The Spring 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Spice & Wolf: merchant meets the wise wolf

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The life of a traveling merchant is a lonely one, a fact with which Kraft Lawrence is well acquainted. Wandering from town to town with just his horse, cart, and whatever wares have come his way, the peddler has pretty well settled into his routine—that is, until the night Lawrence finds a wolf goddess asleep in his cart. Taking the form of a fetching girl with wolf ears and a tail, Holo has wearied of tending to harvests in the countryside and strikes up a bargain with the merchant to lend him the cunning of “Holo the Wisewolf” to increase his profits in exchange for taking her along on his travels. Lawrence soon learns, though, that having an ancient goddess as a traveling companion can be a bit of a mixed blessing.

Spice & Wolf: merchant meets the wise wolf is based on a light novel series written by Isuna Hasekura and illustrated by Jū Ayakura. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

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James Beckett
Rating:
Even if I hadn't been utterly entranced by Kevin Penkin's ethereal soundtrack from literally the first moment of Spice and Wolf's premiere, I was probably doomed to be smitten with this series. That much was clear just a few seconds after the opening notes of Penkin's soundtrack, when we get a lovely shot of Holo dreamily running her fingers along the rim of her cup, with the sweet ring of the reverberation drifting along underneath the music and dialogue. Those are the kind of sequences that I absolutely live for, as a fan of animation. They can be so small in the grand scheme of things, and they require so much effort despite their smallness, that I cannot help but adore it when a show takes the time to include them.

I also love any show that gives me a protagonist who is a grown-ass man with a grown-ass job, and Lawrence delivers on all of those fronts. As a kid, I turned my nose up a little at the original Spice and Wolf because of what I'd heard about the show focusing on a boring old businessman instead of, I dunno, a demon-slaying badass with swords for arms and harem of monster girlfriends, or whatever I would have been into at the time. Nowadays, though, I live for this kind of slow-paced and thoughtful storytelling, and I am eager to see how Lawrence and Holo's relationship develops while the former pursues his trade.

Speaking of which, yes, I am also a cultured enough critic to recognize that Holo is, in fact, just as wonderful as fans have been telling me she is for all of these years, and I was a fool for ever doubting them. How the James of yesteryear ever let himself overlook a show starring a badass wolf-goddess with a sassy disposition and an exceptionally charming voice-actress in Ami Koshimizu is anyone's guess. We can only thank the Harvest Gods that this MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF remake is here to allow me to rectify my past sins.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:
There were about five years where I watched no anime (due to moving to Japan and being determined to experience the real thing). While I have gone back in the years since and watched a fair share of the big ones I missed out on, the original Spice and Wolf regrettably remains on the list of shows I need to watch. So you'd think the new anime remake would be perfect for me.

This episode is structured as the end of one fairy tale and the beginning of another. But because of this, nothing happens in this first episode. There is no problem to be resolved, no conflict affecting either our heroes or the people they encounter. From the start, Holo can escape simply due to the bundle of wheat in Lawrence's cart. She doesn't need to make a deal with him—she's already beyond the limits of the town.

Of course, this raises the question of why she insists on doing so. Perhaps it's due to the loneliness of doing your best but being forgotten. Or perhaps there is some more mystical reason why she needs a partner to travel. As for the lead characters themselves, neither of them particularly stands out at this point. Right now they're little more than “grounded guy” and “manic pixie dream(wolf)girl.”

All that said, there is a lot here to like. Bringing real-world issues (like overfarming) into mystical fairy tales is a neat touch and the episode has more than a few excellently animated and directed scenes. I think my real issue with this one is one of hype. Reputation alone left me expecting to have my socks blown off going in. What I got instead was only a solidly above-average episode of anime—nothing bad objectively but a letdown from what I was expecting. Will I keep watching? Sure. But here's hoping for a little more of a driving conflict next episode.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I admit it, I was worried. Not as worried as my sister, who howled in outrage that they would dare to remake this series, but worried nonetheless. But it seems that my concern was largely for naught, because I ended up really enjoying this return to Holo and Lawrence's world; it felt familiar rather than retread, or worse, shat upon. It may be a different form of the story, but it is recognizably the same characters and world.

It is in forming that world that I think this episode does a particularly good job. Lawrence, a relatively new traveling merchant (or at least not part of the old guard), is heading to a remote village when he's stopped by knights. When he expresses surprise at their presence, they tell him that a small village is suspected of having a pagan festival, celebrating a harvest god rather than the church's God. Lawrence sort of brushes it off, but we can see that he's uncomfortable with the religion's presence, because he knows that the village does, in fact, have a harvest festival ostensibly celebrating Holo, the wolf god of the harvest. By this point it's clear that the villagers are just going through the motions rather than actually worshipping a different deity, but history tells us that that's often not a big enough difference to matter to repressive monotheistic religions.

What the villagers, and Lawrence, don't realize is that there really is a Holo the Wise Wolf, goddess of the wheat harvest, and she knows that she's only being worshipped in jest rather than in full. As she tells Lawrence, the people haven't really believed in her or understood her role for a long time, and that is behind her decision to leave the village hidden in his cart. Her time as a god, she seems to feel, is over, and now it is time for her to return to her place of birth, in the north – or maybe just to find meaning beyond being a goddess no one really cares about anymore. She gives the impression of being sad, or at least lonely, and even Lawrence being afraid of her true form (which, in a nice use of imagination, we never see) makes her feel worthwhile. Holo has been disenfranchised by a new religious order, and the story makes that plain without actually saying the words.

In one of my favorite novels by the late Terry Pratchett, Hogfather someone asks what would have happened had a solstice rite not been carried out. The response is that a flaming ball of gas would have illuminated the sky, but the sun would not have come up. It's a semantic difference that Holo is living – the wheat will be harvested, but the harvest god will not have played a role, and something will have been irrevocably lost. Holo's journey with Lawrence is her looking to find new meaning as he learns to really see her. Even without the greatest of all ending themes, “The Wolf Whistling Song,” I'm hopeful that this new adaptation will make that journey worth following.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

I was skeptical of this remake. Like a lot of fans, I'd long hoped for more of the original anime, so getting a remake instead was a letdown already. Combine that with the unimpressive trailers and drastic shift in art style, I went into this premiere with a lot of trepidation. Thankfully, much of this new adaptation's shortcomings come alongside new strengths, and the sheer charm of Spice and Wolf is still there.

The biggest downgrade is with the visuals. The OG series wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but it had a firm grasp of atmosphere, capturing the medieval non-glory of its setting while always highlighting the intimate chemistry of its leads. Some of that is still here, thanks to returning director Takeo Takahashi, but there's some obvious scuff to certain scenes, and a persistent glow to the character art that can make them feel like they're standing on green screen stages. While I understand shifting the art style to more closely resemble the light novel's illustrations, I'm not a fan of how squat everyone looks now, nor the odd head-to-body proportions that can make Holo and Lawrence look like bobbleheads at times. It's not terrible, but it bears a lot of the hallmarks of a mid-tier TV production that are only liable to worsen as the show goes on.

That could threaten the precious atmosphere of this series, but at least in this episode it's minimal enough to be carried by the genuinely enchanting musical score. In general, everything besides the character designs is solid, and preserves the intriguing and lovable aspects of this story. The setting feels lived in, dealing with the clash of long held pagan traditions vs. the ever-growing influence of the monotheistic church. The main couple have wonderful chemistry, with Holo delivering all the appeal of your typical magic girlfriend archetype, but having a much more grounded and (for lack of a better word) human personality behind the smug and whimsy. Lawrence is a bit harder to get a read on, but he carries himself with a maturity that's refreshing for an anime protagonist. Together, their banter is fun, but also substantive in how it tells us a lot about who they are as people. For a premiere that is mostly people talking, that level of writing is exactly what you want.

There's still a part of me that wishes we were just getting a continuation, but even if it's largely redundant, having more Spice and Wolf in the world is a net positive. If you're a new viewer, this looks like a perfectly fine way to discover the series (and the only one available in HD right now). For older fans, you might end up waiting to see if/when this incarnation starts covering un-adapted material, but in the meantime this is still a pleasant watch, especially if the OG anime isn't fresh in your mind.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.