Footnote to the first paragraph: There is a link to a clip of the first episode’s transcendent scene in my profile bio.
The highest praise I ever read of Miyazaki talked about the small details of human behavior in his films. For example, a character tapping her toe on the ground to set her foot securely in a newly-donned shoe. Watching Frieren, I can’t help but recall this idea over and over again. The turn of a character’s head at a precise angle when she looks behind her. That little jolt in her torso when she opens a door. The care required to portray a yawn in intense fidelity and close detail. Anime gives you many options. You can use any level of resolution you want. Low resolution means broad strokes. With broad strokes you show just enough for the audience to follow the action. It isn’t necessarily wrong or bad to choose low resolution. It depends on your goals. By contrast, you can use fine (high) resolution. In this case you show the audience many details. They clearly perceive a blink, a shift in eye direction, or a slight nod of the head. Why not do this all the time? It’s hard! It takes work. When you see it done well you are seeing an incredible labor of love, carried out and put forth with care. This can only be done by minds that cherish the little quirks of people that make us who we are. Observe closely; it will be wonderful to look at. Successfully executing on this mission makes an anime enchanting where before it was not.
An anime that is off-the-charts talented at showing small details of body language can communicate large amounts of information in a short period of time. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. This is one of the best skills for an anime to be good at. There are many reasons. It makes the show accessible to a wider audience. Pretty much everybody is good at reading body language. It is also the most natural form of communication for us. We interact with each other from birth and evolutionarily speaking ages ago. Our vision is a big part of that. By contrast, words that describe hard concepts come later in the life cycle of a human and later in the life cycle of humanity. It’s less natural to us and fewer of us process it well. So successfully communicating through body language in your anime is a skill that carries tremendous value.
Body language details are also important in this story because of the personality of the protagonist, Frieren. She is naturally reserved; she thinks many things silently that others would say out loud. To teach us her entire journey while faithfully portraying her character, the anime must show as much as possible in the small details of her movements. It does that wonderfully. The slight opening of her mouth. The sudden blink of an eye. The turn of her head: one angle at one time, a different angle at another. If you find Frieren the character uninteresting, you might not be taking in these details. If you are taking in those details and still aren’t pleased, different characters please different people. The sort of person who loves Frieren is the sort of person who loves Saber from the Fate series.
Frieren is a good anime to discuss purposeful pacing. The pacing of Frieren is slow. This is well done. Being well-paced does not merely mean being at a cookie-cutter speed. It means a speed that reflects the intent and the ethos of the entire story. Code Geass, a rapid story, is about ambitious and energetic young men. Sousou no Frieren is about a thousand-year-old elf who loves to take her time and learn everything she can about the world of magic. Frieren is a story about eternity, a story which encapsulates extended eras within short sequences of screen-time. Its pace must be slow. Frieren’s excellent pacing reflects the work of creators who know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. This is another reason why the close details of human body language are important to making this anime good. If your pace of plot progression is slow, you need to have lots of sequences that “show you a thousand words” without saying them. This retains the interest of observers because there is always intriguing information on the screen to follow and think about. Effectively portraying the details of body language helps you with this.
Sousou no Frieren is a good show to touch on the elements of “superior humor” as opposed to low humor (for example toilet humor). Frieren does have some low humor, particularly after it introduces a teenaged male character into the fray. At the end of the day Frieren is a shounen. Depending on what you want out of a story, low humor is off-putting. The creators probably could have skipped some of it. This is not necessarily up to the producer’s discretion; it is the usual habit of Japanese anime to preserve the scenes of the original manga in a highly faithful way.
Let’s give an example of insightful dry humor from the first episode. One character says that Heiter looks much older after 10 years and Heiter replies that “that’s a rather mean thing to say.” Another character says that Heiter looks exactly the same and Heiter says that that too is “a rather mean thing to say.” This is a subtle joke about having our cake and eating it too. The benefits of youth include vitality and energy. The benefits of age include being treated with honor and respect. Heiter treats the first comment as a reflection of his loss of energy. With the second comment he suggests he doesn’t get offered the amount of respect that he deserves at his age. All of this subtext comes through very few words and in a short time. This gets back to what I said about communicating through body language visuals because it is a similar skill. All the best anime do this: they communicate a lot of information buried in the subtext of words. They also make sure that viewers can easily understand those words at face value. This is how you make an anime enjoyable for everyone: give everyone something to enjoy at his or her level of comprehension. Doing this is difficult. Frieren is probably an excellent anime to watch with other people. Or, for example, to suggest as someone’s first anime.
As I said earlier, Frieren is a shounen. Don’t be surprised by “the boy who needs confidence,” “you can’t lose if you keep getting back up again,” and “the overconfident enemy who lets the good guys off the hook.” Frieren is unusually clever with the last one: it uses setting creation and story-building to reflect a cohesive theme about ego. It’s still a dubious plot device. Frieren is at its weakest when it has that “typical shounen feel.” What’s another example of this? Frieren devotes many panels to heavy-handed “this is how good boys act” messaging. It associates heroism with copious visuals of helping out little girls, helping out grandma, and carrying out errands for the entire village. I don’t necessarily disapprove of encouraging viewers to serve others. The issue is that this messaging doesn’t align well with Sousou no Frieren’s primary themes. Its execution is rather hamfisted. Don’t worry, I will praise Sousou no Frieren’s better themes soon.
I’d like to compare Sousou no Frieren to Boku no Hero Academia (hereafter MHA) and Hunter x Hunter (hereafter HxH). MHA and HxH are around the top of the pack of shounen that are highly popular. Sousou no Frieren carries the same rosy and naive vibe as MHA. For the most part everybody means well. Personalities might clash but there isn’t a serious tug-of-war. At times Sousou no Frieren makes it seem as if all human differences can be solved purely with better communication skills. By contrast, most great anime show strongly conflicting world-views where both sides are compelling. In Frieren it’s obvious who is “right” and whom we are supposed to emulate (Himmel). There are fairly obvious good guys and bad guys. On a side note, Frieren has an idea of demons using language purely to manipulate others which is insightful. Some people have no conception of truth beyond attaining a goal; this is worth thinking about further.
HxH has more complex antagonistic elements than either MHA or Frieren. This is a major reason people love HxH. However, as an anime, I ultimately rate Frieren as better than either MHA or HxH (it might be different for the manga versions). There are a couple of reasons for this. One of them is the quality of the characters. HxH and MHA have simple and tropey characters. They mostly look and act like caricatures. This is not a disqualifying feature: we are talking about the shounen genre, where this is par for the course. It’s not like Frieren is leaps and bounds above HxH and MHA in the quality of its characters. Frieren’s characters also have something of a cookie-cutter feel to them. However, across the board, Frieren’s characters are better.
The other difference is in a key anime skill. Frieren is especially good at it for a shounen. I call this skill “person analysis.” In essence this is where characters act closer to what “a real person” would do in a situation. Now, as I said, Frieren is still a shounen. It’s not going to be peak “realistic behavior” like your favorite slice-of-life or seinen. We still have comic-gag scenes of Himmel posing 12 different ways for a statue. But by and large Frieren is much better at having characters react in realistic and subtle ways. A quiet smile. A furrowed brow. Ideas thought but not spoken. This gets back to what I said about body language. If you can portray subtle body language, you can do “realistic behavior” well in your anime. If you can’t, you’ll have Bakugo jump on desks and call everybody extras or Gon cross his arms and shout at everybody so it’s blindingly obvious how they feel.
One last aspect of Frieren as a shounen is the way it handles training and development of skills. Many shounen bury the audience in piles of details about the magic system and the characters’ struggles while learning these skills. For the most part such scenes are excess. They don’t add to the story and function as boring diversions. Doing this can be good if the protagonists’ training journeys are relevant to the themes of the story. Often they are not and shounen waste space on it anyways because “that’s just what shounen do.” Sousou no Frieren does not do this. Features of warrior training or the idiosyncratic magic system are revealed to us as they become relevant to the story and contribute to the narrative arc in an interesting way. There are no lengthy diversions where an author waxes lyrical to show off how clever he is. Rather the system is integrated into the story without wastefulness: this is far more clever. Sousou no Frieren shows short training sequences that are mystical, aesthetic, and wordless. Visuals that reflect the feel of the experience are enough. The minutiae are irrelevant.
Learning about an element of training as it becomes relevant means seeing a flashback to a previous time in the narrative history. Sousou no Frieren does a lot of flashbacks, not only to reveal features of training but also to teach us more about the relationships between characters. This is crucial to help the audience understand those relationships in a full and intuitive way, provided, of course, that the creators do it in a natural and flowing manner. There are two main ways an anime falls flat on its face when it comes to this. One way is to not have a flashback at all and simply have a character talk to us at length about the past event. (This is the “Monogatari” error.) Anime is a visual medium with the capacity to “show, not tell” the features of its world. Telling us when you could instead show us is always a bad move. Another way anime fail at this is by showing jarring or overly lengthy flashbacks that disrupt the story. When possible the flashback should involve at least one character who matters to us. It should also be concise to maintain the “present day” narrative and keep the story flowing. Frieren builds up our knowledge of important characters bit by bit with many flashbacks spread out over time. It doesn’t shove a whole life history for an unimportant character into our face out of nowhere and pretend we are obligated to care. (This is the “Kimetsu no Yaiba” error.) It’s surprising how many anime flounder when they face this test. Sousou no Frieren passes with flying colors.
Excellent anime embody concepts in their world as much as possible. If a character makes a claim in words the audience has to consider whether that claim is believable. Actions speak louder than words. This is because words often lie. By contrast, when you perform an action, you pay a higher cost in energy. Paying that cost is a proof of your sincerity. As I said before, the development and progression of relationships is central to Frieren’s theme and message. A bad anime will have the characters say out loud that they like each other more or something like this then leave it at that. Frieren shows you many actions on the screen that give further proof of the strength of these relationships. This may seem like a small thing, but it makes a big difference. Your gut knows the difference between actions and words even if your brain thinks it’s all the same. When the four heroes put circlets of flowers on each other’s heads, or when Frieren reaches out a hand to steady Fern as she goes down a ledge or across a river, or when Fern is standoffish about receiving such favors from Stark, that is all excellent storytelling. A similar phenomenon occurs with gifts in your story. In Sousou no Frieren, a ring, a hair ornament, and a staff matter a lot. When you give a relationship a physical representation and put its “body” into the world that is a powerful symbol of meaning. Here’s another example. Without going into detail, there is a character whose training exists as a physical “presence” in the world. This is great storytelling. The tremendous value of embodying an idea into your story is one of these things that every anime should understand and put into action. Sadly, many anime fail to get this right. Frieren seems to pass all the important tests.
Sousou no Frieren’s best theme is the tragedy of impermanence and the majesty of time: a deep and difficult theme. Frieren’s setting, style, and characters remind me of Tolkien, who did this theme well. As with elves of Middle Earth, Frieren has a practically eternal life span, which allows for careful consideration of this theme. Another excellent theme revolves around enjoying the journey and taking every bit you can from the gift of life. Multiple characters express a certain attitude regarding dungeons. For them the point is not to reach the end but to cherish the opportunity. As such, every room of a dungeon should be entered. Then it really is an exploration. These are good, good themes.
Sousou no Frieren feels like a slice-of-life at times. It dedicates many scenes to relationship building, mending fights, and clashes of personality. While Sousou no Frieren’s “shounen scenes” tend to be worse, the “slice-of-life scenes” tend to be good. The creation and maintenance of relationships has a solid connection to Sousou no Frieren’s two best themes. Passing through the years with people who are precious to you is essential to the spirit of Sousou no Frieren.
This is a superlative anime original soundtrack. My standard for the best that anime music has to offer is Iwasaki Taku of Gurren Lagann fame. I never go into an anime expecting a challenger to Iwasaki’s throne. Evan Call’s Frieren OST forced me to seriously consider the possibility. I already mentioned the transcendent scene in Episode 1. Call composes a fantastic stylistic match for “British Isles fantasy” in the fiddle-style shifts of pitch present in key melodies. He writes good music for contemplative moments, inspirational moments, humorous moments, and dramatic moments. It’s important to generate a wide spread of musical effects. Call is not (yet) as good as Iwasaki’s peak, but I am eager to watch more anime featuring his work.
Like the music, the voice acting is very good. The manner of speaking is generally in line with that slow pace I mentioned earlier. People speak in a way that carries eternity behind its back. Frieren’s care to detail can also be heard in “auditory body language.” These are sounds like a slow in-drawing of breath, a sigh, a chuckle, a gasp, or the distinctive non-verbal quirks of various characters such as Fern’s grumbles and Frieren’s self-satisfied “hm-hm!” These are all placed carefully for effect and with excellent timing. That Sousou no Frieren is a labor of love really comes out in these tiny details. The walking pace carries the same weight of time. I cannot emphasize enough the value of bringing all the smallest details of your anime in line with the main themes and fundamental purpose of your story. When you create a cohesive whole like this you get a full experience that immerses you in the idea. There’s simply no comparison to speaking words about the concept.
Frieren has bad OP and ED. The first OP in particular does not fit the prevailing style of the anime. The music in it is jarring and rhythmic. First impressions matter a lot. This is the place where Frieren most fails in the mission to create a comprehensive, coherent whole. Once we get out of the OP Sousou no Frieren finally becomes “Sousou no Frieren.” My personal habit is if a show flubs too many details like this, I don’t consider it a masterpiece. To be fair to Frieren, I have extremely high standards. With my usual methods Sousou no Frieren is a 9.
Let’s talk about the very first scene. This is always a good signpost for the quality of an anime. The beginning is an advertisement, an indication of the rest of the show. It should be a microcosm of what your anime is all about: the anime’s narrative arc and its themes. Frieren starts with a shot of a cart on the road. Why does this show remind me so strongly of Tolkien? What’s the song Bilbo sings to set the course of things in The Lord of the Rings? “The road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began.” What does Frieren do at the end of the first OP? She blinks while looking down a long road, then takes her next step. This is the same story. Of course, it is also different, like any new story. It is infused with new ingenuity, new forms of art, and new ideas. I would be happy if Frieren is loved in the 21st century the way The Lord of the Rings is loved in the 20th. And perhaps Frieren will be loved in that way.
The next shot is of Frieren with her head in a book. It is figuratively buried in the book. We cannot see her face at all. She is completely shielded from the rest of her companions on the cart. The audience cannot see her eyes or her facial expression, only her forehead. She is totally removed from our presence. She is there, but not at all there. Then Himmel intones her name, in a beautiful and loving cadence. Everything about the way he says Frieren’s name is beautiful. Frieren takes her head out of the book. She joins her friends in spirit and not just body. As I said, the beginnings of the best-made anime give you a microcosm of the rest of the show and an exposition of its main theme for the first time. This introduction is perfect. Perfect. To completely understand why, I invite you to watch Sousou no Frieren.
