In this review, hopefully I’ll be able to lay out why that feeling no longer remains, and why this franchise is so special. I hope you’ll bear with me; as an aspiring writer, I find the inspiration of this route so incredibly personal and affecting that I have to put some of it into words. As this is the conclusion of a trilogy, I will also refer back to Presage Flower and Lost Butterfly.
Like many anime viewers I started with ufotable’s Fate adaptations. In a weird and convoluted manner, I entered the world of Fate by watching the first episode of Fate/zero, then UBW, then back to Zero. Though my expectations of Fate were defined more by UBW than Zero, I still felt the latter to be more artistically constructed. UBW seemed incomplete.
There’s a very good reason for that.
So I went to the source, Kinoko Nasu and TYPE-MOON’s visual novel. When I read the visual novel for Heaven's Feel, I found a flabbergasting narrative that leads to a unique place in literature: This is not merely a gripping story with compelling characters, high-stakes battles and powerful emotion. There are so many great examples of those in anime; Hunter x Hunter, Attack on Titan, Re;Zero...the list goes on and on.
What separates the Fate franchise from all others is its meta-commentary and broadly "applicable" (as Tolkien might put it) subtext. On some level, this is a story about stories, about the nature of the heroes we vicariously enjoy in media. Admittedly, this may be less apparent in the anime than in the VN owing to sheer length and detail, but careful viewers can pick up on it when reviewing the trilogy as a whole.
I will tell anyone who asks that Heaven's Feel is Kinoko Nasu's magnum opus. He debuted with seminal works like Kara no Kyoukai, a psychological and supernatural murder-mystery, and Tsukihime, a more world-building derivative of the former. And after, came Fate stay/night, his most thematically focused and balanced work to date.
Spring Song is the final anime adaptation of that work.
A number of people, myself included, watched Fate adaptations like DEEN stay/night or UBW and came to the conclusion that Shirou Emiya is an idiot and a hypocrite, an annoying idealist without the character arc or sharpened coolness of Kiritsugu.
I was wrong. Shirou’s arc is a 3-part breakdown that is totally incomplete without Heaven’s Feel.
The story of Heaven’s Feel involves the heroine Sakura Matou, who is as powerful an example of a Jungian shadow archetype as there is. She is everything Shirou Emiya denies about himself…Victim…Villain, and she represents the ultimate challenge to everything he is. Nasu excels at exploring masculine-feminine polarities, and Sakura’s domestic warmth, expertly built up in the prior films, delivers a hammer-stroke of pain and torment to the would-be Hero of Justice.
In this final film, Shirou confronts his Shadows (and Sakura is merely one of several) and surpasses Kiritsugu before the end. Spring Song visually calls back to Zero in a moment of crisis, and the psychological triumph is palpable.
All that is true of the source material, and this is an adaptation. I will say that director Tomonori Sudou has not achieved full perfection here, and in an ideal world the trilogy might have 20 or so more minutes of fleshing out.
That said, Sudou comes really darn close, and in Spring Song so many scenes hit perfectly. In Lost Butterfly and Presage Flower, so many moments depicted the visual novel’s mood and meaning to nigh-perfection; the shed scene in PF, the rain scene and kitchen knife scene in LB. Spring Song has about as many such scenes as the previous 2 films combined. Every character gets a superlative moment, from Illya, to Rin to Kirei. The brilliant cast of F/SN is at their most human, most emotional, and psychologically impactful here.
Admittedly, the film’s ending is a little esoteric and in some ways feels like a finale for ufotable’s Type-Moon work as a whole. If you haven’t seen Kara no Kyoukai, you might be left feeling confused by a certain moment near the end. But all that is forgivable for the exquisite darkness, death, and redemption on display, and Sudou’s ability to bookend is rivaled only by the likes of FMA: Brotherhood and Stein’s Gate.
As said, the ending may be confusing if you don’t recall Kara no Kyoukai in detail; no easy feat given the nature of that series. But from the beginning, even in Presage Flower, Heaven’s Feel requires you to bring external knowledge to properly contextualize the story; it is the Infinity War of anime; a story built up by and deployed in contrast and juxtaposition with other stories. Moreso than even that, it is a masterful work.
I used to hate Shirou Emiya, but this particular route made him one of my favorite characters of all time. He is not simply a compelling hero (or more accurately, anti-hero) in his own right, but a challenge to literary heroes throughout the ages. He is the anti-Deku, the anti-Araragi, the Shadow of the Seigi no Mikata. The contrast and comparison between him and Sakura Matou and Kirei Kotomine ensures that Heaven’s Feel will be my favorite anime for many years to come.
“Rejoice young man; your wish will soon be granted. For a Hero of Justice must have a villain to defeat.”
