 | Haibane RenmeiJanuary 22nd, 2006 |
Over at f13 there’s a discussion going on regarding anime, and I wanted to talk a little bit about a title that I recommend even though several of the folks there don’t seem to be huge fans of it: Haibane Renmei.
For a lot of people, the work of Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki in particular is a gateway into anime — it sort of was for me. Since I spent much of my childhood outside of the US, I was exposed to a greater variety of children’s programming than most kids here got in the early 80′s. For example, most folks here have no idea what I am talking about when I mention Uchu Kara no Messeji, or most specifically, the TV series that spun off from it, Sankuokai: at best, they may very vaguely recall Astron Belt, Sega’s laserdisc shooter game that used footage from it. I remember being very upset that in the game you had to shoot both the good guys and the bad guys from the show indiscriminately. (To my utter dismay, I see that in Chile, the series is available as a 6 disc Spanish-language box set. Must… resist…)
I also got to see a lot of straight-up anime that isn’t too familiar here anymore. For example, the whole family watched Miyazaki’s early TV series Marco (3000 Miles in Search of Mother) which was actually on prime time TV in Peru in the early 80s. It’s no surprise that when Kiki’s Delivery Service was finally available in the States it called to me like something familiar.
There was also the classic shoujo series Candy Candy, with its incredibly catchy theme song and its incredibly sappy tale of an orphan girl. This one aired during the same time slots as the telenovelas did, since really, it had much in common with them (and it’s pretty much unavailable today, because of all the legal disputes surrounding it).
Now, mind you, I also watched stuff that kids here did: Battle of the Planets and the like. But from pretty early on, I wasn’t that interested in giant robots. I was more interested in complex stories.
Which brings me, finally, to Haibane Renmei. I picked it up because it was from the same studio responsible for the fascinating (and overly self-indulgent) Serial Experiments Lain. Lain featured really imaginative art stylings, a highly techno-savvy plotline, and a fairly muddled plot progression. But it was good enough to make me want to see more by this studio, because my dabblings in anime had shown me that it was better to trust a given director or studio than to try things blindly, given the amount of junk on the shelves.
Haibane Renmei features no robots. There aren’t any fights, really. Its sensibility is the closest I’ve seen to a Miyazaki vibe outside of other Ghibli films. But the subject it tackles is far darker and more interesting than the fairy tales that Miyazaki tends to prefer.
Visiting the show’s website should convey something of the gorgeous visuals and the gentle tone of the series. In short, a seed falls from the sky to a mostly ruined old building, and goes in through the window. It starts to sprout, and in time forms a giant cocoon. Angel girls with wings and haloes tend the cocoon, until one day it cracks open, and from within is born another girl, as yet without halo and wings.
Her name is Rakka, and over time, she gets her wings and halo, befriends the others, learns that she must work in the nearby town, and that the town is enclosed by a gigantic wall. That strangers come from outside the wall to be greeted with ritual at the great gates, but are not allowed in. That a strange priesthood guards the town, and play some role in guiding the young angels. That there’s even a matching building full of boys on the other side of town. And most importantly, perhaps, that sometimes angels go out into the woods, and somehow vanish in a great bolt of lightning, carried… elsewhere, in a ritual called the “Day of Flight.”
What she doesn’t know, and neither does the viewer, is who Rakka is, and why this strange set-up exists. Why is she an angel? How is it that all the angels are born from seeds that fall from the sky? How does the town subsist when it’s not clear what there is beyond the wall? Although the architecture seems European, the regalia of the outsiders and the “priests” is decidedly not; as you proceed into the series, you find that what seemed known shifts out from under you.
The crux of the matter is that both Rakka and one of her fellow angels suffer from a problem: their wings, which should be bright white, are turning gray and black — “charcoal feathers,” as it is called. It seems to reflect something about how they feel inside. The mystery surrounding this, and the ways in which is it resolved, are at the heart of the slow-moving plot.
Towards the end, we realize something shocking — what we have been watching is effectively a religious allegory.
My daughter ended up completely hooked on this show when she was around 7 years old (she’s almost 9 now). Although some of the subject matter is a little intense and some aspects of it way over her head, she got her friends to play angels on the playground, and she filled hundreds of sheets of paper with drawings of angels — she was even an angel for Halloween that year. The very first CD of music she ever picked out for herself was the soundtrack to this TV show (which is quite good, btw). In the end, I felt like we had found an experience that she would come back to when she was older, and that would unfold more layers of meaning to her. Only the best books and movies can do that.
So, to the naysayers over at f13, I say humbug. 
Check it out; I don’t think you will regret it.
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