Hello and welcome everyone to the next season of Throwback Thursday, Haibane Renmei! I know nothing of this show going into it and after 1 episode I can comfortably say: What the hell have I gotten myself into? So without further ado lets dive into the 1st episode!
Starting off, Haibane Renmei looks… dated. And fuzzy. But mostly dated! I’m unsure how much of this is just artifacting from how I am watching it and how much is the show itself, so for now I will give it the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, it has the clear look of a show caught in the transition from cel to digital. The story and atmosphere calling for the more personal touch of paint yet suffering from the cheap and familiar look of the first digital animations. This isn’t to say it doesn’t have its moments, Haibane Renmei end’s on a particularly gruesome scene that shocked me out of my preconceptions about the show. But the coloring of the characters in this first episode felt flat and lifeless at times. My hope is that some strong editing and a good narrative can make up for this moving forward.
Speaking of the narrative I have to ask, what the hell is this show? My initial impressions were some kind of modern fantasy slice of life. The kind of light hearted thing where we watch the day to day of a bunch of angel girls. And in my defense for this impression, the tone of Haibane Renmei starts off rather light hearted. A bunch of little angel girls cleaning and do day jobs, riding a bike, etc. Not fantastically pure of course, not with the cigarettes and some of the jokes, but the sort of peaceful lives you expect from an SoL. But there was something darker sprinkled throughout this fun day of cocoons and wire-frame halos. Small tidbits of world building, scenes or lines that something wasn’t quite right. And it all exploded in the last 5 or so minutes of the episode.
This is the scene that changed Haibane Renmei for me. It was so… unexpectedly visceral. From the bruises in the back and the biting of the thumb to the blood-soaked wings and after care. It completely changed the tone of the show. Revealing that the lighthearted stuff was a front more than anything else. That, when combined with the opening falling segment, the inner cocoon and the imagery of a wire-frame halo, indicates there is more here than meets the eye.
This all begs the questions: Where does it go from here? What is going to happen? Is this some kind of dystopian world where only angels are left? But if so then why did they say they can’t leave this town/area? Are they actually dead and this is some kind of purgatory or is it an experiment of some kind by evil overlords we have yet to meet? What the hell are these cocoons? As you can see, I have a lot of questions. I am engaged, I am curious, I want to know more about this world and Haibane Renmei’s story. Hopefully it answers them for me and validates my curious. It would be pretty upsetting for all of those questions to come to naught.
So when all is said and done, how was the first episode of Haibane Renmei? The answer: It was weird. But a good kind of weird. The other authors here have compared it to Serial Experiments Lain in our conversations and I can see why. Hopefully this is a bit less abstract than that but if it has even half the effect I will at least finish it engaged. Hopefully now that we are past introductions next week can give us a bit of the meat to go along with this opening appetizer. See you then to find out!
Ooo, I’m excited for this. I love this series.
Awww yeah, one of my favorite anime gets covered here at last! This is one of my favorite anime of all time, and I know Psgels really liked it too! I’m curious to see what your thoughts on it are. Yeah, the animation is kind of grimy for its time period, but the story and characters more than make up for it in spades IMHO.
Always felt this one benefited from its visual simplicity, which helped ground it and there last episode or so had that clicking moment where I ended up just feeling the show as a whole at that one point.
Of course it looks dated, it’s almost twenty years old.
This is the show that made me an anime fan, so it will always have a special place in my heart.
When I voted for it, Escaflowne was still in the lead. I’m glad that Haibane caught up and won the tie-break (whatever it was), although I wouldn’t have minded Escaflowne either.
There are shows from the 90s that look better than this. Being old doesn’t mean it has to look bad. Shows like Cowboy Bebop and Berserk 1997 are evidence enough of that.
Of course Im giving the benefit of the doubt to Haibane Renmei as I have heard that the Blurays were poorly encoded, though apparently they are doing a digital remaster of it soon.
Every rip of Haibane Renmei I’ve seen has had that muddy look, be it DVD or (upscaled) Blu-ray. Shows were produced at standard definition in the early 2000s, sometimes by teams who had very little experience with digital compositing; even so, most of them look better than this. Haibane will probably be fuzzy forever, but to its credit, it’s one of the best anime to suffer from that issue as much as it does.