Haibane Renmei

What? I’m actually talking about an anime? Surprising, I know, seeing as my last 50 posts (hyperbole) or so have all been about video games. I haven’t really been watching new anime lately, so that effects my urge to write about it. So I was thinking I should just go back through anime I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Actually, I just lied. I finally did finish watching Haibane Renmei recently. What happened was I had seen the first episodes, and the last episodes, but completely missed the middle (entirely because the DVDs weren’t numbered and so I played Russian Roulette in purchasing the next one.) But my good friend Veoh.com came to the rescue as I randomly decided to watch what I had missed one night.

The 13 episode series is based off a short comic by Yoshitoshi ABe, better known as the man behind the animes Serial Experiments Lain (another I’ll have to talk about down the line) and Texhnolyze. It’s not a very anime anime, if you know what I mean. No pink-haired, big-bosomed superpowered girls, mechs or epic threats against the entire planet/universe here. And as strange a story as it is, nothing very outlandish happens. Of course some might argue nothing happens at all in Haibane Renmei, it’s a very quiet, slow-paced series entirely driven by its characters and their day-to-day lives. But under its quiet, sleepy exterior is a subtle tale about pain, forgiveness and dealing with life and death.

The story begins with a young woman falling from the sky, eerily calm about the whole situation, carrying on a conversation with a crow that appears to be trying to save her. She thanks the crow for trying, but tells it there’s nothing it can do, and so it then departs. She continues to fall, and suddenly she can see the ground below, and can feel the wind, and its then she starts to get scared. We later find the young girl is in cocoon, much like a womb, and she’s soon “born” into a place called Old Home which is inhabited by other young people with wings and halos who are known as Haibane (Grey Feathers.) Old Home turns out to be in a town surrounded by large, ominous walls called Glie, which no one is allowed to leave or enter save for mysterious people called the Toga, who do not speak to anyone save the Communicator, leader of the Haibane Renmei, an organization that looks after Haibane until their so-called “Day of Flight.”

The young woman is given the name of “Rakka” (“falling”), based on her dream. It turns out all Haibane are named this way and they all had dreams inside their cocoons. They all also have the sense they came from somewhere else, and had a life before that they now can’t remember. Soon Rakka sprouts wings of her own in a rather painful scene, and is given an artificially made halo.

The series suffers from a rather low-end animation budget and a rather streamlined style, but its made up for by the characters and the gorgeous background work. The music of the series is rather classical, almost like chamber music, which suits the setting. Glie is a very quiet, idyllic if not antiquated place, it has a town square lined with cobblestones and full of old-style architecture but elsewhere the town is punctuated by large expanses of green plains, some with windmills that generate electricity. However this peaceful visage only underscores the rather disturbing notion that no one who lives there really knows what lies outside of the town’s looming walls.

The series is seeped in symbolism, but its much more subtle than Lain, for those of you who have seen that. It’s also not as depressive as Lain, if anyone was worried about that. Haibane Renmei can have many light-hearted, happy, and even funny moments, but it does get down and serious, touching a bit on existential philosophy and questions of sin. But mostly the series focuses on feelings of being alone and lost, of feeling unable to overcome guilt and regret and having to learn to trust the people around you emotionally. As sleepy as the series is for most of its run it can be quite captivating if you don’t mind slow-paced stories with little to no action, and its climax in the final episode is, in stark contrast to everything else, truly intense.

I do like Haibane Renmei, although I don’t think its the best thing I’ve ever watched, but it’s a good little story that’s rather poignant and touching in the end, and quietly profound when it wants to be. I personally interpret the plot as kind yet wayward souls given a second chance, but I can’t say much more about that without giving away too much of the story. I’d say if one doesn’t find it to be their cup of tea by the second episode or so, it probably won’t feel worth it to stick with it until the end.

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