Haibane Renmei
Over at f13 there’s a discussion going on regarding anime, and I wanted to talk a little bit about a title that I recommend even though several of the folks there don’t seem to be huge fans of it: Haibane Renmei.
For a lot of people, the work of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki in particular is a gateway into anime — it sort of was for me. Since I spent much of my childhood outside of the US, I was exposed to a greater variety of children’s programming than most kids here got in the early 80’s. For example, most folks here have no idea what I am talking about when I mention Uchu Kara no Messeji, or most specifically, the TV series that spun off from it, Sankuokai: at best, they may very vaguely recall Astron Belt, Sega’s laserdisc shooter game that used footage from it. I remember being very upset that in the game you had to shoot both the good guys and the bad guys from the show indiscriminately. (To my utter dismay, I see that in Chile, the series is available as a 6 disc Spanish-language box set. Must… resist…)
I also got to see a lot of straight-up anime that isn’t too familiar here anymore. For example, the whole family watched Miyazaki’s early TV series Marco (3000 Miles in Search of Mother) which was actually on prime time TV in Peru in the early 80s. It’s no surprise that when Kiki’s Delivery Service was finally available in the States it called to me like something familiar.
There was also the classic shoujo series Candy Candy, with its incredibly catchy theme song and its incredibly sappy tale of an orphan girl. This one aired during the same time slots as the telenovelas did, since really, it had much in common with them (and it’s pretty much unavailable today, because of all the legal disputes surrounding it).
Now, mind you, I also watched stuff that kids here did: Battle of the Planets and the like. But from pretty early on, I wasn’t that interested in giant robots. I was more interested in complex stories.
Which brings me, finally, to Haibane Renmei. I picked it up because it was from the same studio responsible for the fascinating (and overly self-indulgent) Serial Experiments Lain. Lain featured really imaginative art stylings, a highly techno-savvy plotline, and a fairly muddled plot progression. But it was good enough to make me want to see more by this studio, because my dabblings in anime had shown me that it was better to trust a given director or studio than to try things blindly, given the amount of junk on the shelves.
Haibane Renmei features no robots. There aren’t any fights, really. Its sensibility is the closest I’ve seen to a Miyazaki vibe outside of other Ghibli films. But the subject it tackles is far darker and more interesting than the fairy tales that Miyazaki tends to prefer.
Visiting the show’s website should convey something of the gorgeous visuals and the gentle tone of the series. In short, a seed falls from the sky to a mostly ruined old building, and goes in through the window. It starts to sprout, and in time forms a giant cocoon. Angel girls with wings and haloes tend the cocoon, until one day it cracks open, and from within is born another girl, as yet without halo and wings.
Her name is Rakka, and over time, she gets her wings and halo, befriends the others, learns that she must work in the nearby town, and that the town is enclosed by a gigantic wall. That strangers come from outside the wall to be greeted with ritual at the great gates, but are not allowed in. That a strange priesthood guards the town, and play some role in guiding the young angels. That there’s even a matching building full of boys on the other side of town. And most importantly, perhaps, that sometimes angels go out into the woods, and somehow vanish in a great bolt of lightning, carried… elsewhere, in a ritual called the “Day of Flight.”
What she doesn’t know, and neither does the viewer, is who Rakka is, and why this strange set-up exists. Why is she an angel? How is it that all the angels are born from seeds that fall from the sky? How does the town subsist when it’s not clear what there is beyond the wall? Although the architecture seems European, the regalia of the outsiders and the “priests” is decidedly not; as you proceed into the series, you find that what seemed known shifts out from under you.
The crux of the matter is that both Rakka and one of her fellow angels suffer from a problem: their wings, which should be bright white, are turning gray and black — “charcoal feathers,” as it is called. It seems to reflect something about how they feel inside. The mystery surrounding this, and the ways in which is it resolved, are at the heart of the slow-moving plot.
Towards the end, we realize something shocking — what we have been watching is effectively a religious allegory.
My daughter ended up completely hooked on this show when she was around 7 years old (she’s almost 9 now). Although some of the subject matter is a little intense and some aspects of it way over her head, she got her friends to play angels on the playground, and she filled hundreds of sheets of paper with drawings of angels — she was even an angel for Halloween that year. The very first CD of music she ever picked out for herself was the soundtrack to this TV show (which is quite good, btw). In the end, I felt like we had found an experience that she would come back to when she was older, and that would unfold more layers of meaning to her. Only the best books and movies can do that.
So, to the naysayers over at f13, I say humbug. 😉 Check it out; I don’t think you will regret it.
12 Responses to “Haibane Renmei”
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FYI, the RSS feed doesn’t bother with the spoiler tag formatting. So at first I thought you ‘gave away’ the story. I’m not sure there is a good way around that though…
(I recently saw this and would highly recommend it as well)
Good To see someone else digged this series as much as I did. I have the Soundtracks and even my current desktop BG is a collage of all of the Haibane :D.
I think the music was beautiful, and the story was sweet and wasn’t burdened with the usual verbosity and over the top attempts at “Deepness” found in most anime.
I think your next pick up should be “Now and Then, Here and There”. It too is a beautiful series and was quite the diamond in the rough.
I love Haibane Renmei.
A small couple corrections: “Charcoal Feathers” is a translation of “Haibane”. (“Ashwing” is an alternate translation that I like.) All the characters with wings are Haibane; the name refers to their grey wings, neither black nor white. I know, they look white in the TV series, but they’re supposed to be grey.
The black-winged Haibane are called “tsumitsuki”. I’m not certain what the official translation of this word is (if any), but I translate it as “sinful” or “sin-bound”.
The Haibane are not, according to the creator of the series, angels.
Finally, the series is heavily influenced by Haruki Murakami’s book, “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. The walled town, the gate, the clock tower, the library: all of these come straight out of the book. While the story and theme of the two works is entirely different, I definitely recommend checking the book out if you like Haibane Renmei.
I agree with most of those statements. Personally, I’ve always liked the shows that mix depth and meaningfulness with “cool” mecha, costumes, and the like (i.e. Gundam), as that generally gives them an added appeal, but I must admit there is a certain elagance in series that capture people, especially kids, without needing to use any of that.
Akira. Grave of the Fireflies. Spirited Away.
Akira I thought was overrated when I saw it, and that was years and years ago. I should proabbyl give it another shot.
Grave of the Fireflies is directed by Isao Takahata, the other founder of Studio Ghibli, and Spirited Away is of course by Miyazaki.
My favorite Ghibli film is actually Whisper of the Heart, which will be coming out in a Disney dub in a few weeks.
Oh — and lest you think I am not obsessive about the Ghibli stuff, I even tracked down obscure stuff like “Goshu the Cellist” on DVD 🙂
*mutters something about $300 for Ghibli videotapes that he later bought again on DVD*
Oh we have the soundtrack for Haibane too. The girl flipped out on it bigtime. Made up her own spinning dances to the music and everything. =)
One of my favorites besides Cowboy Bebop (awesome soundtrack there!) was His and Her Circumstances. FLCL was just too bizarre.
I wish I had more money to spend on anime. Some really great storytelling there, and some of it obviously influences Japanese game design. However, I think a lot of anime is not ideal for typical American tastes. A lot of times you have to have some patience in enjoying the story for its own sake. You see this in Haibane Renmei where the show seems to just be floating along until things start falling together in the later episodes.
That said, Haibane Renmei is a really great series. The way the whole topic is handled is superb. The allegory is amazing and well done, not very heavy-handed as these things sometimes tend to be.
Out of all the titles mentioned here, I think Grave of the Fireflies is perhaps one of the best. It’s not a pick-me-up movie, though, so keep that in mind. It’s one of those movies you just have to see to really appreciate, so I won’t say more here.
Out of the shows not mentioned here, I’ll have to give a nod to Ghost in the Shell, the series. The first movie moves a bit slow, but the series is wonderful. And, if you get a chance to pick up the manga version that started it all, it’s great. In short, the series deals with a lot of very deep philosophical issues dealing with the future. If we can replace 99%+ of our body with cyberware, what really makes us human? What happens when most people have most of their sensory organs replaced with cyberware, and that cyberware can be compromised? What happens when your brain is essentially a computer with 24/7 connection to the internet? Can a “normal” guy keep up with cybered-up people in a dangerous law-enforcement job? Absolutely fascinating to watch, even if it tends to devolve into a bit too much talking sometimes. But, they do have cool fights and car chases to make up for it. 😉 This is one of the few shows where the dub version is about as good as the subtitled (sub) version; about on par with Cowboy Bebop’s dub version.
My thoughts,
I’ve never gotten around to seeing Haibane Renmei. I think I should.
The only anime I’ve watched recently and can recommend is Revolutionary Girl Utena. It’s deeply flawed, of course (what isn’t?). Sometimes the low animation budget shows. It’s wonderfully bizarre and paces itself well. If you don’t mind talk as opposed to exploding cars.
In short, anime is just somebody else’s TV. It’s accordingly got good parts, bad parts, and definite influence on Japan’s games.
-Wuh Fuh
I’ve recently become quite a fan of Tokusatsu (literally “Special Effects”) series. These include both the old Godzilla movies and shows such as the Super Sentai series, which was adapted into Power Rangers in the US.
My absolute favorite, though, has been Kamen Rider Faiz (although the other Kamen Riders are good as well). Yes, it resembles.. Power Rangers just a bit, but in many parts of the series, only perhaps 60 seconds of each episode involves action. It’s quite a deep and inspirational series that, although it’s only available fansubbed, serves as an excellent series for adults/teens and children as well.
It’s directed excellently. Very dramatic and engaging throughout. And it’s very memorable, with one of the top soundtracks (mostly techno/instrumental) I’ve heard in a long time.
The visual design throughout is impressive, and you just really feel happy upon completing it but regret that it’s over, as you’ve really come to love the characters. And there really ISN’T a clear good and bad in this, and you never know what will happen next, just that it’ll be jawdropping. Characters who at first appear to be a 5-second extra turn out to be major players, people who you thought would be the primary villains become the heroes. The heroes become villains. People die at surprising moments and the most unanticipated things happen, but, in the end, it all fits together perfectly, and it almost never bogs down. I loved every second of it.
On a related topic, the more childish Live Action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon series wasn’t bad either and had some very realistic characters and drama, although, in the end, it sort-of fell apart near the last few episodes and doesn’t work anywhere near as well as a whole as Kamen Rider Faiz does.
If Faiz can be considered a children’s series, and I’m sure it was watched largely by children because of all the toys available, it’s arguably the best children’s series I’ve ever seen, and you really go on an amazing emotional and philosophical journey watching it, all while watching heroes in excellently designed costumes fight.
Very, very touching series as a whole.
It’s available subbed through TV Nihon.