Review of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Frieren has a slow start that almost made me dismiss this beautifully animated work from Madhouse. I also think the beauty of this story can only be appreciated if you’ve watched enough media (not necessarily anime) where you have an intuition and dislike for bullshit writing that pops up to move the story along. If you need dramatic fight scenes and loud characters yelling all the time to keep your attention, you won’t find that here. If you don’t like thinking about the internal world of characters and their relationships and noticing small details in how they interact with one another and themselves, you probablywon’t like this show.

This story has all the traditional markers of western hero stories from an eastern perspective. Hero is upstanding person. MC is socially awkward without much empathy. Hero and crew teach MC social skills and to care for people. All the lessons about why you need to care about people and do the right thing will be crammed down your throat, sort of.

What’s refreshing is how all of the characters are quite subdued in their reactions, their dialogue. There’s a lot more showing than telling. We see things that let us infer the mindset of a character instead of being hit with it over the head like in a lot of animes.

The “lessons” are also quite short and contained most of the time. People get in fights and resolve their feelings in 10 minute chunks and then the story moves on. Whereas a lot of other animes of the same genre might milk it as the main plot for a full episode.

But the part I appreciate most is the internal consistency of the logic that governs our characters and the world they live in. Anytime you wonder how Frieren can be so powerful but still have worthy foes, there’s a reason that is more than believable. You have your expectations subverted in ways that make the story more logically consistent (big tomb fight). And after gripping about really good animes that abandon real world logic for anime logic all the time (ex Bleach which I love but also get annoyed at for asspulls) I can really appreciate the level of craft required for this level of story writing. I read it somewhere else but Frieren is competency-porn. The writing is so good.

The animation is also 10/10 beautiful. The dance scene. Frieren on the bed. Eyes moving as they read. The fight scene they do animate is cool as hell. The endings are beautiful!! Especially that first one - I didn’t appreciate it until the 5th episode but the more you really examine the art that makes up that ending, the more you’re wowed.

The first OP and ED are so good too!