Hikari no Ou

Human civilization no longer revolves around fire, but is instead now driven by fear of it. Repeated wars have changed human biology, and people now spontaneously combust when they get close to natural flame. However, a new source of energy prevents society from complete collapse: a stone-shaped material used to produce light and steam lies within the bodies of monsters that infest numerous forests. Those tasked with collecting this precious resource are called fire hunters.

Touko, a young village girl, is saved from a forest monster by a fire hunter who perishes during his heroic action. After the hunter's dog, Kanata, heals from his own injury, the girl's family sends her to the capital in order to return Kanata and the hunter's fire sickle to his relatives.

Elsewhere, the fire hunter's son, Koushi, and his sister are adopted by a wealthy family. Koushi learns some troubling facts related to the country's ruling royal family. He conducts secret research on a special fire stone found by his late father, kickstarting a race against time between the country's leaders and those trying to save mankind from its ultimate demise.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Touko Main

Kuno, Misaki Japanese

Kanata Main

Koushi Main

Ishige, Shouya Japanese

Kira Supporting

Hayami, Saori Japanese

Shouzou Supporting

Kobayashi, Chiaki Japanese

Hibari Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Kiri Supporting

Shimamura, Yuu Japanese

Hitou Supporting

Watanuki, Ryuunosuke Japanese

Yanagi Supporting

Ohara, Sayaka Japanese

Narrator Supporting

Sakakibara, Yoshiko Japanese

Katagiri, Daisuke Producer

Toda, Takeshi Producer

Terakawa, Hidekazu Producer

Chino, Takatoshi Assistant Producer

Reviews

Mar 18, 2023

ZNoteTaku

Recommended

To reside in *The Fire Hunter’s* world is to be perpetually afraid of something. Whether that something in particular is a Fiend that is running wild, or even your fellow man, it’s always present and looming. And it is easy to understand way; in the past, a terrible catastrophe struck humankind and made it so that humanity could no longer harness fire. Coming into proximity of it would lead to the body instantly burning, and if it should happen to occur within a group of many people…well, it doesn’t take much imagination to think about what could happen. And the show does not shy away ... on showing just how terrible it really is. The sea of black, red, and orange bathe the screen as people scream for the pain to stop, as though they were mere kindling that allows the fire to spread at an alarming rate. In a flash, everything could be gone. So, there’s only one option that seems sensible: cloister yourself from everyone else, and keep outside contact to a minimum. Choose loneliness.

It is this cloistering quality that makes *The Fire Hunter* a hard sell, both as a seasonal anime and as a general fantasy story. The idea of a sprawling world for our characters to explore and meet so many new faces (along with an equally-sprawling soundtrack) as they fight against a relatively clear-cut evil is traded away. Where is the sense of grand adventure? Instead, what we see and experience is an intense interiority, which allows for the series to develop some fantastic subtextual worldbuilding. Both in terms of the larger social structure and character relationships, there are constant layers to be unpacked and chewed on. Within the pods of villages that exist on the outskirts of the capital city and beyond, they had to learn to defend themselves against the possibility of the fire that could kill them, but they cannot survive purely on their own. A single village can only have access to so many resources, so it became necessary to create a commodity that can bring commerce of some kind (muku paper, or a paper to communicate with the gods, being the most-referenced in-show).

The world is thusly one that, as sequestered as a village might want to be, must rely on others for money, bartering, and liquid fire. And presiding over their safety from the Fiends are the Fire Hunters, the ones whose sickles and dogs kill Fiends for their golden blood to create a new source of light and heat. Whether as a village or as a villager, the ability to work determines one’s worth. With Fire Hunters acting as both guardian and harvester of the most-precious of all resources, they achieve a quasi-divine reverence among the people of the show’s universe.

This interplay between isolation, reliance, and the Fire Hunters’ guardianship is what brings us into the narrative proper, with Touko being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a Fire Hunter sacrifices his own life in a forest to slay a Fiend so that Touko can live, she is subsequently marked by her own family and village as having committed a cardinal sin. She is regarded as a harbinger of misfortune, and must atone for, albeit indirectly, causing the Fire Hunter’s death. Such is the weight of the sin that her own sister wears a black mask as Touko boards the train, treating her as akin to an undesirable. And as a mere child, Touko is the most reluctant of reluctant heroes, perhaps bound more by a sense of duty to return Kanata and the Fire Hunter’s sickle to his family in the capital rather than any inner drive that she may have at the start. She boards the truck not knowing at all what awaits her, and the derisive attitudes of her home and any she might encounter on the way insinuate that the journey will be anything but pleasant, or safe for that matter. She’ll learn a lot as she travels on about the cold world around her.

But her journey of discovering is not one she undertakes alone. *The Fire Hunter* has another story move in parallel to Touko, that of Koushi, the now-orphaned son of a famed Fire Hunter who is taken in by a wealthy family in the capital. Gifted with a beautiful mind, he accepts the offer by the Okibis to escape the old life he once lived, along with having proper doctors look after his sister, in exchange for using that mind of his. There is apprehension about the current state of the world, and Okibi wants Koushi to figure out how to make like his father did and harness skyfire, an even-more-powerful substance from certain Fiends. Between the Fire Hunter’s death involving Touko and what Okibi is asking of Koushi, humanity seems to be hurrying its way to another conflict, and one that might have just as dire consequences for their existence. Moments of levity are few and far between; it is only when Okibi’s daughter Kira seems rather taken with Koushi, or one of the eventual brides-to-be on Touko’s train say something caustic, that the series allows itself to breathe for a moment.

The pieces move slowly and deliberately, almost like a mournful dance rather than a grand spectacle, best encapsulated by its aesthetic decisions. The series plays itself like a series of theatrical tableaux, both in terms of its emphasis on specific moments of heightened tension and in visual presentation. The soundtrack lacks any of the grand-sweeping orchestrations or soaring triumphs of brass, woodwinds, and strings with explosive percussion that we sometimes expect from the standard fantasy fare. Things are more brooding; the music adopts lower tones and murkier timbres as stringed instruments play in their lower registers and the percussion feels less broad and more echoed. It is meditative rather than epic. Complete with highly-stylized still-shots that deliberately contrast with the rest of the presentation, they read as a kind of contemporary spin on the famed “Dezaki postcard memory,” meant to signify either overtly or subtextually just how important or extreme a particular person or moment in time really is. The affect is that *The Fire Hunter* tends to be more suggestive than anime normally produces, with Nishimura Junji treating its world and Oshii Mamoru’s series composition of the original novels as museum pieces.

And nearly every painting in that museum is a breathing testament of misery and murkiness. The palette employed throughout the series is muted, as even the golden blood of the slain Fiends feels almost too dense and congealed to be “bright.” It is unnatural both in that sense and in the natural sense that we associate blood with red. Even when properly harnessed as either a source of light or heat in its yellow hue, that unnatural quality remains. The only real source of light comes from fire (which we know is the ultimate death sentence), the sun which is rarely shown, or in selective postcard memories. The use of setting and placement of the characters within it robs the world of its happiness, as though even the mere implication of fire and heat is something that must be avoided at all costs. Especially as the stories of Koushi and Touko continue on their way, it allows a real contrast between the higher-class house and its comforts that Koushi enjoys versus the cold, hard steel of Touko’s train or the shaded canopy of the forest she travels through. At times, it is intensely claustrophobic. At others, it feels so vast so as to feel that something is just wrong. Every inch of *The Fire Hunter* is tinged with something to be afraid of, no matter who is traveling with you, where you are, or what is waiting out there.

I mentioned before that *The Fire Hunter* is a bit of a hard sell. Barring the fact that it’s only one season at present, its affect is, on some level, quite alienating, and the narrative runs thick (as do its infodumps). Yet, the unfolding mysteries about the Spiders, the Fiends, Okibi’s goal, Kira’s feelings, Touko’s quest, the divine clans, and many other things make a dystopic steampunk-esque fantasy that feels like more is constantly waiting to be unearthed. Its off-kilter form of presentation and animated character acting gives tension, repose, and rumination plenty of time to dig into the earth, and its world is only revealed to be more horrifying the further it goes along. In the midst of its bleakness, a few characters stand poised to take their steps into whatever fire-laden fate awaits them.

Just remember that the metaphorical shadow on the wall is not just cast by fire – in this case, the shadow itself IS fire.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Mar 18, 2023

KANLen09

Mixed Feelings

Well-written

This show's plot in a summary: within the space of its abrupt 10-episode run that only covers the first 2 volumes in a total of 4, having to rewatch this in a binge IS a necessity to fully (albeit partially) understand the appeal of novels like these.

I'm not going to sugarcoat this: I definitely have a love-hate relationship with both director Junji Nishimura and series composer-cum-scriptwriter Mamoru Oshii. With the former returning back to the anime scene after a recent string of bad series going as far back as 2018 with studio Seven Arcs, and the latter coming back for one of the most polarizing ... series (Vlad Love) that depending on the people you ask, is a love-hate affair that either is worth being enjoyable or just plain bad. Lo and behold, these two notable people are back, and this time, they helm novelist Rieko Hinata's fantasy novel: Hikari no Ou a.k.a The Fire Hunter together with studio Signal.MD...and the results were more in line of what I expected to see from both people leading this somewhat ambitious project being the TV network WOWOW's comeback after a few years (as opposed to the current constant ones you see on Japan's major TV networks).

Being a full-on novel (as opposed to the LN), there is more detail drawn here, and Reiko Hinata's story is shown as such: In the distant future of Japan, a calamity has changed human physiology so that humans will instantly combust when in the presence of fire. As a result, human civilization collapsed until they discover an alternative fuel source derived from the blood of demonic Fire Fiends. As a result, the elite Fire Hunters are formed, whose sole purpose is to hunt down Fire Fiends and fallbeasts and harvest their blood, fueling a new industrial revolution. And one such Fire Hunter by the name of Haijuu, gets himself killed in action while saving a wandering girl named Touko from the Fire Fiend, only to leave his companion dog Kanata with her to be brought back to whence he came from, which is the Capital. At the same time, this young man named Koushi, living off the prestiges of a wealthy family due to the fact that his mother is dead and his younger ill-fated sister needs recovery. And in return, he is tasked by the same wealthy Okibi family under Yuoshichi to find out an alternate power source towards the bottled lightning that harnesses the power of the extremely volatile skyfire that plagues the current government that's about to be overturned in the midst of the resultant chaos.

The full story split into two halves: Touko and Koushi's routes, they're in no doubt connected to each other, though how the anime procured the original source material in this way is amicable at best. From the outset, it's clear that both main characters will be the center core of the series (at least for the first half here) going through what they need to know and survive amongst the sea of raging spirit monsters that could hunt them at every corner. For that, I'd say that it was a good job trying to segregate this massive storyline that involves even the unsuspecting public, albeit with infodumps that don't spare even a second of your time expositioning if you aren't playing close attention, which can feel like a lot through the fast progression of the narrative plot. The truth is that this could've been more refined by Junji Nishimura trying to picture this in the minds of the audience, but as mentioned, nowadays he doesn't give a heck to how anime these days needed to be structured carefully if the storyline is THIS hectic and living-breathing, and just went on his old directorialship ways, which in more cases than one, hurt the show in trying to convince us the audience into the investment of the anime's world at large. At least from what was presented here with Season 1, I would already have surmised that Season 2 (the latter half of the novel) will be more of the same, and though the execution here is wonky at best, the only hope I have is how this story will wrap up when the 2nd half comes in the future.

The characters here also sell the narrative, because they run through the whole course of their world being invaded by the Fire Fiends, not to mention the Fire Hunters themselves and with overarching plots like with the Divine Clans misaligning the world following their Gods/Goddesses and whatnot that ultimately result in the disconnection of the goals and objectives of their purpose in the first place. Touko is a good girl no doubt, the problem is that this innocent kid is brought to the big issue just by wandering alone with the possibility of being attacked by the Fire Fiends, which brings us to her dangerous and treacherous journey back to the Capital, honing the dead Haijuu's belongings along with the dog Kanata as its temporary protector. Touko might not have been taught mature due to her age, but it's because of this reason that forces her to be one, and with the people that she meets on the way (e.g. the 3 brides of Hotaru, Benio and Kaho that are sold off to other villages for forced marriages in exchange of citizenship; fellow Fire Hunter Akira) that teaches her the brutalities of reality, and that this issue is not something to be taken lightly with potential people dying at the hands of the Fire Fiends if not careful. On Koushi's side, being taken by its owner Youshichi, together with his wife Hibana and daughter Kira, he is a good-natured person awaiting the arrival of Haijuu, which turns out to be his father, that with his death together with the suddenness of his mother, as well as his ill sister Hinako, the world crumbles at his feet, similar to that of being an orphan within a split second. The exchange of researching on Fire Fiends, bottled lightning and skyfire, it's a necessity because of the distrust against the government and its nation under attack from a rebel group called the Spiders, and Koushi anchors the project, learning more of what goes under the hood, like the history of the Fire Hunters, the Flickering Flame and the Millenial Comet, all of which play a big part in the eventual plot that slowly expands the story overtime. This is an interesting world that requires very close attention no doubt, and the plot beats are placed right where they need to be, so this is the hallmark to appreciating full-blown novels that require meticulous details where every single storyline and character is essential to make or break the story. Sure, for now it seems like a wedge that both Touko and Koushi are only get getting started on the big narrative from being clueless to informative, but they'll get better as time moves on.

Unfortunately, where I can praise the show for its story and interesting characters, is where I draw the line with production values. Studio Signal.MD is no means by far a decent studio, the most recent of which was the 2-cour run of Platinum End (that was just decent at best), but like another show that they once helmed on (Mars Red), it's clear that director Junji Nishimura and the staff team were putting aesthetics over quality to magnify the world at large. Some were great (e.g. artistic hand-drawn scenes that showcase the beauty and destruction of the world) and many others were not so great (e.g. the constant overlaying of portraits over the current animation plane and the exact hand-drawn scenes used to depict the characters' outburst of emotions), though I don't know what the hell that they were thinking to portray with the latter, which could be done through normal animation, but they didn't, and decided to leverage the shortcomings with the excessive animation and hand-drawn cut-aways, which felt jarring at best. This is a beautiful story, and the production must be in tandem together to express its world at large, which this show I'd like to believe was a fluke but was not.

The music that's courtesy of composer Kenji Kawai, like Nishimura and Oshii, has also worked on Vlad Love as well, so it wouldn't be a mistake to lump these 3 people together. For one, it sets a mood that often happens with moodswings depending on the situations circumvented, and I think that it's decent effort all things considered. For the OST, Leo Ieiri's OP is solemn, yet mystical, while Maaya Sakamoto's ED is just about what I expected being a song of many colours that adds to the generic backdrop of "we are Shonen running" sequences. In this case, I find the ED much better than the OP.

If you can say anything about Hikari no Ou a.k.a The Fire Hunter, it would be signified as a diamond in the rough. Sure, the extent of it is about halfway there, but for the earnest watcher who wants to get invested in this show, while binging it would be the best option, breaking down every episode is the key to being fully immersive on what this show has to offer. Right now, this Fire Hunter show is all but a gem that awaits its latter half to see what it's made of to be properly judged altogether.

This battle against the Flame Fiends is not over yet, it's all but a footnote, that is for now.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 21, 2023

chekkit

Not Recommended

Informative

I really wanted to like this one. I really did. But there's just so much wrong here that I'm wondering if the season 2 will truly help or not.

When I saw this anime, I was thinking I'd be getting something similar to the Shinsekai Yori series. It looked similar at first and lured me in with its intriguing world and wild art style. The opening song especially ended up being one of my favorite bangers of the season!

But without delving too into spoilers, I felt like much of my time was wasted. The first 1-2 episodes are amazing and pulls you in. Then it ... slows down and drags. The characters narrative falls incredibly flat at times and you can't help but wonder what the MC girl is thinking half the time. She's a child who hardly speaks and one who's kind of just dragged into things while rarely making any difference. The MC boy has a lot more interesting things going on with his side of things, but even then you're left with more questions than answers. Talking sequences in general feel very off-putting and stiff. The only good things going on for these characters is their designs... and little more. Excellent wonderful designs but not much else. You learn things here and there, but by the end of the final episode I'm left feeling like I know so little still.

Then you get to the obvious art style direction. Beautiful and interesting at first as they allowed themselves to draw animation freely. Then later on growing stiff and really funky at times. Not in a good way. Some might think it was a style choice to go as clunky as they did, but its clearly a low budget sort of thing going on as well. Still frame panels on top of still frames, action scenes where the action hardly moves... If I wanted to watch a slideshow I'd make one myself. Most of the budget went into the OP as far as I can tell.

Will I watch the eventual season 2? Maybe out of morbid curiosity to see where it goes since I'm still truly interested in the world itself. But all in all, with how much other anime is being cranked out at all times of late, I'd rather be spending my time watching something else.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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	Poll: Do people really think the animation quality is bad? ( 1 2 ) EmmyMoomin - Feb 7, 2023	74 replies	by CyStarkman »» Oct 3, 1:42 AM
	Poll: Hikari no Ou Episode 10 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 18, 2023	47 replies	by WolfWood37 »» Aug 8, 10:58 PM
	Poll: Hikari no Ou Episode 9 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 11, 2023	27 replies	by WolfWood37 »» Aug 8, 2:03 AM
	Poll: Hikari no Ou Episode 8 Discussion KANLen09 - Mar 4, 2023	28 replies	by WolfWood37 »» Aug 8, 1:30 AM
	Poll: Hikari no Ou Episode 7 Discussion KANLen09 - Feb 25, 2023	18 replies	by WolfWood37 »» Aug 8, 12:52 AM