The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

For ten years, elf mage Frieren traveled with Himmel the hero, Heiter the priest, and Eisen the dwarf warrior as they quested to destroy the demon king. At the end of their journey, Frieren set out on her own, not quite understanding how differently time flows for her versus her human companions. Reunited after fifty years only to see them wither and die, Frieren begins to ponder the nature of connections at a time when it's already too late to say goodbye.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is based on a manga of the same name by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

The first question I always ask when we get these feature-length premiers is “Did this need to be the length of a movie?” For some like Oshi no Ko, the answer is yes. That story needed 90 minutes to deliver its prologue. Now with Frieren, I find myself caught between Yes and No. On the one hand, I enjoyed every single minute of this 2-hour special, lost in its lush artistry, melancholy atmosphere, and refreshingly grounded fantasy setting. On the other, all of that was delivered just fine in the first quarter chunk, and the rest of this lengthy premiere is more of the same.

Not that that's a bad thing. Frieren is an exceptionally pleasant, enchanting viewing experience, whether it's for 25 minutes or a hundred. The story of a nigh-immortal elf trying to reforge connections and memories with her old, mortal adventuring party before (or tragically after) their deaths is a great hook, and it's delivered here with expert execution. While there's a deep, personal sadness to Frieren's current journey and how it echoes her first one, it's delivered in a remarkably quiet way – lingering glances to the sky, repeated phrases that only resonate with her later, and a myriad of little details that communicate her grief and regrets without needing to hammer you over the head with it. If you've ever lost someone and wished you'd appreciated your time with them more, there's guaranteed to be a moment somewhere in here that'll make you cry. Combined with the episodic nature of her travels and the lackadaisical pacing of it all, it makes for a unique kind of fantasy; rife with the history and magic of a high-flying adventure, but grounded in a sense of lived-in realism that makes it all the more impacting.

That world is illustrated and animated beautifully. The many villages, towns, woods, and ruins that Frieren travels through are rendered with wonderful detail and warm lighting. Character animation is expressive, complementing and enhancing the writing during dialogue and bringing the characters to life through the many wordless montages scattered across the special. The sparse sequences of magic are jaw-dropping in their style and intensity, capturing the majesty or danger in a way that should clash with the much quieter status quo, but only enhance it. The music by Evan Call is used perfectly, swelling at just the right moments while backing off and letting the soft-spoken vocal performances carry you through conversations. Even if the story and characters weren't as engaging as they are, these episodes are so nice to look at and listen to that they'd be worth the price of admission on their own.

It's altogether a fantastic introduction, whether you watch it all in one sitting or spread things out across multiple viewings, which in a way is the best of both worlds. Everything you need to know about the appeal of the series is there in the first quarter, and everything after that is much the same, slowly developing a rapport between Frieren and her apprentice while expanding the world and extrapolating the elf's history in some surprising and touching ways. This is an easy and immediate recommendation, and if it keeps this up, could make for one of the best shows of the year.

This is unheard of – I don't think I've ever seen a Preview Guide start with a show this strong. It wasn't a foregone conclusion based on the quality of the source material, either. Although the manga of Frieren is exquisite, that is no guarantee that the anime would do it justice, but I am pleased to report that it does. That said, if you don't enjoy stories that make you cry, this may not be the show for you, because I haven't cried so hard over an anime since Sunday Without God.

Like that show, this one deals with the inescapable sadness of loss. Frieren herself is a long-lived elf, a member of the hero's party who defeated the evil that threatened the world. Once their mission is done, the party splits up and goes their separate ways, and although Frieren intellectually knows that she's likely to outlive her friends, she doesn't understand. That means that when, after fifty years, she returns to find them, she's taken aback by how they've aged, especially the hero Himmel. And as we all know, with age eventually comes death, and that's not something she was prepared for. For the first time, Frieren realizes that she's going to be alone for most of her life, and that's very different from choosing to travel solo.

After Himmel's death, time is marked in the years since his passing. This is a subtle way of telling us how his loss continues to affect Frieren, and everywhere she goes, she is reminded of the time she spent with him and the rest of their party. When she reconnects with the party's priest, also a human, he asks her to take care of Fern, the girl he adopted. While he initially brought the orphan home because that's what Himmel would have done, there's a sense that he knows how Frieren must be feeling, and having her care for Fern is his way of showing her that life goes on. She doesn't have to be alone, and maybe Fern will remind her of the good parts of Himmel and the others, even after they are gone.

This is the kind of sadness that creeps up on you. There are silly moments and beautiful ones to balance things out, but all of a sudden you'll find tears coursing down your face and not even fully understand why. It doesn't feel emotionally manipulative, just organically honest about how it feels to yearn to hear someone's voice one last time or to feel them with you once again.

Like the Little Prince said, everything is ephemeral. Frieren reminds us that what we carry in our hearts doesn't have an expiration date.

Two seasons back, I commented in the Preview Guide that it wasn't fair to compare Oshi no Ko's feature-length premiere episode to other premieres of the season. After all, you can do much more with the story in two hours than you can in thirty minutes. And while the same thing should be taken into consideration with Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, I want to be clear: Even if I was judging just the first half-hour, I'd still be giving this one a solid five stars.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is one of those rare works of fiction that repeatedly, relentlessly strikes right at the heart of what it means to be human. Despite the magic, demons, and all the other fantasy trappings, it is a deep dive into concepts like mortality, regret, inspiration, and the power of change at its core. This is the story of one singular moment—a moment that, for Frieren, re-contextualized everything that had come before and created a new path into the future that she never could have imagined.

Frieren is an immortal elf. She has seen countless people come and go over the course of her 1000 years on the planet. Within her skewed view of time, a human's lifespan might as well be a mayfly's. Yet, Himmel's death hurts her in a way she never expected. They spent “a mere 10 years together” (as she puts it) but that doesn't change the fact that she could have spent another 50 getting to know him. She just never did. It didn't seem important—right up until the moment that she realized what she had missed out on and, now, could never have.

The tragic beauty of this story is that, as Frieren journeys on, she comes to realize how much those 10 years spent on her adventure to fight the Demon King and save the world have changed not only who she is but who she wants to be. Each step of her journey, especially once Fern enters the picture, makes her realize that she did know Himmel in all the ways that matter—and that by honoring him and remembering him, she can still grow closer to him.

Frieren is a person fighting to understand the world in a way that goes against her very nature. Her attempts at making a human connection are clumsy and often misguided, yet, at the same time, pure and honest. Her journey teaches us about ourselves and the bittersweet beauty of our own fleeting existence. It hits hard and I can't count how many times these first few episodes brought me to the edge of tears. Make no mistake, this anime is something special, and we are blessed to be able to watch it.

I was almost anxious over beginning this fall's Preview Guide marathon with Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, but not because I was worried it'd be bad. Rather, everything about it, from its melancholy story to its lush production values, seemed so perfectly keyed into what I've been looking for in new series that it would make it that much harder for the other shows of the season to measure up. Well, I can't speak to the quality of the season's other shows just yet, but I can say with absolute confidence that Frieren is a hell of a tough act to follow. Even if Studio Madhouse didn't knock this adaptation out of the park, the source material is just rife with so much promise that I can't envision a reality in which this show wasn't, at a bare minimum, really good.

I'm already inclined to like stories that ask, “What happens to the gang of heroes once the big quest is finished and the day is saved?” I'm also very much inclined to enjoy elegiac but beautiful meditations on grief, time, and the inevitable loss pain of loss that comes with loving others (I won't tell you how many hours Teenage James spent sobbing like a baby while he watched The Fountain on repeat). Frieren, then, is a case of two great flavors tasting even better when you smush them together, and it comes with the bonus of making you reflect on all of the existential dread and looming sadness that comes with growing older and at least attempting to come to terms with all of the ennui that comes packaged with the increasingly achy joints and muscles!

I might be doing a terrible job of selling Frieren as the lovely anime that it is, but I mean it when I say that I was so damned happy that this show was able to make me so damned sad. My favorite thing about this first batch of episodes is that it doesn't reduce itself to the easiest narrative shortcuts, or any other cheap tricks, to get the pathos flowing. My biggest worry would be that the titular elven mage's aloof nature would force her into the role of a blank-slate perspective character who simply stands by and observes a bunch of sad stories about the lives of the people who pass her by on her endless life's journey.

Thankfully, the series does a great job of making her a deeply empathetic and relatable person, one whose very non-human perspective of time and relationships doesn't make her any less caring or vulnerable. It gives the relationships she forms with characters like Himmel or Fern real stakes because we know that the aging and the inevitable passing of the human cast isn't just going to be drawn out for the sake of making the audience care. Frieren herself cares, even if she can't show it in the same way that her more mortal companions might, and that makes all the difference. I'm absolutely in love with this one, and I cannot wait to see where Frieren's story takes her.