The Fire Hunter
a review by Lenlo
a review by Lenlo
Novels. The progenitor. The alpha and the omega. So often ignored for its easier to digest kin, Light Novels and Web Novels, yet often containing some of the best stories I've ever experienced. In anime, they gave us works such as Run With the Wind, Tatami Galaxy and Fune wo Amu. However sometimes... Sometimes even Novels fail us, as they have by giving us todays topic. Animated by studio Signal MD, directed by Junji Nishumura of Vlad Love fame (?), with music by Kenji Kawai and art direction from Hiromasa Ogura, I give to you the most disappointing show of the Winter 2023 season: Hikari no Ou AKA The Fire Hunter.
Be warned, this review contains minor unmarked spoilers for The Fire Hunter. It also contains major spoilers in some sections however these will be heavily marked to avoid accidents.
As always, the best place to start with a series is with its production. For Fire Hunter though, this might actually be the worst way to start. Simply put, Fire Hunter looks terrible. What little is worthy of praise ends up getting misused and drowned out. The beautifully colored eye-catches are a prime example of this. These are stunning. Often the highlight of an episode, these eye-catches are easily the most memorable visuals Fire Hunter has. The detailed line work and vibrant colors, how they change ever so slightly to fit both the situation and characters depicted within. Used well, they can greatly augment a scene and make up for lackluster animation. And aside from a few scenes, such as Touko, our lead, cleaning a toilet for some reason, they are! Fire Hunter's problem though is, well... basically everything else.
The easiest way to put it would be that Fire Hunter simply feels incomplete. Like the production was running behind or something. For one of the most egregious examples, simply look at the screenshot I've provided below. Do you see how each of 3 houses have completely different lighting? Despite being on the same street, with street lamps in front of them? This is what we in the business call a "compositing oopsie". And this isn't the only scene it happens in! There are a number of others throughout the shows run where nothing feels like they belong in the scene together. Combine that with lackluster, choppy, detail-less animation like the scene above, which is the norm I might add, and you have a show that doesn't ever really look... appealing. In any way. Sometimes you can watch a show just for its production, but not with Fire Hunter.
Normally this wouldn't be so bad. Plenty of bad looking shows manage to cover for their shortcomings. They never look good but they at least avoid looking offensive. But that's where Fire Hunter again fails. Junji Nishimura is an experienced director, he's been doing this for over a decade. But you wouldn't know that from watching Fire Hunter, as the way the show is shot is often just as damning as the content itself. Cutting from scene to scene at the most jarring moment, breaking their flow and snapping the viewer out of the experience. Black title cards to tell us who the next scene is about, rather then just showing us. Overlaying garish reaction shots over marginally interesting action. Fire Hunter would be an unpleasant experience to watch even if it actually was animated well. Together though? This is one of the most abysmal productions I've seen in ages.
It's a shame, because Fire Hunter had an absolutely beautiful aesthetic in its OP. While a completely unreasonable and unrealistic ask, had Fire Hunter looked like that, and been directed with the same skill, I could easily see it becoming the standout of the season. It wouldn't even have needed to be particularly animated, just take the art style and put some care into it. Instead what we got was... Well a disappointment. And sadly, as someone who absolutely adored Fire Hunter's 1st episode and had high hopes for it, the disappointment doesn't stop here. Because while you can ignore a bad production for a phenomenal story, or a mediocre story for a phenomenal production, Fire Hunter is mediocre on both counts.
That's right, Fire Hunter is about as poorly written as it is drawn. Well maybe that's unfair. After all, I haven't read the original novels by Rieko Hinata. If they are any good though, this adaptation isn't doing them any favors. Because despite getting 10 whole episodes, despite traveling across the country from a remote village to the busy capital, despite all this setup regarding a possible coup and coming war (Don't worry all of this is mentioned in the first 2 episodes), if you were to ask me what happened... I wouldn't be able to say much. This is in large part due to Fire Hunter clearly being a much larger story then can be contained in 10 mediocre episodes. 4 novels is a lot. More then that though, I think it comes down to how Fire Hunter connects it's story and keeps it moving forward.
Spoiler warning for a number of events in the second half of Fire Hunter. Short summary: Fire Hunter has numerous dubious coincidences, questionable decisions and undermines its own setting regularly.
Or what about Flame Fiends are apparently these terrible and terrifying monsters? Things that can upend armed metal trucks, threaten villages and have to be hunted by specialized combatants? Does it make any sense for a young girl to be able to kill one of these on her own, when we've seen multiple professional Fire Hunters fall to them already? Maybe that would fit in a battle shounen, but in a serious character drama like *Fire Hunter? Then there's stuff like Kou, a Spider, being snuck into the capital and no one seeming to care. Or how there's apparently a tunnel, unguarded, leading directly into a forest filled with Flame Fiends, etc etc. Can these things be explained away? Yes. Does that in any way make them good writing? No.
Now I'm willing to believe that the novels Fire Hunter originated from put a lot more care into the presentation of these details. That they are explained in much better ways, that we are simply missing information due to the nature of this adaptation. After all, plenty of these ideas are great. Turning Touko into a strong-willed Fire Hunter after her upraising in a village, or the whole plot with the Spiders/Divine Clan, are both good. Fire Hunter has a lot of good ideas, and I want to believe they are executed on well. But at least as far as this adaptation is concerned, it doesn't. Fire Hunter is dully written, dully communicated, and dully produced. It is, in every way, dull. And this extends to the characters as well!
Once again, Fire Hunter shows promise here. The ideas behind their individual stories, of Touko going from a meek village girl to a strong and independent Fire Hunter, of Kaho's quest to establish her own life and reason to live, of Koushi's desire to protect his family and learn what happened to his father. Individually these are all great ideas. And a few of these even go well, with Koushi's relationship with his father being perhaps my favorite little mini-story of the show! But somewhere along the way from novel to anime, as Junji Nishimura attempts to pick out all of the most relevant details and communicate them in a TV format, what made these stories work seems to have been lost. Because by the end of the season, few of them felt particularly compelling.
To talk about these in any semblance detail I will have to dive into spoiler territory. If you haven't watched Fire Hunter and don't want to be spoiled, then this is a tldr: Both Touko and Koushi's stories are, as I said, good ideas. But the way Fire Hunter progresses them, such as Touko standing up to deal with conflict herself rather then getting walked over, are handled in the worst way possible. The steps, the ideas, are correct. Their execution is what failed for me.
Koushi has a very similar problem. Fire Hunter sets his arc up from the beginning to be a more political one. Of people preparing to protect themselves, of standing up against their government, the Divine Clans. There is a mentor character, Yuoshichi, who seems to be priming Koushi for this. Asking him to create and develop new weapons so they can defend themselves against the evil Spiders. Yet multiple times throughout the story, Fire Hunter tries to make us doubt Yuoshichi, with it never amounting to anything. On top of that, Koushi himself doesn't have any real connection to Yuoshichi's struggle. He doesn't hate the Divine Clans, nor is he a put down and ignored public worker with a family routinely endangered by their negligence. He's an exceptionally gifted student who's dad just so happened to have a stash of rare fire! It's just not very... compelling.
It's these sorts of issues, of Koushi not being connected to his own primary conflict, of Touko's not being handled with any sort of grace or finesse, that made it impossible for me to care about, or become invested in, these characters. Perhaps if Fire Hunter had handled them with a bit more grace, had taken more time or presented their stories with the care and attention they probably deserve, then they would have worked. But it didn't. So they don't.
Finally we come to the OST, and I sadly have very little to write here. Composed by Kenji Kawai, a man who has demonstrated his talents multiple times in series like Mob Psycho 100, Eden of the East and Seirei no Moribito, Fire Hunter should be a shoo in for a solid track list. However over the course of watching Fire Hunter, I can't say that's the case. It's not bad per se. I would have to remember any of it to dub it such. Rather, it's just incredibly forgettable. Some of this is no doubt due to how poorly Fire Hunter integrated anything and everything into itself. I can't think of a single moment (Outside the OP, which was fantastic but also performed by Leo Ieiri not Kenji Kawai) where the music heightened a scene. That's how little an impact it left on me.
By the same token however, I also can't think of any scenes or moments where the music took me out of the show. Perhaps this was due to never being in it to begin with, what with how terrible every other aspect was. If so, that isn't really praise. Whatever the reason though, the fact remains that Fire Hunter's music never made a scene worse. So while you won't watch it just for the music like you will say... Megalo Box (God I love Mabanua), you also won't turn it off because of it either. And looking at the rest of this review, that might be the kindest thing I have said about Fire Hunter yet.
With that we come to the personal section of this review. This is where I drop any pretense of "objectivity", as little as that means when talking about media, and just try to communicate my personal experience with the show. If you aren't interested in that, or don't want to be spoiled, then feel free to skip! This has no bearing on the score and is really just me trying to open up about my experience. So without further ado, in we go! And remember, spoiler warning!
These cuts to black as we jump between characters, the awkward scene transitions, the way episodes are paced. Even were the content good, which I still dispute, the way it's presented fails the source material. It sucks any and all emotion from the work, leaving me with not but growing disappointment. I hoped every week that Fire Hunter would live up to the potential of its world. That it would properly explore the ramifications of not being able to use fire. Or how scary these beasts that could feasibly kill them with a touch are. Instead, Fire Hunter spends half its time on a half-baked political intrigue in the capital that really only serves to dump lore and the other half on a messy, ugly trek through the woods to the capital.
Every time I wanted to care for Fire Hunter, it found a new way to turn me off. It took a world full of interesting ideas and reduced it to an amusement park walk through the woods. It wouldn't be so bad if Fire Hunter was trash from the beginning. At least then you wouldn't have any expectations for it. But the fact that it started promising, only to disappoint every episode after, is what makes it hurt so much and why I'm so annoyed by the series.
All in all, Fire Hunter had one of the most promising starts of the Winter 2023 season. It was engaging and beautiful in its own dystopian way. But as the series went on, it failed to live up to that promise. It fell deeper and deeper into a production pit, which ended up taking the narrative with it. Are there things to like here, is it different from most anime you see today? Yes! And maybe that's enough for you. But for me? It was a challenge just to finish it for the sake of writing this review. Maybe the 2nd season that was just announced will be able to fix some of this. Maybe its disastrous production can be cleaned up. If so, I won't be around to see it. Fire Hunter has already burned me once, and I won't let it do so again.
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