Review originally posted August 30, 2021

If you’ve ever experienced the death of a loved one, you know the feeling that To Your Eternity seeks to evoke in its audience. Several times I found myself sobbing, and it gave me an outlet to release the pent-up sadness I’ve held from the deaths of people I loved.

To Your Eternity follows an immortal being named Fushi who assumes the form of dead humans and animals he encounters along his journey. He can transform into them at will. A few are a giant bear, a girl who can climb trees, and a wolf. Though he is immortal, he has fears and things to lose. He befriends kind people and fears losing his memories of them. There is a forest monster who can steal his forms, along with the memories. While fighting murders, warriors, and monsters, he utilizes his toolbelt of fallen friends. The high concept premise makes for enthralling action. Although the manga was published in a shounen magazine, it has a relatively slow pace, making the action feel monumental rather than inevitable. In one moment, Fushi is a wolf to lunge at his enemy, and in the next he becomes a massive bear to stomp on them. There's a set-piece with dazzling animation in every other episode; explosions, collapsing buildings, blood, and gore. Studio Brain’s Base has a collection of talented animators, artists, and editors who put their best work into this show. Whether it be time or budget constraints, the art quality becomes more simplified as the series progresses. Even at its least impressive, it stands above the studio's prior works like In/Spectre.

Any anime that succeeds at making me cry has a special place in my heart. This show made me cry… A lot. The first and the twelfth episodes hurt the most because I was emotionally invested in the people Fushi met. The story begins with him meeting a boy who has lived alone in a snowstorm for 5 years, waiting for his family to return. If that sounds sad to you, it gets a lot more depressing. Seeing their goals, aspirations, hopes, and dreams become wasted upon their death shook me. For the main cast, death is a meaningful tool used to evoke catharsis. Some may call it emotionally manipulative, but for me, it works due to the stellar execution. Though you will witness plenty of violence, the artists do not linger on blood or suffering upon an emotional death. Once the moment passes, we see whoever died glowing in the afterlife. Realization sets in that they're gone, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. What happens after that is left to our interpretation. I would go so far as to say the framing is sensitive. Accusations of misery porn have no place in these parts. Personally, I recommend against watching the anime’s opening theme because the visuals contain spoilers all the way until the last episode. If you mistakenly watch it like I did, you’ll find the deaths pretty unsurprising.

I need to praise the voice actors and script for this. Especially Fushi’s VA who went from babbling like a baby at the start to slowly learning the language with a slight stutter. That’s what he needed to sell an alien being transforming from a rock to a fully sentient human. In the first two arcs, the characters felt real. Their dialogue was natural, they reacted to the world believably, and their struggles kept me waiting to see what would happen next episode.

Flat characters, intrusive narration, weak storytelling, hammy dialogue, and forced drama plague the underwhelming second half. For the remaining eight episodes, the surfaces were flat as cardboard cutouts. The show's final arc jammed in a dozen new people with any characterization, and it expects us to remember their names. Even the sensitive portrayal of death I praised became watered down. Using sad music, tears, and afterlife imagery should be used to make a tragic death more impactful, not trick us into caring about a character who had barely any dialogue and no development. That's emotionally manipulative. Despite this, the first two arcs prove that big-budget anime productions can adapt poignant anime in a market that prioritizes adapting generic isekai light novels.

Each chapter of Fushi's journey isn't tied together with an overarching plot. What we have instead is a constant threat of danger, the unpredictable monster chasing after his memories. Around halfway through, we get a vague, amorphous antagonist with unclear motives explained in a tiresome exposition dump. I always appreciated Fumetsu no Anata e for not overcomplicating its high concept premise until it did.

Throughout the whole show, there is a narrator. Around the halfway point, he becomes a visible man who interacts with Fushi. Looking like a cultist, he shows up wearing a black hood whenever Fushi needs guidance, or rather when the story feels like it's time for exposition. The story tends to overcomplicate itself through the narrator; he explains the rules of Fushi's supernatural powers and arbitrarily tells us what the true antagonist's motives are. Fushi could've confronted the antagonist, then discovered its motivations. Or, they could've left that information vague, as it had been. Being spoon-fed lore and character motives feel forced. Eternity has plenty of death and mature themes. Spoon feeding the viewers with exposition in an R-rated show is like a mother feeding a teenager baby food.

Fushi has the mind of an infant at the beginning. Seeing him learn how to be human as the months pass by is compelling. I assumed the whole story would consist of him learning to become human, but that development happens relatively quickly. For the rest of the story, we have a protagonist with a mundane personality. He goes from an intriguing mystery to a heroic traveler. His motives are clear—save whoever his person of interest is at any given time. Due to the spoilers in the opening theme, you sort of know things won't always go as planned. Shortly put: once he gained a personality, I didn't like him. How compelling is a guy whose reason for living is to save people in danger when he's at no risk of dying? Well, "no risk" isn't entirely true. The amorphous antagonist introduced early on threatens to steal Fushi's deceased friends, along with his memories of them. Fearing that Fushi would lose a character I liked kept my interest in the underwhelming final episodes.

To Your Eternity has a truly poignant message at its core; even after we die, the people we leave behind will remember us. Ironically, it is a forgettable show in the end.