It’s a wonder that we can fit an entire world between two book covers, that we can find the space between opening and closing credits to make lives that break our hearts with consequence. There was once a sense we had as children where the world held so much possibility. It can feel buried under so much else, until we find ourselves tripping briefly into someone else’s world, where that wonder’s waiting fresh for us. We need that peace. We need that sense of possibility to keep from becoming desensitized. “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” gives us such a world.
The fantasy anime isn’t about the adventurers’ quest to defeat a mythic villain. We start after they’ve already done so. We begin as they return, are celebrated, and say their brief goodbyes to each other. Frieren is an elf mage who’s already lived a thousand years. The ten year journey that defines her party’s lives is less than a hundredth of her life. They stand beneath a meteor shower and agree to see it again in 50 years time.
When Frieren returns, the warrior Himmel is days from passing away. The party sees the meteors again, and Himmel dies. Frieren regrets not knowing him better, but even regrets are something that take decades for her to process. It’s another 20 years before she visits the party’s priest Heiter again. He asks her to stick around for 5 or 6 years – but a moment for Frieren – to translate a magical tome. And while she’s at it, she can train Fern, a war orphan with a talent for magic whom he adopted.
“Frieren” continues taking place over years, visiting moments that describe its characters. The story is told from Frieren’s perspective, and that means we don’t get something continuous from one day to the next. We get impressions, and the tales that stand out. And yet, it always feels like I can sit inside any of its scenes.
The animation is expressive in such a surprising way. There are moments on film where a single image can describe a character in a way that keeps on expanding. Like ink on wet paper, the idea that image contains keeps spreading and informing everything else we see. “Frieren” is a landscape of images that capture entire beings, that tell us experiences that keep expanding, that keep meaning more.
There’s one shot of Fern cutting vegetables as her adoptive father says goodbye to Frieren. We see Fern from behind, through the doorway. She stops to lift her sleeve to her eye. That’s it. And if there’s a museum in my mind of images that will stay with me, that will speak to me, that will embody something about how I understand the world or myself, it will hold a place. Some of those images are seared, some are unforgettable, and some – like this – are placed gently, with care and awe.
In these ways, “Frieren” captures a theme that is near impossible to capture – that of what people mean in both life and death, of how we keep them alive in ourselves, of how we paint the world in their likeness – even in ways we didn’t take the time to when they were here.
Through the four-episode premiere, there’s only been one fight. It feels epic, but it’s also ordinary, over surprisingly quickly. The lesson Fern learns from Frieren is what captures our imagination. Everything modern is the norm for her. For Frieren, that progress is the blink of an eye. The progress of 80 years dwarfs what came before it, but it hardly matters – the progress of another 80 will do the same. Knowing that history matters; becoming trapped in it doesn’t. That’s the disconnect. That’s what keeps Frieren at a distance, and it’s what builds regret. She can’t hold on to what is – to her – a passing moment, but when it passes she doesn’t want to let go of its grasp.
Most of the series so far is about Frieren doing odd jobs in exchange for folk magic. She might be a legendary mage, but she collects statue cleaning spells and spells to change the flavor of grapes. One episode is about the hunt for a flower – not for an entire spell, but simply because her spell to grow a field of flowers is missing this particular one. Yet there’s always a reason revealed, a very humbling and touching one.
In Frieren, we have a character who genuinely feels alien, who feels like she views the world through a lens that’s very different from ours. You might mistake her for stoic, but she’s just as emotional as anyone else. Her emotions just fit the pace of her lifespan. If one of our days is 20 of hers, then our smiling every day is her smiling every 20. Since her story is similarly spread out, we begin to see at her pace, and how strange it is that everyone else – to her – feels so quickly and often.
I love how ordinary the magic feels, and not just those folk spells. Flying and levitating objects are just in a days’ work. It’s no big deal. Cleaning shipwrecks off a shore is just showing up and levitating flotsam all day long. These small stakes are always interesting, though. Frieren helps people not because she believes in it, but because it’s what Himmel would have done, and she wants to understand humans better. Her regret in not knowing him better when he was alive is to shape the world a little bit more in the way he would have.
The animation is stunning, often for how it uses light. Characters pass under the dappled light of branches. The morning sun slowly but smoothly lifts shadows away. Nature is thick and varied. Worn pavement stones along old paths are cracked. Autumn forests are so very colorful. The trunks of trees are stressed with lines and growth. Everything grows older. Just not Frieren. It’s a brilliant realization of a fantasy world and how one character sees it, built not from the top-down, but from inhabiting its overlooked and unimportant places, the stops along the way. I long for more fantasy like this, where adventure is complemented by seeing what its everyday world is like, where a town doesn’t have to worry about a monster but instead the beauty of its ocean.
I cried across each of the four episodes that make up its premiere, not because it was strictly sad, but because it was clarifying. It communicates with something so deep down that it bypasses our guards, and accesses something essential. It’s not even communicating with empathy, although that’s there, too. It’s reaching all the way down to that weird abyssal place where existence itself is strange, where we’re each kind of horrified and scared, where we stuff the dissonances we never quite figure out. And it comforts it. It holds it and just lets us understand how…soft it can feel to recognize this part of yourself that’s buried under so much else, that’s rarely visited, that once sparked wonder and now feels alien. It just lets you be with yourself. It’s rare when a story can make me feel this whole.
The most memorable moments in “Frieren” are its quiet ones, when you can hear another world breathe around you, through stillness transporting you, where the world hushes even if not your own, so you can feel one foot inside of it and know what it’s like to yearn not to leave.
“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” is on Crunchyroll.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 