Highlights
- "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" is an emotionally engaging anime that explores the themes of time, life, and companionship.
- The series follows the protagonist, Frieren, as she reflects on her past adventures and the passing of her friends over a span of 50 years.
- The anime beautifully portrays the relationship between Frieren and her friends, highlighting the love and bittersweet nature of their fleeting time together.
Warning: This may contain minor spoilers for Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Time flies, time is fleeting, and time is also an illusion, but in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, time is the centerpiece of an emotional examination of life and companionship. Since its premiere, there has been quite a bit of buzz - much of it very positive - and make no mistake, if the rest of the series is anything like its premiere, it absolutely deserves the hype.
Based on the manga by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren is animated by Madhouse and directed by Keiichirou Saitou, fresh off the success of 2022’s Bocchi the Rock. It follows an elven mage retracing the steps of her former adventuring party, remembering them, confronting her guilt about not getting closer to them, and making new memories along the way.
A Mere 10 Years
While the current number of episodes for this series is unconfirmed as of the time of writing, the first four all came out on the same day. It’s a pleasant surprise and the four episodes serve as a prolonged, thorough, and engaging beginning to the real adventure in the weeks ahead. Funnily enough, it begins at the end of another adventure.
The elven mage Frieren and her three companions, Himmel, Heiter, and Eisen have just completed a decade-long quest to kill the demon king. They’ve returned victorious, and the entire kingdom is in celebration, bestowing gifts and congratulations to the heroes. At the sight of a meteor shower on that perfect night, all of them are overjoyed, though Frieren isn’t all that impressed.
“There’s a better spot to view this meteor shower,” she says, promising to take them there in 50 years when it happens again. See, elves live for so long that to her, the time spent with them was practically no time at all. And sure enough, the audience follows her next 50 years so casually and with such haste that the passage of time feels insignificant, as is the intention. All of her friends are much older, but she has stayed the same.
Anime fans who bore witness to Mari Okada’s 2018 filmMaquia: Where The Promised Flower Blooms, might find this premise familiar, and likewise are preparing for emotional pain. It’s true that Frieren’s premise is similar, but whereas that film explored the lifespan of its protagonist patiently through her relationship with her son, this series moves a tad more briskly. It goes to new places each episode and skips months and years at a time.
The first four episodes of this series follow Frieren as she witnesses the passing of friends, and realizes that despite how briefly they were in her life, she did love them greatly. She begins to wish she knew more about them, spurring her to go on a quest in the hopes of learning more about her friends and herself. Joining her is Fern, a young girl who is similarly gifted in magic and who shares a bond with Frieren's friend Heiter, to whom she was like a daughter.
A Clever, Powerful Fantasy Story
Many fantasy stories feature non-human races whose life spans are longer than humans, but few capitalize on what effect that can have on characters’ perceptions of life. The relationship between an individual and the world around them changes fundamentally. Stories like Maquia explored this idea by depicting the protagonist coming to understand the weight of this as she grows up, but Frieren has lived a very long life before the story begins; she's used to it.
What keeps the story from being a complete downer is the sheer glee with which it reminisces about the past. Anyone who has ever played Dungeons & Dragons can instantly relate to the party as they remember all the struggles that are funny in retrospect because they lived to tell the tales. For how much this story grapples with death, it’s filled to the brim with a love that is felt in every frame and every note of Evan Call’s beautiful soundtrack.
Even the passage of time itself feels less scary when seen through the eyes of Frieren, to whom it is customary. It only becomes scary once she - and the audience - are reminded that time and its preciousness are relative. Fern makes for a great companion because, as a human, she can’t afford to waste years in just one place, and she doesn’t want Frieren to make that mistake either, them both knowing what that difference in perception has cost her in the past.
This theme of time even extends beyond the existential and becomes the vehicle through which the individual episodes' messages are conveyed. In Episode 3, when a villain from Frieren’s past is set to return, a point is made about how people learn from the past to prepare for the future. It’s set up subtly and pays off in a manner not unlike an old fable. For everything about time that is scary, there is a lot about time that is essential to the beauty of life.
A Gorgeous Feel-Good Adventure
Madhouse has truly gone through something of a renaissance in recent years and the image of the studio popularized in the 2000s is nothing like today. Where some despaired the studio’s changes as the end of an era, the thoughtful and aesthetically charged dramas of their repertoire today have ushered in a new one. From the works of Shingo Natsume like ACCA 13 or Sonny Boy, to films like Goodbye Don Glees, Madhouse is hitting its stride anew.
Director Saitou seems intent on winning over audiences for a second year in a row after Bocchi the Rock solidified itself for many as last year’s anime of the year. It feels hollow to simply call this show gorgeous, but the beauty becomes the most apparent in how consistently this series keeps moving. The character acting is charming and expressive and the magic effects are dazzling, be it shields deflecting blasts of energy or just characters levitating objects.
For a show that looks as good as Frieren and likes to flaunt it, it feels worth mentioning that this story doesn’t have much action either, at least so far. If the opening is anything to go by, there are more perils ahead, but it speaks volumes about just how high-quality the animation can be even when the stakes are low. With any luck, the production schedule will be healthy enough that this can be consistent.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is pretty incredible and Saitou’s team clearly wanted audiences to sink their teeth into as much of it as possible from the start. It balances its potent grief with sweet character moments and rarely fails to keep the viewer in its grip as it explores time, its passage, and making the most of it with others.