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Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
葬送のフリーレン
2023 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationActionAdventureDramaScience FictionFantasy
After the party of heroes defeated the Demon King, they restored peace to the land and returned to lives of solitude. Generations pass, and the elven mage Frieren comes face to face with humanity's mortality. She takes on a new apprentice and promises to fulfill old friends' dying wishes. Can an elven mind make peace with the nature of life and death? Frieren embarks on her quest to find out.
4 positive1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Your friends might be overselling it. Even as an anime fan myself, most anime is mindless drivel with works that leave a lasting impression few and far between.
Hard to make a recommendation without knowing what genres you like but the recent "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" was a very well done story told from the perspective of a member of a fantasy-style adventuring party who outlived her fellow party members that reveals its tale through her memories of her friends and the changes their party's travels left behind on the lives of ordinary folk.
Cowboy Bebop (the 1998 anime series, not the dreadful recent live-action movie) and Trigun are considered classics in the space western genre, with a solid mix of drama and occasional humor.
As others have mentioned, the movies from Studio Ghibli are rightly regarded as classics, although I would personally limit that to their pre-2002 movies; their later movies have somewhat of a more mixed reception. To western audiences, Princess Mononoke is probably the most well known. If you want something less fantastical, Kiki's Delivery Service might be worth looking at.
In terms of rom-coms, I'd suggest the less well known His and Her Circumstances, despite its incompleteness. A lot of its humor and drama is conveyed through energetic visuals that wouldn't really be feasible when filming human actors.
Have you tried watching something like OddTaxi?
It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).
I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.
So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.
It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.
It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.
But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.
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I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.
There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).
But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.
Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)
You need to see Samurai Champloo if you haven't. It's twenty years old but absolutely timeless.
Reposting my comment from elsewhere here:
For something more fantastical, To Your Eternity, an adventure that makes you feel and hurt. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End for an adventure that's both young and grown-up - it only came out recently, but has instantly been acclaimed as a modern classic.
For something more childlike yet endlessly creative, Delicious in Dungeon or even Ranking of Kings.
For proper literary sci-fi (despite featuring young protagonists), From the New World (Shinsekai Yori).
For true artistic cinema despite a Japanese high-school setting, Ping Pong The Animation.
Other gems mentioned that I second: ODDTAXI (a tightly written mystery-drama despite its art) and Pluto (serious thinking sci-fi with gravitas).
There are always a few upper-tier shows coming out each year that retain an artistic, mature bent. Not very many but at least they're there.
Give Vinland Saga a go, for some gripping historical drama.
Or Bartender: Glass of God (the ongoing 2024 series), for stories in a real-world setting.
For something more fantastical, To Your Eternity, an adventure that makes you feel and hurt. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End for an adventure that's both young and grown-up - it only came out recently, but has instantly been acclaimed as a modern classic.
For something more childlike yet endlessly creative, Delicious in Dungeon or even Ranking of Kings.
For proper literary sci-fi (despite featuring young protagonists), From the New World (Shinsekai Yori).
For true artistic cinema despite a Japanese high-school setting, Ping Pong The Animation.
Other gems mentioned that I second: ODDTAXI (a tightly written mystery-drama despite its art) and Pluto (serious thinking sci-fi with gravitas).
There are always a few upper-tier shows coming out each year that retain an artistic, mature bent. Not very many but at least they're there.
Your Name (2016, Makoto Shinkai) and Ping Pong the Animation (2014, Masaaki Yuasa) are both IMO top notch (and the creators are active and have extensive oeuvres). The Shape of Voice (2016, Kyoto Animation (RIP)) was also much acclaimed. Of these, I recommend Ping Pong the most (and Yuasa's other works as well).
I suppose for more sci-fi/fantasy, Rebuild of Evangelion (2007-2021) might be interesting, although to me, its popularity in Japan and why the retelling was made is actually more interesting to me than the works themselves. It didn't win any particular awards or acclaim, but I was a fan of the incredibly stylish manga series, and I personally enjoyed the Blame! (2017, Hiroyuki Shesita) CGI anime film for those into the Japanese post-cyber-apocalypse sci-fi aesthetic.
I think these days, the economics of anime has driven more interesting work into series rather than features. Recently some memorable ones I've enjoyed are Steins;Gate (2011-2015, White Fox), Devilman: Crybaby (2018, Studio SARU), Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022, Trigger), Pluto (2023, M2), and Frieren (2023, Madhouse).
This is the part I found most interesting about the first few episodes of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" anime. The main character is an elf. In this world elves are rare so she hasn't see another in 100s of years. Time for her passes differently than humans. She's got 1000s of years so for her, spending 10yrs in some library researching a hobby topic is not a big commitment. For her human friends it would be a large portion of their life. She commits to multi-year projects easily (10 years of a 5000 year life is 1/500th of your life vs a human where it's more like 1/8th). And, she watches her human friends pass away. Societies form and collapse. Etc...