Today's review, Kemono no Souja Erin (The beast playe Erin), a coming-of-age story that's equally relaxing and suspenseful. What immediately caught my attention with this anime was how rich its history is. The quality of a fantasy's world building is usually a good indicator of its quality.
Genre : Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
Themes : Beast, Magical creatures, politics, tragedy
Kemono no Souja Erin is set under a theocratic matriarchy that is battling wars on all fronts while slowly collapsing from within.. It's governed by a series of complex laws created generations ago by its divine matriarch and never questioned. Their country is founded on the notion of peace through strength and maintains this dominance by subjugating the most ferocious animals as tools of war.
Story
The story begins deep within a small village of Touda handlers, following Erin, the daughter of an expert Beastinarian. While her mother, Soyon, is undoubtedly the best in the village, she faces scrutiny, jealousy, and racism for being of the mist people who are rumored to use magic and steal secrets. Additionally, Soyon also faces the difficulties of caring for Touda in a way that pains her.
By raising it against its nature, feeding it medicine that strengthens its body for war, and using paralyzing whistles to neutralize it numerous times each day. Although Soyon disagrees with these guidelines, going against them is considered treason, punishable by death.
So her only option as an animal lover is to care for them the only way she's allowed. Despite these hardships, she carries on stoically for the sake of her daughter and the Touda under her care. Erin looks up to her mother and aspires to follow in her footsteps, learning about animals and medicine at a young age.
While life in such a rural village is typically uneventful, Erin's curiosity and hunger for knowledge occupy her days. She pays close attention to a myriad of details, such as observing animal behavior to understand its psychology and the properties of herbs for the sake of medicine.
Erin's life reaches far beyond the borders of her small Touda village. She eventually leaves and lives with a few different mentors, where she furthers her education. Some of its major themes focus on the value of curiosity and education, understanding that animals don't exist to benefit humans, and the importance of having the courage to question beliefs you know to be wrong.
It's various circumstances, themes, morals, and challenges. But its variety is what made it so easy.For example, 10-year-old Erin on the mountainside learning to gather honey from bees, watching birds, and sharing a meal with her mentor.
Other episodes had me intrigued as we're introduced to other characters with troubled pasts, such as one of the queen's guards who sold himself to a life of servitude so his family could survive. While Erin is clearly the main character, the series is heavily fleshed out with a large cast of detailed side characters with their own history, goals, and motivations.
Some are characterized as the perspective shifts. Others are more mysterious, leaving the viewer to decide the truth and await its reveal. The anime also knows how to be thrilling, intense, and tragic, as political corruption and the threat of war looms over the characters we've come to love in its second half.
Kemono no Souja Erin is one of the most dynamic anime I've ever seen, with a broad scope spanning a decade yet never feeling rushed. However, my main problem was its heavy use of flashbacks in its second half. Flashbacks are frequently used within the entirety of the anime as a way to display sentiment or depict a character's thoughts, but in the last 10 or so episodes, they ramp the flashbacks up to a point I've never seen in anime before.
They do it way more than Naruto. I'm talking 5 or 6 flashbacks per episode towards the end. They weren't long, but I did notice them a lot more than I did in the first half, but it's also possible that I was restless after three days of marathoning the same anime.
So maybe you won't have the same issue. As much as I enjoyed seeing this epic tale come to a complete conclusion and the small afterstory following it, they were missing one key detail. It was implied, so I can live with it, but considering the amount of time they spent on flashbacks, I think they could have fleshed out its ending much more than they did.
Running time : 25 mins per episode
Number of episodes : 50
Imdb Rating : 7.7 (201 users)
My Anime list : 8.3 (19,539 users)
Overall Experience
Either way, I'm happy with the ending we got, though it could have been slightly more detailed. Overall, I give Kemono no Souja Erin a 9/10. It's truly an anime with something for everyone and feels like a refreshing and new experience.I have no idea why this isn't more popular. Less than 20,000 people on MAL have completed this series.
Maybe it's because it's length, and people think an anime that starts with a 10-year-old girl learning about herbs and lizard poop is going to be boring, but I assure you, it's not.
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