The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Tale of Outcasts

Wisteria is an orphan girl living in a corner of the British Empire at the end of the 19th century. Her life is desolate and bleak–until she encounters Marbas, a powerful but equally lonely immortal being with a furry appearance, hounded by hunters. Together, Wisteria and Marbas roam the Empire–populated by humans and human-like beasts–in search of a place where they can live together in peace.

The tale of outcasts is based on Makoto Hoshino's manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

I do not dislike A Tale of Outcasts. However, I do not like it either. I nothing it. I watched the episode, doing everything in my power to attend and engage the whole time, and yet I am hard-pressed to mention anything I like or dislike about it.

I think I might feel nothing because I didn't get a sense anyone involved in the project felt anything either. It was all terribly perfunctory and passionless, competent but disinterested. Wisteria is a perfectly nice little anime girl who is subjected to a terrible fate, while Marbas is a typical immortal who has seen everything and feels disinterested in the world. That is, until he meets a sweet little girl who can see her. The world is just so cruel⁠—the priest who took Wisteria in beats her and sells her to a man who gets off on torturing children to death. Also, her estranged brother is a demon-hunting priest, who is working at cross-purposes but isn't evil. You can tell, because he's pretty, and bad people are ugly.

The script and animation are neither laughably bad nor particularly good. Things go a bit too easily and there's a couple moments of animation janky enough that it made me laugh out loud, but it's never egregiously bad. It's just not very interesting either. It feels unsure of how to build tension without veering into shock value. But then again, those weren't very shocking either.

Okay, I think I've talked about this enough to justify the line on my invoice. Low effort anime gets a low effort review, I guess.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

It probably won't surprise you that I have a very soft spot for Victorian melodrama. I'm talking about the stuff written during the Victorian era, stories where the progression of events starts with a kind but impoverished girl visiting her friends at their high-class beachside hotel when it catches on fire, and she has to climb out the window wearing her night dress to save everybody only to be kidnapped and almost immediately upon completing her rescue mission. (That's an actual book, by the way: A Hoyden's Conquest by Mrs. Georgie Sheldon and all that happens in the first couple of chapters.) The Tale of the Outcasts makes an honest attempt to tap into the Victorian wellspring of imagination for melodrama. Wisteria is the sort of fragile beauty that winsome orphan heroines are made of, and she is naturally at the mercy of the villainous priest. He makes little Wisteria beg on the streets outside the church, apparently in a relatively affluent area judging by the women's clothes. (The distinctive drawn-back look of the full skirts places the setting sometime in the 1870s or 1880s.) But naturally, he is not running an orphanage; he traffics children into sexual slavery.

With this as its base, the entrance of both demon Marbas and Wisteria's long-lost brother Snow, who is, naturally, a demon hunter now, feels very much par for the course. They managed to show up just when Wisteria most needed to be rescued, with Marbas getting there first and presumably starting a sort of cat-and-mouse game between them as Snow attempts to reunite with his formerly missing sister and vanquish the demon who freed her from the clutches of a child torturing and murdering madman. Without the supernatural angle, this could almost be Moriarty the Patriot, and I feel like that might have been more fun to watch. That's because this has all of the elements of a good melodrama but fails to recognize that that is what it set up; it takes its ludicrous plot twists too seriously, and it doesn't even have the sense that it is playing a game with its characters that Moriarty the Patriot does. When Wisteria gives up her vision to form a pact with Marbas, it just feels like torment heaped upon torment for this kid, not to mention a very good way to make Marbas feel bad about his inability to rescue her sooner.

Having read the first volume of the manga this is based on, the manga works better. This isn't what I call a terrible story, but its adaptation makes it feel too much like it's relishing the more torturous aspects of its story, making it unrelentingly dark. Stories about girls with supernatural guardians/potential romantic interests who are otherworldly have worked in the past; You need only look at The Ancient Magus' Bride and The Girl from the Other Side for examples. But The Tale of the Outcasts isn't up to their level, and while it may get there, this episode isn't particularly encouraging.

It's looking to be a big year for Beauty and the Beast stories, huh? Next season has Sacrificial Princess & the King of Beasts, along with the much-awaited return of The Ancient Magus' Bride. You've got a full plate this year if you like seeing young girls standing alongside foreboding monster men. Unfortunately, if you wanted an interesting story or characters to go along with that imagery, you're going to have to wait for the next season.

This premiere had one job: make me care about Wisteria and Marbas' relationship. And it failed to ever move the needle on that front, mainly because both characters have little going for them outside of basic, broad archetypes. Wisteria is the naïve waif who's tortured by the cruel world around her. While that's a sympathetic place to start, it gets less effective when she's constantly encountering cackling villains whose personality is “I love to torture children” and nothing else. Marbas is a stoic demon bored with immortality who takes a liking to Wisteria because...well, honestly, I couldn't tell you why. I guess he likes the companionship? Or he feels sorry for her? The dialogue they share is so generic – and often laden with exposition – that there's never a natural rapport between them. By the time both parties sacrifice body parts to save each other, I felt like I'd missed an entire episode where the two bonded enough for this to mean anything to me.

There is, at least, room for improvement. With Wisteria and Marbas' pact now sealed, there's room for their characters to grow as they go on whatever journey they're setting out on. With how fast this first episode rushed through its introduction, I wouldn't be surprised if things get better now that the origin is out of the way. We've already established the requisite demon hunters as future antagonists, one of them being Wisteria's older brother, so there's room for some juicy drama there. The opening promises there will be other demon pact duos, which may turn into Devil Digimon battles. That could be fun! But I don't have my hopes up because nothing about this premiere felt like it had any idea of how to capitalize on its ideas.

I'm certainly not curious to find out, though. The writing here is just too clumsy and vacuous to elicit the emotions it wants. The animation is serviceable but lacks any sense of magic or darkness, leaving us with many mundane shots of a furry and a little girl just standing around. Even in a comparatively mild season, this is too underwhelming to stick with.

James Beckett
Rating:

There was one moment in particular during The tale of outcasts premiere that had me feeling really confused, despite how much I was enjoying it. One minute, the tragic little orphan girl, Wisteria, was having a chat with her invisible furry demon friend, Marbas, about the time he got to see Shakespeare perform live at the Globe because Marbas is immortal in addition to being tall, invisible, and terminally detached from the world around him. Then, I look away for one second, and suddenly two completely different dudes wander the streets and shoot some freaky lizard monster thing until its head explodes. For a second, I thought we'd flashed back to Marbas' visit to the Globe, and all I could think was, “Man, the anime version of Hamlet sure hits different, huh?” Then, I realized that, in addition to introducing the sad tale of Wisteria and the somewhat complicated rules of materialization and exchange that govern Marbas' existence, Tale of Outcasts also introduced a team of clandestine demon hunters, one of whom is the long-lost brother of Wisteria. This was before the show revealed that the comically evil priest who runs the orphanage has been selling kids into all sorts of terrible slave markets and that Wisteria's new “master” is a supremely deranged child-murderer aristocrat who himself has made a pact with a different demon.

A lot is going on in this first episode of Tale of Outcasts, is what I'm getting at; a lot more than I was expecting. Yes, the show presents us with the “Terribly Sad Orphan Gets Whisked Away from Her Dire Fate by Mysterious, Magical Benefactor” setup. Still, the emotional arc that Marbas is required to go through to get to the point where he wants to do the whisking feels just a skosh rushed, especially since the show has to constantly be explaining the hows and whys of demon contracts and physiology so that we understand why Wisteria has to willingly give up her eyesight to give Marbas the ability to take her in without his own body crumbling to dust, and so on. Nevermind that those demon hunter guys get nothing to do other than be introduced before the credits roll, and you end up with a premiere that feels like it should have been a two-parter if only to give some time for Wisteria and Marbas' dynamic to develop more organically.

That said, I'm certainly intrigued to know more! There's the usual capital-D “Discourse” to be had about the asterisks you might need to apply to the power dynamics of a traumatized child being taken in by her immortal, inhuman savior, especially if their relationship ever takes a romantic turn, but Marbas is a cool character that I want to learn more about, and his affection for Wisteria has not strayed from the path of wholesomeness yet. The tale of outcasts has my curiosity; we must now see if it can secure my attention for the rest of the seas.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Look, I know this episode is supposed to be some beautifully tragic tale of two unlikely friends who—despite one being human and one being a demon—decide to live their lives together. But for me, it was just way too over-the-top detailing Wisteria's suffering. Frankly, I don't want to see a child beaten repeatedly—even in animated fiction. Watching Wisteria get tortured constantly by the priest that's supposed to be caring for her and then basically hunted for sport by the crazed noble who wanted to do unspeakable things to her... it's just not something I need in my life.

Of course, I do understand that this constant emotional assault is done to make us feel sorry for Wisteria—and to explain why Marbus would change his way of thinking to the point that he'd risk his immortal life—but that could have been accomplished by simply doing a little visual storytelling by showing her bruises and through the final scene alone. Or, to put it another way, things can be left to the imagination and still work.

The constant child torture also acts as a character assassination for Marbus. I think we're supposed to like and even feel sorry for him. But the fact that he stands there blankly and watches time and again as she suffers—well, let's just say any sympathy I might have had is lost. Oh sure, in the end, he risks it all to save her, but it's his fault the situation got that bad in the first place. He had the chance to take her soul—to make her his companion—and passed on it. He has long since crossed the moral event horizon, and there is no coming back.

With the tragedy porn tone set by this first episode—and the dislike I have for Marbus as a character—I have zero interest in watching even a minute more of this anime. If I hadn't been watching this for work, I would have shut this off halfway through. I'm sure for some people, this anime will hit them just as intended. But as for me, I am not one of those people.