Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Wherefore the anime elf? This often-stylized archetype has been a standby of the medium, especially in the old-school fantasy genre, since the days of Record of Lodoss War. In Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, the archetype finds perhaps its best representative in many years. Which would mean nothing were the show itself not very, very good, but thankfully, Frieren‘s premiere is not just one of the year’s best, it’s an incredibly emotional treatment of the concept, and consequently, an examination of the brevity of life itself. Of how regrets can pile up over the decades, and of the incredible importance of connecting with those who are still here while we can.
If you wanted to be pedantic, you could argue that Frieren has something of an unfair advantage when it comes to the inevitable forthcoming comparisons to the other anime premieres of this season. Its first four episodes were melded into a single contiguous block for their Japanese premiere, and even as some streaming services (both in Japan and overseas) have sliced them back up into four parts, it’s obvious that this is intended to be taken as a single chunk of narrative. Back when Oshi no Ko made the over-length premiere play in Spring, it was an act of gutsy arrogance; an announcement that this was a massive pop blockbuster event that demanded full attention. With Frieren, the aim is much quieter but no less ambitious; it is to emphasize the sheer scale of time on which this story takes place. By my count, the combined premiere contains around 5 time skips varying in length from 1 to almost 50 years. Over this loping timescale, the hero’s journey is rendered merely a prologue. By taking this approach, Frieren reveals itself to be part of a long legacy of fiction that emphasizes the transient and fleeting nature of life itself, while at the same time demonstrating how important the people we meet, the things we do, and the memories we make truly are, even if they are little more than dust on the wind.
I have to confess to being a complete and utter sucker for this particular thematic line, and you should read everything else I’m about to say accordingly. I am a kind of romantic at heart, and stories that deal with this sort of material almost always get me. Last year I praised Vampire in the Garden for a broadly similar approach, there focusing on romantic connection. The year before that, it was Heike Monogatari with its emphasis on the crushing weight of history. Further examples predate anime as a medium. It is a tale quite literally as old as human memory. People are here and then, one day, they are not. Art is one of the few ways to truly reckon with this.
As far as the actual plot, we should rendezvous with Frieren herself [Atsumi Tanezaki]. She was the wizard of an adventuring party that, as the anime opens, has just returned triumphant from defeating (of course) the Demon Lord. A fireworks show cheekily labels this joyous occasion as “Part 6” of a story that we will never get to see in full. That night, a shower of bright blue comets blazes through the sky; the fleeting fire is a symbol for the short lives of mankind, and to hammer it home, Frieren’s companion, the swordsman Himmel [Nobuhiko Okamoto] remarks that he wishes he had a better spot to see it from. Frieren offers to see the next shower with him, which Himmel recognizes but Frieren does not is far enough in the future that he will be old by then. And indeed, when we actually see that next occasion, a full 50 years later, Himmel is a hunched-over old man with a beard almost as long as the party dwarf’s. Frieren herself, of course, looks exactly the same.
Not long after that, Himmel passes away. Frieren attends his funeral service and is forcibly confronted with her own nigh-immortality. She laments that despite travelling together for a decade (a length of time she previously dismissed as a “mere” ten years), she never really knew Himmel at all, despite him considering her a close friend.
Later pieces of the premiere imply that the two harbored even deeper feelings for each other, but, really, this scene is pivotal enough that for a time, the original manga was known by its fan-scan name Frieren at the Funeral. This marks a shift in her worldview, if one she seems to struggle to actually incorporate into how she acts.
Heiter [Hiroki Touchi], the party’s cheerful (at least on the surface) cleric, struggles with the limits of his own mortality as he takes in a war orphan named Fern [Kana Ichinose]. Frieren is eventually convinced to take Fern on as an apprentice as Heiter lay on his death bed, and she is the second main character of this story.
Much of the premiere, in fact, consists of Frieren and Fern taking on various odd jobs. Frieren is rather fey in a way that elves in more poppy works tend not to be. She is an aimless loreminder, and travels throughout the land collecting spells. To her, something to heat up a cup of tea or turn sweet grapes sour is just as valuable as any great or destructive magic anyone could conjure. Similarly though, when either she or Fern are shown in deep concentration or meditation, they do so amongst nature.
That Frieren is so mindful of the natural side of spellcasting elevates it above most work that reduces magic to the merely flashy. This connection with nature becomes important when, at one point, the two search for a type of flower that Himmel was fond of to decorate a statue raised in his honor many years prior. The search takes months, and Fern, who has quickly grown into the more practical of the two, thinks it may be extinct. But sure enough, Frieren is able to find a hidden store of the pale blue beauties, and rescues the species from extinction. (The flowers are blue and seem to deliberately recall the comet earlier in the premiere; that’ll be another symbol for the tragic brevity of life, if you’re counting.)
The flowers are also important to Frieren’s actual goal throughout the premiere. As the story advances and Frieren repeatedly reflects on the departure of Himmel (and, indeed, Heiter), she resolves to retrace her adventure with Himmel nearly a century after the fact, before all sign of it fades away and is subsumed by time’s tides. This smoothing-out of all of history, good or bad, is another of the anime’s key ideas.
Another example; 80 years before the show’s present, Frieren and her companions sealed away a demon sage as part of their adventure, trapping him in stone. During the present day, when the seal begins to weaken, Frieren and her still-relatively-green apprentice are able to simply dispatch the demonic wizard with ease. The once-unthinkably destructive magic that the demon pioneered has since become a standard part of every magician’s arsenal. In some sense, his contribution to this branch of magical theory, stripped, perhaps deliberately, of any context by the march of time and tides of history, is the real “evil legacy” of the Demonic Kingdom. Of course, on the other hand, the magical analysis of this kind of spell has allowed it to be overcome in the form of the protective wards that Frieren and Fern cast to defend themselves, so it’s not all bad. Still, one must wonder if the demon sorcerer doesn’t in some sense get the last laugh here.
A similar flattening and smoothing is applied, very much in the other direction, to an utterly ancient genre-standard gag. A skirt-flipping brat 80 years in the past becomes the wizened old man leading the village where the demon is sealed in the present. Time, Frieren puts forward, takes the impact out of anything, be it atrocities or dumb pranks, for better or worse.
When the past becomes truly important, it argues, is when it is manifested in the present. A later tale sees Frieren making sure she can witness a New Year’s sunrise. Not because she has any desire to do so herself, but because she did not do this with her companions during her quest decades ago. In a sense, she’s righting a wrong; even if Fern has to almost literally drag her out of bed for this to happen.
Later on, the past meets the present in a more immediate and dramatic way when Frieren and Fern reconnect with the dwarf Eisen [Youji Ueda] (another member of Frieren’s old party, and the only one other than Frieren herself who is not deceased by the premiere’s end).
From that reunion, Frieren’s journey seems to go full circle. The late elf magician Flamme, Frieren’s own mentor, is a fascinating, looming presence over this story. She taught Frieren much of what she knows, and time and legend have ascribed to her the power to speak to the dead and physically visit heaven itself. In the end, a book she left behind sets Frieren on a new journey, once more, a “mere” ten years to the lands of the late Demon King, as she chases the trail of her dead mentor and, conveniently, still sticks to her goal of retracing her steps with Himmel’s group. Frieren’s journey begins again, a loop nearly a century in the making.
I would not be surprised if future episodes of Frieren are less direct with alluding to this particular circle. Then again, maybe they won’t be. Frieren is nothing if not holistic; no part of the premiere feels easy to divorce from any other part of it. It’s in a way criminal that I’ve held until now to speak about the show’s craftsmanship, which is absolutely superb. Keiichirou Saitou returns here, from his directorial debut with last year’s Bocchi the Rock! working in a very different mode, intent on capturing the beauty of a lived-in, weathered fantasy setting that feels utterly timeless. The series can be surprisingly funny, too, with a charming, character dynamic-based sense of humor that never overstays it’s welcome. These things add to the show’s immense capacity for resonance; be that in joy or sadness. At the end of the day, all of this is Frieren, and it all ties back to the series’ core themes. This is my life, this is your life. We are all on some journey to somewhere.
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