Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

 Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (葬送のフリーレン) is a 28 episode fantasy series based on the manga of the same name by Yamada Kanehito.  The series originally aired between the Fall of 2023 and Winter of 2024.

    After a ten years long quest to restore peace to the land, the party of heroes are basking in the celebrations around their defeat of the Demon King.  It is time for them to rest and pursue a life of peace and safety.  The celebration coincides with a rare meteor shower.  One of the members, an elven mage named Frieren, comments about taking them to a better spot to view the shower the next time.  The other members scoff at her statement, knowing the next time it will come is in fifty years.  Frieren doesn't understand how the passage of time effects her friends as they are normal mortals.  She, an elf, lives for a very long time and has already lived far longer than her companions could even imagine.  She holds them to the reunion and goes on to wander on her own again.  To her word she returns for the next iteration of the meteor shower.  The world has changed around her, a world she has barely paid attention to.  She comes to find the hero of the party, the human warrior Himmel, frail and shriveled in his advanced age.  They reunite with the other two party members, human cleric Heiter and dwarven warrior Eisen.  Heiter as well is showing his advanced age.  Eisen, being a dwarf, has a longer life than the humans, but no where near the length possible of Frieren.  The heroes head out for a final journey together, to the place Frieren wanted them to see the meteor shower.

    Shortly after, Himmel passes away due to his age, leaving Frieren to rethink her approach to the passage of time.  She begins to regret the way she spent the past fifty years, realizing too late that she could have spent more time with her friends, particularly Himmel.  A few years later she visits Heiter to talk to him about her regrets.  To her surprise, Heiter is fostering an orphan girl who has strong magical aptitude.  As a dying wish, he forces the girl, Fern, onto the reluctant elf to serve as her apprentice, a thing Frieren has refused to do for a thousand years.  After losing two close companions, and regretting not spending more time with them, she takes the young girl under her wing as a traveling companion and apprentice.  Together they wander around the land searching for unique spells and grimoire.  Frieren was apprenticed to the greatest human mage of all time, the legendary Flamme, who established the use of magic for humans a thousand years earlier.  Since then she has been wandering the land collecting spells and helping to preserve and improve on them for humanity and its fight against the forces in the world which threaten their existence. Her journey now has another role, a way to help her become more sympathetic to human emotions and the preciousness of their short lifespans.  

 

    As time passes Frieren and Fern find themselves wandering aimlessly through out the land, not having any real goal.  In their journey's she visits with the last living member of the hero party, the dwarf Eisen.  He encourages Frieren to attempt to speak with Himmel one more time using one of her masters legendary grimoire that would allow her to speak with the dead.  Upon recovering the book she learns that in order to speak with the dead she will need to travel deep into the northern lands, still controlled by the race of demons.  It looks like she will retrace the steps she took with her friends almost a hundred years earlier in order to reconnect with Himmel.  She extends an invitation to Eisen to join them but he declines citing his old age.  Instead he recommends his young human apprentice to join them.  Even though the journey may take another ten years, Fern reassures the elf that she is willing to accompany her on it.  The pair set off, with a goal in mind and attempt to recruit Eisen's young apprentice.

    They encounter the apprentice, a man close to Fren's age, named Stark.  When they find him, instead of the expected protege of a member of the hero's party, they find a young man who has never killed a monster before and lacks confidence in his ability to survive dangerous encounters.  After tricking him into solo combat with a dragon, Stark agrees to join the two women on their track north.  As they do, they encounter memorials left in place from the time of the hero parties journey.  Statues erected for them, usually under Himmel's direction, to solidify their place in history, even before they had succeeded in their task.  Like the heroes party, the trio of travelers will soon face mortal perils and challenges that will push their experiences and abilities to the limit as they come closer and closer to the lands still controlled by the forces bent on destroying other sentient species.

    As I have stated in the past, ad nauseam, I am not a fan of fantasy anime in general.  I find the way classic Tolkien derived sword and sorcery stories are done in the medium lacking in something that I enjoy with things like Conan the Barbarian.  I have never been able to put my finger on it, maybe its just the artwork its self that distances me from enjoying the story.  But something about Frieren changed that and I think a lot of that has to do with the stories tone.  I love slice of life and chill anime.  Frieren is mostly an incredibly chill and introspective story.  It's great to have a story that starts at the end of the 'real' story, to show the fall out and after effects of the world changing events.  We know going into a hero's narrative, that the hero will win.  Its boring and predictable.  The only reason we consume the same repetition is to see new twists on it.  But in the end its always the same thing, overcoming adversity and ultimately succeeding in the lofty goal placed at their feet.  But Frieren does something different.  There is no longer any threat to the world, things are stabilizing and people are forging a new brighter path for society and humanity.  But there is something driving the main character, something that isn't physical.  Something that doesn't have a physical goal.  She is literally going on a journey of the self.

    The tone and flow of the show works in a way that pays little heed to the length of the story.  It mimics Frieren's own ambivalence to the passage of time.  She is in no hurry to get to where her feet take her and is willing to make any number of detours along the way.  But Fern and Stark are humans who aren't eager to stop in a village and spend ten years there doing little and continuously encourage Frieren to have more focus on the task at hand, the task to find the land of the dead so she can reconnect with her lost friends one last time.  At times the story does dip quite heavily into combat and action as they encounter a variety of dangers, but it goes back to focusing on their growth as individuals and as a group with a shared goal.  It isn't until we get into the second season that the series changes, personally for the worst, and we see structure and adversity.

    I really did not enjoy the back half of the second season and felt the story lost its charm as it transformed into something it wasn't before.  It went from being a casual slice of life story about growth and reflection into an atypical exam story, where the stakes were never there and too much space was spent on a very short amount of time.  It was a waste to devote so much of the story, particularly given that the second season could be the last anime adaptation we see for this fantastically lovable story, at least in the immediate future.  It changed what the story meant, from something new and refreshing to something that appears to have been designed to appeal to a different audience.  To meet expectations that may have surfaced when the story wasn't what people expected.    We are given a slew of standard shonen battle personalities and a series of challenges, while sometimes interestingly crafted, lead to very little in the way of actual threat or failure.  So what was the point?  World building?  The authors desire to branch out a little, play with different story types?  Did they get bored or hit a road block in writing and needed to shift focus for a while into something a little easier to write?  Whatever the reason, it reduced the appeal of this beautiful show for me and made the last episodes of this great story unappealing.

    Questionable plot distractions aside, this is over all a really lovely anime.  The artwork and direction is highly enjoyable.  The characters expressions and body language is finely crafted, enhancing the simplistic yet beautiful artwork.  You can not help but love everyone in the story.  The voice acting is great, the soundtrack fits the mood perfectly, its just a solid package all around....aside from the mage exam distraction.  I really really disliked the mage exam arc...like a lot.  It really took away a lot more beauty and comfort and joy we could have had with following Frieren further on her journey.  I will really need to pick up the manga and continue to the journey into lands unknown to see these lovely characters grow closer and more confident in their identities.

The anime was simulcast on Crunchyroll and is currently available in sub and dub format.  The final episode teased a possible continuation of the anime, but as of the time of this review there has not been anything announced.