Anime review: Wolf’s Rain

Wolf’s Rain is a movie musical, stretched out to last ten times more than it needed without a proper storyboard to excuse the excess duration. And what a better choice to mess up in that department, than Bones the “pretty colors and no faks given for the plot” studio. It’s one of the hottest names today for all the wrong reasons.

The best way to approach the show is as a dark fairy tale that overstayed its welcome and has to do with freedom, life, happiness and wolf-huggers. It does a great job at building up a melancholic mood with its artwork and soundtrack, making it very easy for a weak-minded viewer to start thinking weirdly.

It is properly dark and depressing, with the snow keeps falling, while songs and dialogues keep mentioning freedom from pain and sadness. It’s about four wolves who disguise as pretty boys being hunted by everybody in a dying world as they follow their instinct to reach paradise where a flower girl will resurrect everything. Did that make any sense? No, but it is a cool concept and it does a great job at presenting an apocalyptic world at the brink of destruction. The problem is, that’s the only thing it does.

The characters for example are nothing more than mouthpieces that seem to be interesting just because they are a patchwork of fetishes. If you try to remember what their personality is like, there is not much there. Pretty boys to attract the fujoshis, can transform into wolves to attract the furries, and are victimized by the world to attract the feelfags. Not that anyone who liked the show cared about good characterization, since apparently that was never the point.

Neither is the pacing, which is EXTREMELY slow. So slow they had to throw in FOUR RECAP EPISODES for a plot that can be summarized in less than one. That’s what happens when you strike a deal for two cours and don’t bother to fill them with something. The story was not complex and the main characters had no depth to excuse the duration. If you are expecting something to happen in every episode, you will be bored to death. But then again, it’s not a show you are watching for its plot or characters. It’s supposed to give you the feels, which in turn will make you feel like reciting emo poetry.

And even for the scraps of plot you can find in it, anything unfolds in any way the scriptwriter feels like it. There is such an overuse of magic, to the point anything is possible. The main villain has such broken powers, he can teleport anywhere he likes, kill anyone he feels like it, and nobody can do the slightest thing to stop him. The story can end whenever he wants it, basically. The sky can turn pink and it will make sense because nothing makes sense. When nothing has limitations, everything is possible, and nothing matters. Bones in a nutshell. But hey, look at the pretty colors and stop thinking about it.

So basically, what you are supposed to do with the show is stare at the gloomy backgrounds, and listen to the teen angst filled soundtrack. It is all about the artistic whatchamacallit side of the show, and the emotions it inflicts to its viewers. You might as well pretend there is no story at all. The ending is just a reality reset, which renders pointless the entire show, since it doesn’t exist anymore.

The whole thing is very one-note, and because of its duration it will become tiresome very fast if you want something other than just mood atmosphere. Wolf’s Rain hardly deserves its fame. It needed less episodes, better characterization, and someone NOT FROM BONES to work the storyboard. The soundtrack is the only thing I appreciate about it.