Kemono no Souja Erin -- Screw the story pacing, I have green hair!... Huh. Now that was weird. This show should probably cut down on the filler.
This review has truly been too long in the making. From the moment I first laid eyes on this show, I got a very positive impact from watching the fairly unique graphics, the sound image and the fact that it was based on a collaboration between Production I.G. and a Nahoko Uehashi story (which was the dream team behind the superb Seirei No Moribito). Thus, I was expecting to review it somewhere down the line. Now it’s been almost six months since the show ended, and I’ve still failed at reviewing it… Until now. Partially this is, I suppose, because the show’s end doesn’t quite carry on the impact gained by the first episodes. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Kemono no Souja Erin ("Beast Player Erin" in english) is a 2009 anime that concerns the story of Erin, a girl living in a medieval setting containing a few biologically implausible animals but is otherwise free of fantastic elements, and how her life develops from happy-go-lucky mum’s girl in a peaceful peasant village into being forced to become an adult. Over 50 episodes, we follow Erin’s character development and coming of age as it intertwines with the politics of the country… Well, ideally, at least. Practically, we get 50 episodes that I can, in a charitable mood, describe as ‘dragging on a bit’. It’s an interesting concept but the execution makes it rather bloody boring at times.
Animation and Visuals: 7/10 -- Looks like a children's book, and plays like one too. A bit too much recycling for my tastes, though.
The graphics of Kemono no Souja Erin are highly stylistic artwork; like I’ve already mentioned, it brings to mind a children’s book. The backgrounds look like they’ve been done in crayons (highly skilled crayon-use, but crayons nonetheless) with their frayed edges and colouring; it’s, to say the least, an interesting touch and I applaud the animation studio for taking it in that direction. The anime also features some interesting art shift moments to represent acts of violence on-screen that wouldn’t look good for the children directly animated. These moments are highly artistic and very noticeable, being introduced so early as two to three minutes into the first episode, and are very good. Character models are also nice and varied for the most part and a wide range of backgrounds, clothing and other details are involved.
It’s just sad that there’s not always so much ‘animation’ to go with it. Kemono no Souja Erin is a massive 50 episodes and I can expect that they have a limited budget, but still, there are a few things you notice over that time, like the reuse of a few scenes, some still frames, and heavy use of flashbacks to fill air time. It’s never quite as noticeable as it was in Evangelion, though on the flip side this show never looks as good as Evangelion did at its best either.
Ultimately, Kemono no Souja Erin’s graphical impression reminds me very much of that of Detroit Metal City – objectively it’s above average at best, but they suit the ‘tone’ of the anime extremely well and I’m wrapping my head around how the *style* could have been done differently. I just wish they could have used a little less freeze-frames and recycling old graphics.
Sound: 7/10 -- A very good soundtrack and well-chosen voices. Just wish they wouldn’t sing so much.
The sound picture consists of an eastern/medieval-inspired instrumental soundtrack composed by one Sakamoto Masayuki, which I must say acquits himself fairly well. It’s not up to snuff with Kawai Kenji’s work on Seirei no Moribito, but it works. Going along with this is the voice acting, which contain roles for some twenty-odd recurring characters, almost all of whom are solid, decent jobs to go with the music, giving a bit of a low-cast tone to go with the setting. Erin’s voice may take some time to get used to, but it’s interesting how she’s able to adapt her voice to fit all three main stages of Erin’s life – even though I feel it gets a little ill-fitting near the end. Rounding up the good parts is the first OP, “Shizuku”, which is impressively catchy.
So, what’s bad about this sound? Nothing really in particular. The second OP is a bit odd, being a resigning of the first by a lady who is a bit… Atonal (I’m going to assume the studio intentionally picked a tone-deaf person to sing it to underline the wrongness in the story at that point). The singing sort of gets on my nerves a bit too –- Seirei no Moribito had one sequence where an in-universe children’s planting song was used for a backdrop once in a late episode, but Erin has practically every other episode contain a sequence with singing to a backdrop of nothing much happening onscreen and it gets tiresome after a while.
Story: 5/10 -- There's something like *too* much minute detail sometimes.
The story of Kemono no Souja Erin is a massive, 50-episode epic about the coming-of-age of Erin, the only child of a village beastinarian (like a veterinarian, except the animals are intended for eating people) called Soyon. The story starts out with the two living peacefully in a village in a oriental-medieval fantasy world, and how events conspire to force Erin to grow up from this complacent lifestyle. Without spoiling too much, Erin’s story has three main parts to signify the three most significant steps in her character growth and her relationship with two particular beasts of the wild, which runs side-by-side with a side story that concerns the growing social divide and unrest in the kingdom they live in. While the two story threads only interweave until part three, this secondary plot gets quite a lot of time devoted to it – as does quite a lot of other things that do what I’d call “building the universe”, which is a nice way of saying “spending a lot of time on things that have little to do with the actual story” – in other words, filler material.
Building the universe can actually be a good thing, in moderation, as it provides context to the events of the actual story and helps make sense of things that might otherwise become plot holes. Gemini of the Meteor is a warning example of what happens when this doesn’t happen in sufficient amounts, and even then I’m not mentioning the true bottom-feeders in doing it. Seirei no Moribito (and you just *knew* I was going to keep beating that particular comparison horse) was very good in that regards, although to listen to some it had a bit too much of it for comfort. Kemono no Souja Erin, however, is not like Gemini of the Meteor. It isn’t like Seirei no Moribito either. Oh, no, this show goes way over in the other end and overcompensates, in many was spending more time building universe than telling the actual story. The result is that not only does the show creep along way too slowly and has a pacing that could be somewhat generously compared to the movements of your average glacier, but way too many unimportant details get thrown into the mix for comfort at times. It especially becomes noticeable later on in the series as you start to think that the time for exposition and background should be over and it's time for a little pay-off... Only to get even more filler.
Yet, when the end of the story comes, it seems to me like it’s still all wrapped up a little too quickly and conveniently. A paradox, I know; but nonetheless it is contrariness that I feel sticks out and annoys me. The show spends 45 episodes being *too* detailed and that somehow leaves it with too little time to properly pace the ending: Something they may have been able to solve by cutting out a few song numbers and compressing a few episodes.
It’s also a bit of a shame since the core concept of the story is fairly decent, especially considering the target demographic. It’s not exactly world-class: The solutions to some of the problems are a bit too simple and the whole villain and his evil plan is a bit too ham-handled, but it works as a concept. It’s just a shame that the execution leaves a good bit to be desired – and that I really don’t have the time, space, memory or spoiler-insensitivity to lay out about in detail. If you haven’t seen the show you’ll just have to take it on faith that Kemono no Souja Erin’s story ends up more boring than it has any right being.
Characters: 6/10 -- A general impression of decent and believable characters, with a couple of holes that ends up ruining the overall picture.
Kemono no Souja Erin is, naturally, a character-driven story, centered on Erin. As a character, the anime certainly takes its time developing Erin’s character: With 50 episodes to take from, we can hardly call her character development anything but ‘geologic’ (like ‘organic’ character growth, but a longer scale). Like with the story, it’s really something that could have had a few episodes shaved off of it. Erin as a character is pretty interesting if a little tiresome in large doses (and this show is nothing *but* a large dose of Erin) and watching her grow is not, in itself, a bad thing. The series has a number of supporting cast too; most of them are memorable enough and get enough screen time for you not to scratch your head every time they show up, but they’re not exactly the end-all be-all of an interesting character cast. For a kid’s show cast they act generally believably and mature, however… Most of the time, and I will praise it for a general realism in their characterisation even if it robs some of them of their "joie de vivre", so to speak. There are a few non-good exceptions to this that keeps me from being too generous with this score, however.
One of the problems is the villain. I know this is supposed to be a kid’s show, but the villain is *so* obvious from the get-go that I ended up getting mildly affronted by the show’s continuing attempts at saving the suspense of the ‘hidden villain’ until the last fifteen episodes or so and refusing to state it outright. We also don’t really get much characterisation of him until the last three or so episodes, which is really a shame given that he remains the quasi-hidden obstacle for most of the show and it takes so bloody long for us to figure out *why*. Another is the side-story of a pair of bickering siblings, whose payoff of that particular character arc eventually comes off as one big “huh?!”. I mean, seriously, huh? Did they ever get to resolve their conflict in any meaningful way? No? Then what was the point?
Erin is a bit too perfect in a way, and seems to have few, if any, character flaws. Not to mention the utter implausibility of her favoured beast-lords, which are basically animalistic Deus Ex Machina – as a peddling zoologist, their biology was a source of much mockery and derisiveness from me. The biggest problem, however, are the comedy sidekicks. After showing up for one episode early on we eventually get straddled with the pair for almost the entirety of the show, which is not a good thing. Predictably and annoying, they are pretty much equivalent to Jar Jar Binks within the context of this show. They have absolutely no relevance to the story for most of it, they get way more screen time than I’m comfortable with, we don’t get rid of them, and their antics only served to frustrate me. They even receive a focus episode of their own, which I have no problem with claiming that I skipped through, anticipating (correctly) that it had no relevance whatsoever.
Ultimately, the rest of the cast just isn’t interesting and well-made to compensate for a few stains like these, and the overall impression gets pulled down a fair bit by it.
Value 6/10 -- I would actually like to see more things made like this... Perhaps a bit more competently, though.
At its core, Kemono no Souja Erin seems very much a children’s show, around the 8-13 group. The pacing, the characters, the story and pretty much everything in it seems to make it intended for children – although it has some elements that endears it to adults, mostly these are of the kind when an adult can appreciate that something new is being made as a kids’ show rather than being aimed at the adults themselves.
Like Dennou Coil, Kemono No Souja Erin is an attempt at a ‘mature’ kid’s show – if something like that can be said to exist – in that it actually has a few elements in it that will give the kids a little shock introduction to the adult world. It may seem a little trite to cynical old me at times, but it’s still a lot less trite than what most of those damn high school nostalgia series and moe panty series actually intended for the older demographic contain. So yeah, I don’t mind recommending this show, advising people to at least take a look, hoping that more of a similar sort will be made, and storing it (mentally) for the posterity, even though I have no interest in watching it again.
If you liked this show, I already mentioned Dennou Coil and will keep mentioning it till it draws a bigger crowd. And if you haven’t already seen Seirei no Moribito, I adwise you go do so too.
Enjoyment 5/10 -- ...Are we done yet? No? How many episodes left? 15?... Good grief.
As I already touched upon in the story and characters part, Kemono no Souja Erin got rather boring to me at length. I managed so far as to around 35 or so episodes before the slump really hit, but then it hit hard, as the lacking and somewhat trite story elements and the lukewarm characters weren’t really enough to grip my attention for long. I had to struggle my way through the last part of it, and looking back it was a long time back when this show was any of my high expectancy. Although an interesting story, it was drawn out too long to be truly gripping and it was never really entertaining or funny in large doses -- You can definitively say it outstayed its welcome eventually.
Total: 6/10 -- Ultimately above average, though not because of the aspects I would have *liked* for it to pull up score.
In the end, Kemono no Souja Erin is a decent show. It has good graphics, decent music, an epic story and is something of an unique show that can stand alone from most anime produced nowadays and truly claim to be different, and it will be true. Unfortunately, it is also filler-ridden, long-winded, almost too fiendishly detailed and ultimately rendered somewhat self-defeatingly boring by the very same epic story, and while the character gallery is interesting it isn’t really all that special when it comes to it.
There are no single elements in this show that can really make up for said long-windedness, and in many ways I feel a bit internally ashamed about being ‘only’ able to give this show a 6 out of 10, given its origins and what it represents when I see much of the monotony that seems to dominate much of the anime of its time. That said, that still doesn’t change the truth that this show got fairly dull with time and there were better original shows in 2009. And that’s the short of it – something Kemono no Souja Erin didn’t have the courtesy of giving us when it might have counted.
