Hai to Gensou no Grimgar (Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash), which aired in January of 2016, is different in that it follows the ordinary young men and women that end up trapped in their world, without the skills or anything special going for them (in the beginning at least). The grounded setting that follows their daily life as they work to make a living has made it one of my favorite anime this year.
The foundation of the story is your stock and standard “trapped-in-another-world” plot that is all too common. However, in this case the time-tested foundation is used to build a rather solid and intriguing story that explores how ordinary people would slowly adapt to their setting by showing us just how glamorous that sort of life is if you only have ten silvers to your name, a week of training under a guild, and no way to return home, in a more cynical setting without getting too grim-dark.
The setting is fairly firmly set in a fantasy world, it’s even in the name of the show. However, unlike most shows of this nature, it does a fantastic job of establishing early on that life is rather hard for those that live in it. The people aren’t exactly friendly and virtually everything costs money, meaning that if you want to live you have to work.
The characters are unabashedly human in how they behave. They’re not just archetypes that spout out heroic lines and do things for the sake of justice. They do what they have to in order to live, while sharing different opinions on it.
The animation is fluid, watercolor backgrounds, the fight scenes are done quite well when they don’t just show a still of the characters performing a technique and giving a lecture on it in the narration, and you can feel just how clumsy they are at first. There are some scenes that could be better, but it’s nothing horrible. And the music carries the tone of the show, a somber tune during the depressing moment and a placid tone during their valued downtime.
Overall, Grimgar is a Fantasy anime that has many things that I love. It is a story with a rather simple and narrow plot, people who land in a new world and adapt to it over the course of a few months. The wheels that turn the world, overarching debates on morals, and grand battles are left out of the equations to give it a more grounded exploration of these characters and the immediate setting they live in, but doesn’t shy away from the very real, very human consequences of their mistakes and actions.
If you’ve got a free day, go out and watch it where you can.
