Anime Thoughts: Haibane Renmei
Apr. 14th, 2008 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith a "quarterly review" complete of all the anime I watched in the first three months of this year, I decided it was time to rewatch another series I've already seen. I may have unopened DVDs stacked on my shelves, but I'm not about to let that utterly dominate me... and having figured out a fair bit in advance what series I was going to rewatch this time, I was looking forward to it.
The first time I watched the anime Haibane Renmei, I was very impressed by it and thought it one of the standout series of my viewing that year... and one thing that added to my good feelings just might have been the unusual circumstances of how I got its DVDs. Poking through my local Wal-Mart one day, I spotted a small display of heavily marked-down DVDs from the anime distributor Pioneer. While amused by the sight in context (this was a few years before the North American branch of Pioneer, renamed Geneon, was shut down by its corporate overseers in Japan), I wasn't quite sure if there were any titles there I really wanted to get (and that brings to mind my wondering about how it's nice to cater to the discerning fan but having at least some "wide appeal titles" is good too, and whether Geneon had simply had bad luck picking titles they thought would have "wide appeal" until it was just too late), much less whether I could collect a complete series that way. I noticed DVDs of Haibane Renmei, though, and had heard how it was interesting in a low-key way... some hurried research reassured me the thirteen-episode series was complete on four DVDs, and I headed back to the store to find and buy them.
The anime begins with a teenage girl falling from the sky... and then she wakes from that dream, only to be "hatched" in a way from a tremendous plant-like cocoon that grew inside an old dormitory building. Several young women greet her, all of them with halos and stubby grey-feathered wings. They call themselves the "Haibane" (Japanese for "charcoal feather"), and it turns out that the girl is one of them. Unable to remember anything of her old life, she's given the name "Rakka" based on her dream of falling, and begins exploring the small wall-enclosed world she's now a part of. The first time I watched the anime, I had already formed the belief that this quiet slice-of-surreal-life exploration would amount to the series, and yet something about the first episode was impressive enough that I thought the series was somehow "coasting" on that first impression... and then, in the second DVD, things started getting deeper into the obvious "angelic" overtones and still more interesting, building to a very satisfying conclusion. Not everything is explained, but in a way that lets you form your own ideas. As it turned out, the second time around I was able to pick up on things early on that were more significant later.
Just for a change, this time around I resolved to watch the series with its English dub. I had heard it spoken approvingly of, in the just-about-unchallenged way I just about require to even dare the thought of watching an anime DVD in English, and I'd even listened to the first episode in English a while back and thought it all right myself. It was still a slightly odd experience at first, though, and I wondered as I've done at other times how I would respond to hypothetical criticism, but as the series continued I got more and more used to it. I wouldn't say it ever distracted from the experience, and it also meant whole days when I wasn't reading any on-screen subtitles... and, perhaps, not having to always look towards the bottom of the screen helped me pick up on some of the particulars of the subtle but impressive colour design.
The first time I watched the anime Haibane Renmei, I was very impressed by it and thought it one of the standout series of my viewing that year... and one thing that added to my good feelings just might have been the unusual circumstances of how I got its DVDs. Poking through my local Wal-Mart one day, I spotted a small display of heavily marked-down DVDs from the anime distributor Pioneer. While amused by the sight in context (this was a few years before the North American branch of Pioneer, renamed Geneon, was shut down by its corporate overseers in Japan), I wasn't quite sure if there were any titles there I really wanted to get (and that brings to mind my wondering about how it's nice to cater to the discerning fan but having at least some "wide appeal titles" is good too, and whether Geneon had simply had bad luck picking titles they thought would have "wide appeal" until it was just too late), much less whether I could collect a complete series that way. I noticed DVDs of Haibane Renmei, though, and had heard how it was interesting in a low-key way... some hurried research reassured me the thirteen-episode series was complete on four DVDs, and I headed back to the store to find and buy them.
The anime begins with a teenage girl falling from the sky... and then she wakes from that dream, only to be "hatched" in a way from a tremendous plant-like cocoon that grew inside an old dormitory building. Several young women greet her, all of them with halos and stubby grey-feathered wings. They call themselves the "Haibane" (Japanese for "charcoal feather"), and it turns out that the girl is one of them. Unable to remember anything of her old life, she's given the name "Rakka" based on her dream of falling, and begins exploring the small wall-enclosed world she's now a part of. The first time I watched the anime, I had already formed the belief that this quiet slice-of-surreal-life exploration would amount to the series, and yet something about the first episode was impressive enough that I thought the series was somehow "coasting" on that first impression... and then, in the second DVD, things started getting deeper into the obvious "angelic" overtones and still more interesting, building to a very satisfying conclusion. Not everything is explained, but in a way that lets you form your own ideas. As it turned out, the second time around I was able to pick up on things early on that were more significant later.
Just for a change, this time around I resolved to watch the series with its English dub. I had heard it spoken approvingly of, in the just-about-unchallenged way I just about require to even dare the thought of watching an anime DVD in English, and I'd even listened to the first episode in English a while back and thought it all right myself. It was still a slightly odd experience at first, though, and I wondered as I've done at other times how I would respond to hypothetical criticism, but as the series continued I got more and more used to it. I wouldn't say it ever distracted from the experience, and it also meant whole days when I wasn't reading any on-screen subtitles... and, perhaps, not having to always look towards the bottom of the screen helped me pick up on some of the particulars of the subtle but impressive colour design.