Why "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" is your new favorite Anime.
Frieren is a uniquely captivating anime that offers a fresh and special perspective on the normalized fantasy themes. At its core, the story follows an immortal elf who goes by the name Frieren, shes supposedly lived for hundreds of years and experienced many generations of humans. Somewhere along these years she joins a group of adventurers on a world saving journey. The story though is set years after her adventure with this said party. This is mostly what sets Frieren apart from other fantasy adventures, the way the story explores the human experience and life in general through the eyes of someone who is immortal.
As the story unfolds you will see one of the other great strengths of this anime, the crazy deep character development. While our main hero is interesting in her own ways, by seeing how some humans could in such a short time have several lifes amount of years long impact on Frierens mind and how she still deals with these emotions to this day. The other characters in this story also get deep and rich lore, so much even that when some of these characters walks their own path, you start to miss them, you start wanting to see them again. These side characters even have their own problems that we get to tackle with them. Furthermore the story also tends to go a bit in to the "dark side" and becomes rather scary or more so dark themed, talks about murder, the need to kill or even some cases suicide. Pure hatred and how the cast interacts with it is a common theme throughout so don't go thinking this anime is all go lucky happy adventure like. There is some REAL tension to be had here.
What is also really attractive in this anime is the artwork and MY GOD did MADHOUSE deliver (as always) with the artwork basically being 1:1 to Kanehito Yamadas illustrations. The scenes are MAD beautiful hehe see what I did there?
Anyways, while “how pretty an anime is doesn’t mark how good it is” it sure as hell helps doesn’t it. While we are at the topic of how beautiful this anime is, let me tell you that THE MUSIC IS SO DAMN GOOD, if you didn’t already know American composer Evan Call is the composer for Frieren whose work you might know from Violet Evergarden, the way his music flows so nicely with the environment really makes you feel sucked into this world, like the combination is insane he really knocked it out of the park with this one. Pats on the back, my words cannot even begin to be explain how good it is.
This anime wouldn’t be classified a shounen without some action now would it? The action scenes in this anime is nothing other than beautiful, striking, visually and auditorly stunning. Now this is a spoiler free review so you have to really trust me on the animation part on this note, but hey its MADHOUSE if you’ve seen any of their works you know that they deliver.
This anime aside from keeping your attention through battle scences will also deliver some fantasy-set slice of life from time to time, to keep you invested and on your toes.
Why should I take time out of my day to watch this show?
So to summarize "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" isn’t just a fantasy adventure it is also a deeply philosophical show which will make you ponder over what it truly means to be human, does not shy away from deep or even dark topics, all while giving you deeply interesting characters with outstanding character development, incredible animation and music that makes you feel all sort of emotions, which definitely keeps you invested. Combining all of this truly makes for an incredibly good recipe for ultimate success! And is most likely the reason, Why Frieren is your new favorite anime.