it marks the overseas debut of the exhibition in its latest form, and has been expanded from its first iteration across Japan from 2014 to 2015. What this means is that fans can expect new and never-before-seen content, including unpublished works, years upon years of drafts, detailed character backstories, and more.
It’s the best of both worlds, with fans being able to enjoy anime content alongside various manga elements. Do be warned, though, that there are spoilers that lay ahead in the exhibition, so it’d be good for anime-only fans to exercise caution!
Kicking things off is the standard photo-taking fare. Here, visitors can take pictures against a green screen backdrop, and collect them after their journey ends at the retail store, with visuals from the anime serving as decoration. Various images and schematics of the equipment are also displayed elsewhere in the space.
The thematic influence of the series carries over to the second portion, where visitors are forced to choose their sides via a split entrance following an introductory video. The left points to life outside of the walls, while the right places them inside the walls, putting them with the Marleyans (Titan Shifters such as Reiner) or on the side of Eren and company respectively (before the turning point, of course).
Each doorway will play out the stories and experiences of the characters through manga panels, with the two opposing factions viewing the other as the enemy—a choice reference to the exploration of choice, truth, and morality in Attack on Titan itself. Ultimately, the paths will converge on Eren and Reiner’s first meeting in the Survey Corps, before a recap of their confrontation in the anime is shown.
Look up to the ceiling, and you’ll find 3D titans falling from the sky. Held up by threads, these illustrated figures seem to spawn straight from the manga itself, complete with crisp shading and line art.
Moving on from the battle action, a one-to-one scale of the Colossal Titan’s head awaits. It’s impressively huge, and easily towers over a 1.83m-tall individual, so it’s no surprise that the 60m titan is such a fearsome sight.
Introduce one, introduce them all. Labelled the Giant Titan Theatre, the next section gathers the nine main titans of the series onto a screen spanning 10 metres. Offering an idea of their overwhelming size and power, it seeks to deliver an immersive experience through various display elements, such as scattered debris on the ground, that have been deliberately arranged to mirror (as best as possible) the environment as shown in the manga.
The item exhibit greets visitors next. Here, manga artifacts are being put on display, such as Eren’s basement key, Annie’s ring, the Survey Corps cape, and Mikasa’s scarf. Eagled-eyed fans would have noticed that the scarf differs slightly from the red one in the anime, and that’s intentional: it was always meant to be in another colour for the manga.
As the next section goes into heavy spoiler territory regarding The Rumbling (at the point of writing), we shall leave you to experience it alone. The Final Interview Room with Hajime Isayama follows after, granting a glimpse of the creation process behind Attack on Titan through screened interviews. On the walls are 11 years’ worth of drafts and manga sketches that were almost thrown out, with his editor’s comments highlighted in red.
At the end of their journey, visitors will find themselves at a T-junction, where they can enjoy a 20-minute supercut of all the seasons in anticipation for the end of the current anime arc, or skip it and enter the retail store directly.
Exclusive merchandise always result in happy fans, and there’s a fair lot of them here up for grabs, including manga volumes, character keychains, figurines, t-shirts, and even a Survey Corps jacket. Gotta dedicate your wallet to the cause somehow!
The exhibition is as close as we can get to stepping into the world of Attack on Titan, and it speaks plenty about the series’ popularity that tickets are selling out real quick. Slots for the next two weeks have all been snatched up, so those who are looking to swing by should purchase their tickets at the Marina Bay Sands box offices or online as soon as possible.
Attack on Titan: The Exhibition runs from 19 February to 3 July, with the adult admission fees priced at S$18 for Singapore Residents, and S$14.70 for Sands Rewards Members.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
