Wolf's Rain

Episodes 5-6

I'm glad I'm covering these Classic Streaming Series in two episode batches, because I reckon that “Fallen Wolves” and “The Successors” play much better as a double-length story than as stand alone episodes. For the first time, we get a (ninety-nine percent) human free tale that sees our pack arriving at another nameless city in their search for Paradise and the Lunar Flowers that grow there, only for them to find a group of old castoffs who have long since given up on the quest. Though not without its minor issues, the pair of episodes provides some much needed context to the plight of the world these wolves live in, which goes a long way in establishing some stakes for what might happen to our heroes should they, too, fail in their fight to find Paradise.

The setup is fairly simple, as most of the stories we've gotten from Wolf's Rain have been so far: The Good Boy Pack, as they will hitherto be known for the sake of differentiation, make their way into another run-down city in search of food and Lunar Flowers, though all they find is rejection from a Pack of Grumpy Old Boys, run by a wolf named Zali. Though one wolf, a female named Cole, is willing to show the Good Boys some kindness and secretly gifts them some stale bread to eat, the message from Zali and the rest is clear: There is no Paradise. Only fools go to seek it, and there definitely isn't anything for the Good Boys in this city either. They can either buck up and leave, or stay and cause trouble.

Since Kiba and Co. have made their fondness for causing trouble well known over the past half-dozen episodes, it's rather obvious what they pick, though the trouble comes in slow, creeping movements. This is another story that is operating fully in the show's patented mix of fairy-tale logic and parable rules, which means that we don't so much as get a plot that ties the two episodes, but a series of tonal shifts that dip in and out of despair, denial, and eventually, hopeful rebuke. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a tunnel, walled off for years after Zali and his Grumpy Old Boys tried to pass through it in search of paradise. Poison gas stifled their efforts, so now they've given up on a life remotely resembling that of proud and wild wolves; instead, they choose now to work as ragged mules for the city's equally desperate humans, as it's the only way to scrape by with what meager resources there are.

This sordid fate of living like lowly “dogs” is what really forms the conflict of the episode. Kiba gets the crap kicked out of him by Moss and some other of Zali's underlings for pointing this out in Episode 5, and the whole reason Cole wants to help the Good Boys out is because she wants to see some of that spark of life set back in Zali's eyes. Later, when Moss and the others straight up set up Hige to be kidnapped and incinerated by humans, they reveal that they no longer give a good god damn about Zali's so-called leadership, as it all it has brought them is a life of miserable servitude, little better than slavery.

It is a simple, straightforward kind of strife for a world that doesn't have much luxury for the complications of nuance, but it's a valuable one all the same. Until now, the only motivation we've had for Kiba and the others' search for Paradise is “Well, it's got to be better than the rest of the world," but the titular “fall” of Zali's pack reveals a more existential angle to that crisis: What is a wolf without its homeland, the territory through which it can hunt and roam and truly live? Even wet-eared pups like Toboe seem to intuitively understand the difference between “living” and pure, raw survival, and fellas like Tsume are dead set against the thought of letting themselves be “used” by humans until their dying day. Outside of the presence of a whole heck of a lot of Lunar Flowers, we still don't have a very concrete idea of what Paradise is, but at this point, it's more important for what it isn't. It isn't dying slowly in a wasteland that has no use for the likes of wild wolves, and that has to be good enough for our Good Boys. At least for now.

I'm currently rereading Stephen King's wonderful and weird Dark Tower series, and a phrase that is constantly used to describe its fantastical and haunting setting is that it is “a world that has moved on.” Moved on not just from life, but from time itself, a place that can only barely be said to be existing according to conventional understanding of what it means to “exist." Wolf's Rain reminds me a lot of the Dark Tower books in that way, where the characters move and think and act in ways that don't necessarily track to the standards of realism or even particularly fleshed-out fantasy, but it makes just enough sense in a dreamlike sort of fashion to keep things functional. When Tsume turns toward supporting the others' dream of finding Paradise near the end of Episode 6; when Zali finally makes his redemptive act of showing the Good Boys through the tunnel that leads out of the city; when the wolves make a daring and fairly easy rescue of Hige when he's wolf-napped; or when Cole very casually drops the fact that the machinery in the city is long dead, so it isn't like there's any poison gas left to speak of — these beats feel like they work more than they actually do work.

Normally, this would be a flat-out criticism, but in Wolf's Rain's case, I'm willing to play along more than usual. Its world has moved on, after all. If and When our Good Boys find the Paradise they seek, I doubt it would be exactly what they've dreamt of, but it will be the stuff of dreams, to be sure. It's the kind of story that make you especially glad for Yoko Kanno's haunting music on the soundtrack, as the tunes propel the narrative in a much more clear and powerful way than even the events onscreen do sometimes, as if we're watching the world's most elaborate series of music videos for an apocalyptic concept album. Even when the dialogue and character development falls short of hitting the emotional beats they need to for you to fully buy in to what's happening in the story and why, the music somehow manages to smooth over the rough edges enough for you to say “Okay, sure, go ahead and do your thing wolves,” and resign yourself to the inexorable forward motion of the thing.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Who's a Good Boy!?: You know, I'll throw Tsume a bone this week, if only because he's taking steps to being not quite as much of a dick as usual – he also jumps fangs-first right onto a pistol brandishing human to bust his boy Hige out of his cage, which is pretty damn cool. Equally cool is how Kiba just casually bends the solid steel bars of Hige's cage, which is a thing I guess wolves in this universe can do.

• Despite how I celebrated these mostly human-free episode, we do get a couple of check-ins with Hubb and Quent, which must amount to barely a minute's worth of screen time, total. Basically, Hubb is reading that mythical wolf book that Cher left him and getting all obsessed, while Quent and Blue are leaving the city to track down the wolves. They're almost entirely pointless scenes, and it really makes me wonder why these characters have to be part of the show at all.

• Sorry for the delay on this review, everyone; I've been recovering from a minor surgery that has left me a little bit behind in, well, everything. We should be back to our regularly scheduled reviewing now, though, so expect our next Wolf's Rain update by around the middle of the week, as per usual!

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.