Wolf's Rain

Episodes 11-12

One of my favorite filmmakers of all time is David Lynch, and the predictable go-to shortcut for describing most of his projects is “dreamlike." It's become a cliché to refer to basically any work of art that trades in surreal imagery or fractured storytelling, but in the case of Lynch's filmography, it is difficult to come up with as fitting an alternative. Anyone that has seen Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, or the all-time classic television masterpiece, Twin Peaks, can attest to how watching a David Lynch piece really does resemble the paradoxically incoherent yet perfectly sound mechanisms of memories, fears, and instinctual sense-shaping that dreams are made up of.

This isn't just me making an excuse to talk up one of my favorite directors, I promise. David Lynch's work has historically been incredibly popular in Japan, and anyone that has ever played a game like Deadly Premonition, or literally anything Hideo Kojima has ever produced, can tell you that the influence of Lynch and artists like him can still be seen today in Japanese media of all kinds. Watching “Vanishing Point” and “Don't make me blue” gave me strong flashbacks to the early days of parsing through Lynch's movies, struggling to reconcile the confusion and anxiety that the movies inspired with the undeniable beauty of them that kept me coming back over the years. Wolf’s Rain is nowhere near as tightly constructed and emotionally devastating as David Lynch's best work (at least not yet), but the end result of the show's unrepentant adherence to its own peculiar dream logic still has that alluring affect that keeps drawing me in, even when the cracks in the façade threaten to bring the whole thing crashing down.

”Vanishing Point” and “Don't make me blue” are supposed to be where all Wolf’s Rain's disparate story threads come together, just like I've been asking for all these weeks, and yet the show's utter disinterest in making “sense” in a traditional way leaves me sometimes feeling as frustrated as I am enchanted by its boldness. Cher's position as Darcia's hostage feels completely contrived; Hubb's search for Cher has taken a dozen episodes for him to get a single, very outdated lead; the obtuse political landscape of the city's nobles is only just now kind of coming into clarity (The one in charge is called Lady Jagura, I think, and there's a guy called Lord Orkham who dies, which is bad, and all of this is somehow related to the Darcia Clan, the Darcia guy, along with the Curse of Darcia, and so now things are even more intense, I guess?). All of this is Very Serious Business, except none of it is actually all that important, because what really matters here, what has always mattered, is the wolves: What they fight for, what they will die for, who will fight for them, and what they stand to lose.

They lose Cheza, for one; the flower maiden offers herself up to Darcia when he nearly kills the Good Boy Pack, so now the pack is utterly lost. They find some allies to help them along, however, most notably Blue. Ever since Cheza revealed her half-wolf bloodline, Blue's magical wolf powers have awoken, so now she possesses the ability to project a human form and all that jazz. Her joining the group is easily my favorite development of the story so far, even if it happens just as haphazardly as anything else in Wolf’s Rain has, and not just because she can finally add some more feminine representation to our pack of Good Boys. Toboe might be the green-eared one of the group, but Blue didn't even know she was a wolf until a couple of days ago, and the struggle she has reconciling her new lot in life with her more domesticated instincts offers a great new perspective to the cast dynamic. Plus, the way she tolerated Hige's weird-ass flirting was cute and admirable—I only hope she doesn't get relegated to the token romantic interest role.

The group's other new allies also offer the best scene of this pair of episodes, one that has nothing to do with the increasingly over-the-top melodrama Darcia plot, or Hubb and Quent's utterly redundant subplot, or whatever the heck Cher is up to. Instead, it comes after a sketchy pair of human/wolf traffickers catch on to the packs trail, and very nearly instigate some bloodshed, until our Good Boys (and Girl) run into an elderly couple living on the outskirts of town. The wife has no problem treating them with kindness and courtesy, though the husband is quick to draw his gun, somehow seeing through their guise and recognizing them as dangerous strays (cue that insanely earwormy theme song, which has been playing on a loop in my head since I started reviewing this show). Needless to say, there is a tense standoff, though Kiba's diplomatic skills win out, and the scene culminates in a funny bit where the old man plays senile and pretends he shot the dogs.

There's something about this scene that captures everything I've loved about Wolf’s Rain so far, as well as why I'm able to overlook the show's inconsistencies when push comes to shove. It was maybe exaggerating when I said it had nothing at all to do with the plot, since the chance encounter is what gives the wolves the idea to track Darcia and Cheza down at the castle to the west, but the impact of the scene is a purely emotional one. Here we have five wolves who have all been scarred in one way or another by the humans' efforts to exterminate them, and yet after all of this there still remain tiny oases of human compassion. Blue gets a long overdue pet from the elderly man, and the woman reveals that leaving the cities to explore the world before they die may have been a mistake. They've seen so much pain and decay, and it's difficult to even know what it is for.

Earlier in the episode, a broken nobleman cradled the body of his ethereal lover, his face distorted in inhuman anguish. A girl who is also a flower sings a lullaby to nobody in particular. Later, a group of thugs nearly lost their minds when confronted with the glistening fangs and sharp claws of the humans they were about to kill. In the end, a pack of lost and nearly broken wolves find the small scrap of respite by a trailer parked at the very edge of a wasteland that resembles a world that we might have recognized, once upon a time. These stark, expressionistic scenes don't seem like they could possibly fit together in any reasonable sense, and one could easily argue that they don't. All of that said, though, these glimpses into the world of Wolf’s Rain linger even after the episodes are done, twisting around and tumbling in and out of order until the “plot” that holds them altogether ceases to matter so much.

In that way, it's kind of like waking up, and straining to remember a most strange and melancholy dream.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Who's a Good Wolf!? With Blue a semi-official member of the group, I may just have to change the pack's name to… I don't know, “The Good Wolf Pack?” Either way, the poor animals got shot and left for dead this week, so they all get a head pat for their troubles. Special shout out to Tsume, who actually helped Kiba in talking down the old man with the gun, instead of eating him. That's a good Tsume.

• The Weird Boy award goes to Hige, who just straight up admits to Blue that he can never successfully seal the deal with a lady wolf because whenever he's about to take a trip to the Bone Zone he gets the urge to take a leak. That's just… good for you, Hige. I guess.

• Then again, after explaining his incontinence issues, Blue responds to Hige with a proposal to just run away together to wherever, so I guess his technique of being “gross… but nice” has something going for it?

• Hubb and Quent literally spend the majority of these two episodes getting drunk and complaining about women. We also get a flashback reveling Quent's tragic backstory of having his whole family killed by wolves… which we could have guessed from Episode 1. We're almost halfway through this series now, and I'm an desperately hoping these two characters end up serving some kind of point eventually.

Wolf’s Rain is currently streaming on Funimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.