Wolf's Rain

Episodes 13-14

At the beginning of “Men's Lament," The Good Wolf Pack cement their decision to head towards Lord Darcia's Keep, the ancient castle where Cheza is being held. There is certainly a harrowing and action-packed journey to be had… much later, because outside of that one scene, “Men's Lament” is actually about Hubb and Quent driving and drinking a bunch. I suppose I should have known to be disappointed based on the title.

I've been pretty critical of the human element of Wolf’s Rain, but I want to be clear as to what I specifically have a problem with. I don't actively dislike any of the human characters—well, I kind of hate Quent for abandoning Blue and making her sad, but he's meant to be a scuzzball, so I get his place in the ensemble. What's really been frustrating me is how much Wolf’s Rain has been dragging its feet on giving any of these characters something to do, and “Men's Lament” is the perfect example of this. It's a shame too, because on the surface, forcing Hubb and Quent into a broken-down old car on the world's most depressing road trip sounds like a good opportunity to force some new conflicts into their stale stories, and perhaps learn more about them.

The episode tries to do this, I'll give it that much credit. But if you break down everything that happens, it becomes all too obvious that the show is just spinning its wheels. All Quent does is repeat grizzled clichés and drink his sorrows away, which is literally the only thing he's ever done, so we're totally out of luck there. Hubb gets a fairly lengthy flashback to his marriage with Cher, and a lot of monologuing about how the Cheza project cost them their marriage, but we nothing about what these scenes present us is new or impactful information. Cher and Hubb apparently had a relationship ripped straight out of a Hallmark movie, which is to say it feels artificial as hell, and then they got divorced because Cher got too obsessed with her work. We knew that already, or at the very least, we've been able to puzzle that out for quite a long time. We don't actually see the couple argue, and the fact that they only just get around to discussing their life goals and dreams after they were married speaks volumes as to how shallow the human relationships are in this story.

Outside of that, there's just a lot of driving, and the direction and animation aren't nearly enough to justify spending so much time with montages and filler. Then Hubb reuinites with Cher, she explains exactly nothing to him outside of a recap of what we already saw happen, and then she joins Quent and Hubb on the trip to Darcia's Keep. In other words, the entire episode is just Wolf’s Rain padding out the time it takes for its humans to be together and on the same path as the wolves. A more cohesive and well-planned narrative would have made that a natural element of the story that didn't take over a dozen episodes to pan out, but here we are.

”The Fallen Keep” is a much better outing for the show, because now all of the different plot threads are finally on track to collide, Wolf’s Rain has decided to grace us with some much-needed focus and drive. There's still a lot of ambiguity and loose ends to keep the show going for another dozen episodes, but the journey to Paradise now has a plot that has more shape and stakes to it than “A bunch of humans and Wolves walk around looking for each other for a very long time."

Specifically, the mission to rescue Cheza is fraught with conflict and peril, as any good quest to retrieve a damsel from a castle ought to be. Kiba's own obsession is fraying his relationship with the other wolves, specifically Hige, and the apocalyptic winter that has covered the landscape only makes the desperation that much more palpable. The humans' arrival at the castle complicates things even more, especially for Blue, who still doesn't know how to feel about her newly discovered wolfen blood, not to mention what that makes her in Quent's eyes: The enemy.

When he first appeared, I cheekily compared Darcia to a Power Rangers villain, and that has proved more apt of an analogy than I ever expected. For all of the show's efforts in painting Darcia as a tragic and imposing gothic figure, the character falls flatly into the territory of “a little too goofy and two-dimensional to take seriously” a lot of the time, for me. He isn't so much a villain as just another vaguely defined obstacle in the wolves' journey, but there have been so many opportunities to make him more than that. I will admit that living in the lair of a Final Fantasy wizard is a boss move, and having precisely one magical wolf eye that burns with forlorn anguish is a detail that's basically ripped straight from one of the original character biographies I would design for GaiaOnline roleplay forums back in the mid-2000s.

I did appreciate the info dump that Cher gives on the overall history of the world, and the place that all of this conflict between the nobles, the wolves, and the dejected dregs of humanity have in it. I like how the 200 years that have passed between the fall of civilization and now lends an even more warped air of mystery to the show's fairy-tale tone, though I'm wondering how much longer the story will be able to sustain itself on such abstract ground. What we have here is a world that is some kind of alternate dimension that is similar enough to our world to be recognizable, even though the divergences in history, technology, and culture have to go back a lot farther than 200 years for this world to make sense. I'm also still waiting for even just a little bit of clarification on why wolves are such important figures in this universe's cosmology, and what historical clashes caused them all to be wiped out, and how ancient clans of human nobility (that once traveled through space and maybe also time?) got involved in any of this. There's definitely an aesthetic appeal that Wolf’s Rain is tapping into with its sometimes awkward blending of post-apocalyptic futurism and baroque fantasy; I'm just waiting for the show to take full advantage of all that potential.

At the very least, there are thrills and cliffhangers aplenty, and those go a long way in dialing up the fun factor of the show. I've always argued that literally any work of art would be improved by the presence of magical talking wolves doing battle with an army of dark knights and airships, and here at last we have the anime that had to guts to bring such a vision to life. The wolves and the humans are all tangled up in this Flower Maiden business together now, Lady Jaugura and her army have complicated an already tangled web of tangled goals, and Kiba is nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the Keep's destruction. We'll just have to see where this tale takes us in Wolf’s Rain's second half.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Who's a Good Wolf!? I'm going to have to award this to Blue again, since she's had to put up with Quent's nonsense for her entire life, and she's more than willing to put her life on the line to protect her new packmates. I also want to give a shout-out to Toboe, who is a sweet darling pupper who's just doing his best pretty much always, even when Tsume is giving him crap for liking humans. Leave my boy alone, Tsume.

• Remember, Episodes 15-18 are recaps, thanks to the production issues caused by the 2002-2004 SARS pandemic. As far as I've read, there's nothing at all to be gained from these episodes beyond, well, recapping the plot, so next time we'll be jumping ahead to Episodes 19-20. See you all then!

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.