Welcome everyone, to another episode of Fire Hunter! This week was… It was a disappointment, to put it lightly. I’m really starting to lose faith. Why? Well lets talk about that.
Now I really hate to keep beating this horse every week, but Fire Hunter keeps finding new ways to disappoint. Yes, the animation was still trash. And yes, the direction was largely uninspired. But this week saw the melt also extend to the detail. Flat smoke with no linework or details, just a shape filled brown. The composite falling apart as Kanata and Touko look like they don’t even belong in the environment. Characters in the foreground, not the background mind you, with just no detail whatsoever. Legitimately incomplete drawings and fucking pop-in. Pop-in, from an animation. Now I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes with Fire Hunter, but clearly something is going down in their pipeline. Because Yasunori Miyazawa, from shows like Ping Pong and even better cuts from this very show, is far better than this. Easily some of his most disappointing work for me.
Getting into the episode proper, I found it to very exceedingly dull. There was some action early on with the Dragon, yes. But it was presented so poorly, both via the animation and direction, that I wasn’t engaged by it at all. And once that was over, the rest of the episode felt more like an info-dump then anything else. Koushi’s time in the library with the books didn’t really answer any questions, instead just asking new ones. Some it was interesting, sure. The lore about the Sister Gods and the tidbits about when Flame Fiends came into being continue to cast doubt on the Divine Clans. We are getting a lot of information about Fire Hunter’s world. But it’s the characters that are going to make the show worth watching. And they haven’t gotten any attention.
It’s a shame, because I do actually like Fire Hunter’s world. The stuff about Flame Fiends coming into being, the differences between Guardians and Fiends, the idea that the Sickle is the only way to get the fire juice thus explaining the importance of it being returned. Fire Hunter has a good story/setup here, it just needs to actually tell that story. For instance, even with this new information, we don’t really know what it means. What are Guardian Deities, why do they ward/watch over villages at all? Is it because the Divine Clans set them to the task, the same way the Spiders are pushing them off of it? If that’s the case however, are the Divine Clans really actually… bad? And what exactly is the difference between Skyfire and Fiendfire? What are the forest people and why do they look like trees? Please, give me something.
Aside from that though, there really isn’t much to talk about. Fire Hunter seems to be laying some groundwork for something involving the Mother in the mansion. Apparently Koushi recognizes the scent of her perfume from somewhere, though where we don’t yet know. We also learn about Okinawa, and how ships visit it every year on some ceremonial “We tried to find other humans” journey. Hopefully we get to actually go there or that tidbit becomes useless, but for now it’s expanding the world a bit. There was also the Treefolk who apparently live in the forests unafraid of the Flame Fiends, bringing medicine to villages an such. I’d really like to know more about them, as well as how they know so much. Actually that’s my position for the whole episode, I just want to know about the characters more then the world at this point.
So yeah, short post this week for an uninspiring episode. All in all it was a very dull week for me. Fire Hunter has this interesting world that is being dragged down by dry exposition and melting production. If only, and I understand how unreasonable a request this is but still, it looked more like the OP. That’s a striking, beautiful visual style that fits the series perfectly. It doesn’t even need to move much! Just use the same brighter colors and sharper lines with crosshatch shading. Then take some of that information we got in the library and instead of throwing it at us via uninspired narration, show us as Touko travels the land towards the capital or as Koushi learns about the transgressions of the Divine Clans. Really just… give me anything more then a narration. Please.
I actually rather liked the episode. The animation was indeed terrible, of course, but that’s kind of to be expected at this point (and the stills don’t look too bad imo, so outside of the awkward action scenes the visuals are fairly tolerable). And the Kenji Kawai soundtrack is excellent, which brings a lot of atmosphere to scenes in which the visuals were not up to par or where simply not a lot happened.
As for the plot and characters, I thought quite a lot actually happened this episode: Touko & co escaped from the dragon guardian and met the tree folk, and Koushi made significant progress with his experiments, learned a lot about the world (even if much of the information was rather ambiguous) and has clearly fallen hard for Kira. It’s true that the characters aren’t the most interesting (as a 9-year old girl, Touko can’t really do much, so she’s mostly been an observer for now, and Koushi is rather bland as well), but both of their arcs are moving in an interesting direction (with Touko learning about the world outside the capital and Koushi being dragged into the conflict between the divine clans and the spiders in the capital), so the overall direction of the series seems fine to me.
Interestingly, for me it’s actually Kaina that I’ve lost interest in (and have therefore dropped for now): I like its setting, but other than that there isn’t really anything that has captured my interest. The backgrounds look nice from time to time, but the CG character animation remains awkward. And the characters and story are really dull imo – just your typical fantasy conflict in a different garb. Which is not to say that The Fire Hunter is excellent or anything (the production is awful, and the characters are indeed not very interesting so far), but I’m still enjoying it for now.