DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionHikari no Ou 2nd Season

REVIEWS

• 

  Mcsuper

  74/100
  A Cohesive, Deep Story, With Animation Shortcomings

  The moment I laid eyes on this show, I could immediately tell that veterans of the anime industry were working on this. The likes of Mamoru Oshii, and Junji Nishimura working on this left me having high expectations for this show, and it delivered, to some extent. The story telling and world building has a more older style to it, with it being more of a slow burn. It reminded me of the older Studio Ghibli films, like Princess Mononoke, with its forest settings. There was also a lot of world building and exposition, and while it made it a bit hard to keep up with everything at points, it was quite intriguing watching and listening to all the lore around the fire hunters and the changes of human civilization.

  Unfortunately, early on, there were signs of this show having a very limited budget, and I could tell with the shortcuts in the animation, the CG, and the unpolished designs. However, I will say the unpolished designs sort of worked for this type of show, and the line work was decent. It was a good effort, nonetheless, by studio Signal M.D.

  The music was a very well executed aspect of the show, with the OST contributing to the overall ambience of the shots and settings. The OP and ED were both great as well, with the former being my favourite opening of the season.

  To give you a gist of the show, it revolves around an industrial-esque world where human civilization is not driven by fire anymore, but lives in constant fear of it. However, there is hope to collect a new type of energy, with collecting stones that emit light and steam, which is the job for fire hunters.

  Touko, a young girl, is in trouble in the woods, and gets saved by a Fire Hunter, who sadly perishes saving her, leaving his dog, Kanata behind. She embarks on a journey to return Kanata to his relatives, along with his weapon. Meanwhile, Koushi, who is the Fire Hunter’s son, is adopted by a wealthy family, and in their mansion and in the outdoors, he learns truths about the history and lore about the Fire Hunters and royal family, and researches to try to save the world from its eventual demise. Their two paths start out separate at first, and slowly come together.

  The show does get a little heavy on exposition, and it gets hard to follow at times, but it’s definitely intriguing. The execution of the lore telling might make the story a little boring at times, with its restricted use of animation, which constantly uses stills to tell the story. While the story is wholly interesting, the execution is a bit lacking. The characters seem more like vessels to tell a larger story, and while they have distinct personalities, there wasn’t much to break down from their interactions. They have their realisms around how they interact with the cruel world around them, but that’s about it.

  If you value cohesive storytelling and world building a lot, this might be an anime you’ll enjoy. For me, while I did enjoy the storytelling and world building, but the animation ultimately did take away from some of my enjoyment here. There was some good ambience, background shots, and an excellent soundtrack as well. This adaptation basically tells me that the novel itself was quite amazing, and this adaptation gave it some movement to go along with it. In a mediocre season overall, this still ended up as one of the better shows of the season, and I would give this a light recommendation.

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• 

  ZNote

  82/100
  The shadow on the wall is not just cast by fire – in this case, the shadow itself IS fire.

  To reside in The Fire Hunter’s world is to be perpetually afraid of something. Whether that something in particular is a Fiend that is running wild, or even your fellow man, it’s always present and looming. And it is easy to understand way; in the past, a terrible catastrophe struck humankind and made it so that humanity could no longer harness fire. Coming into proximity of it would lead to the body instantly burning, and if it should happen to occur within a group of many people…well, it doesn’t take much imagination to think about what could happen. And the show does not shy away on showing just how terrible it really is. The sea of black, red, and orange bathe the screen as people scream for the pain to stop, as though they were mere kindling that allows the fire to spread at an alarming rate. In a flash, everything could be gone. So, there’s only one option that seems sensible: cloister yourself from everyone else, and keep outside contact to a minimum. Choose loneliness.

  It is this cloistering quality that makes The Fire Hunter a hard sell, both as a seasonal anime and as a general fantasy story. The idea of a sprawling world for our characters to explore and meet so many new faces (along with an equally-sprawling soundtrack) as they fight against a relatively clear-cut evil is traded away. Where is the sense of grand adventure? Instead, what we see and experience is an intense interiority, which allows for the series to develop some fantastic subtextual worldbuilding. Both in terms of the larger social structure and character relationships, there are constant layers to be unpacked and chewed on. Within the pods of villages that exist on the outskirts of the capital city and beyond, they had to learn to defend themselves against the possibility of the fire that could kill them, but they cannot survive purely on their own. A single village can only have access to so many resources, so it became necessary to create a commodity that can bring commerce of some kind (muku paper, or a paper to communicate with the gods, being the most-referenced in-show).

  The world is thusly one that, as sequestered as a village might want to be, must rely on others for money, bartering, and liquid fire. And presiding over their safety from the Fiends are the Fire Hunters, the ones whose sickles and dogs kill Fiends for their golden blood to create a new source of light and heat. Whether as a village or as a villager, the ability to work determines one’s worth. With Fire Hunters acting as both guardian and harvester of the most-precious of all resources, they achieve a quasi-divine reverence among the people of the show’s universe.

  This interplay between isolation, reliance, and the Fire Hunters’ guardianship is what brings us into the narrative proper, with Touko being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a Fire Hunter sacrifices his own life in a forest to slay a Fiend so that Touko can live, she is subsequently marked by her own family and village as having committed a cardinal sin. She is regarded as a harbinger of misfortune, and must atone for, albeit indirectly, causing the Fire Hunter’s death. Such is the weight of the sin that her own sister wears a black mask as Touko boards the train, treating her as akin to an undesirable. And as a mere child, Touko is the most reluctant of reluctant heroes, perhaps bound more by a sense of duty to return Kanata and the Fire Hunter’s sickle to his family in the capital rather than any inner drive that she may have at the start. She boards the truck not knowing at all what awaits her, and the derisive attitudes of her home and any she might encounter on the way insinuate that the journey will be anything but pleasant, or safe for that matter. She’ll learn a lot as she travels on about the cold world around her.

  (Touko's introduction includes death and blood, a harbinger of the conflict she will be thrown into with forces beyond her understanding and control)

  But her journey of discovering is not one she undertakes alone. The Fire Hunter has another story move in parallel to Touko, that of Koushi, the now-orphaned son of a famed Fire Hunter who is taken in by a wealthy family in the capital. Gifted with a beautiful mind, he accepts the offer by the Okibis to escape the old life he once lived, along with having proper doctors look after his sister, in exchange for using that mind of his. There is apprehension about the current state of the world, and Okibi wants Koushi to figure out how to make like his father did and harness skyfire, an even-more-powerful substance from certain Fiends. Between the Fire Hunter’s death involving Touko and what Okibi is asking of Koushi, humanity seems to be hurrying its way to another conflict, and one that might have just as dire consequences for their existence. Moments of levity are few and far between; it is only when Okibi’s daughter Kira seems rather taken with Koushi, or one of the eventual brides-to-be on Touko’s train say something caustic, that the series allows itself to breathe for a moment.

  The pieces move slowly and deliberately, almost like a mournful dance rather than a grand spectacle, best encapsulated by its aesthetic decisions. The series plays itself like a series of theatrical tableaux, both in terms of its emphasis on specific moments of heightened tension and in visual presentation. The soundtrack lacks any of the grand-sweeping orchestrations or soaring triumphs of brass, woodwinds, and strings with explosive percussion that we sometimes expect from the standard fantasy fare. Things are more brooding; the music adopts lower tones and murkier timbres as stringed instruments play in their lower registers and the percussion feels less broad and more echoed. It is meditative rather than epic. Complete with highly-stylized still-shots that deliberately contrast with the rest of the presentation, they read as a kind of contemporary spin on the famed “Dezaki postcard memory,” meant to signify either overtly or subtextually just how important or extreme a particular person or moment in time really is. The affect is that The Fire Hunter tends to be more suggestive than anime normally produces, with Nishimura Junji treating its world and Oshii Mamoru’s series composition of the original novels as museum pieces.

  

  (This image of Kira is one of the few times that the series allows softer yellows and whites into the aesthetic, showing that her heart is, perhaps, one of the few points of light in a miserable world)

  And nearly every painting in that museum is a breathing testament of misery and murkiness. The palette employed throughout the series is muted, as even the golden blood of the slain Fiends feels almost too dense and congealed to be “bright.” It is unnatural both in that sense and in the natural sense that we associate blood with red. Even when properly harnessed as either a source of light or heat in its yellow hue, that unnatural quality remains. The only real source of light comes from fire (which we know is the ultimate death sentence), the sun which is rarely shown, or in selective postcard memories. The use of setting and placement of the characters within it robs the world of its happiness, as though even the mere implication of fire and heat is something that must be avoided at all costs. Especially as the stories of Koushi and Touko continue on their way, it allows a real contrast between the higher-class house and its comforts that Koushi enjoys versus the cold, hard steel of Touko’s train or the shaded canopy of the forest she travels through. At times, it is intensely claustrophobic. At others, it feels so vast so as to feel that something is just wrong. Every inch of The Fire Hunter is tinged with something to be afraid of, no matter who is traveling with you, where you are, or what is waiting out there.

  I mentioned before that The Fire Hunter is a bit of a hard sell. Barring the fact that it’s only one season at present, its affect is, on some level, quite alienating, and the narrative runs thick (as do its infodumps). Yet, the unfolding mysteries about the Spiders, the Fiends, Okibi’s goal, Kira’s feelings, Touko’s quest, the divine clans, and many other things make a dystopic steampunk-esque fantasy that feels like more is constantly waiting to be unearthed. Its off-kilter form of presentation and animated character acting gives tension, repose, and rumination plenty of time to dig into the earth, and its world is only revealed to be more horrifying the further it goes along. In the midst of its bleakness, a few characters stand poised to take their steps into whatever fire-laden fate awaits them.

  Just remember that the metaphorical shadow on the wall is not just cast by fire – in this case, the shadow itself IS fire.

  
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• 

  Lenlo

  31/100
  Started as one of the most promising shows of the season, ended as the greatest disappointment.

  

  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.

  [Video Link](https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/a6525d5b353e69b0de747edb6d949594.mp4)

  Production

  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.

  

  Narrative

  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.

  Take for instance one scene near the end of this season. Koushi, our male lead from the capital, has discovered a book in the library with a lot of questionable, but important, information. Inside the book he found red hairs, meaning someone was here not to long ago. So what does he do when he meets Akira, a red-haired Fire Hunter whom he has no personal knowledge of and no reason to believe has any connection to this book? Why he immediately asks if the brother she mentioned had red hair and, upon hearing he did, assumes he must have written in it himself and invites them to see to. I suppose red hair might be rare enough to do that? But even then, it's an incredibly flimsy connection to make.

  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!

  

  Characters

  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.

  So, what do I mean by Touko's execution failing? Well simply put, rather then having her take small steps towards independence and self-realization, Fire Hunter kind of has her just... skip most of it. There's no real progress there. Just one day she's a meek girl cleaning toilets, the next she's table to kill fearsome Flame Fiends all on her own. Either the Flame Fiends aren't near as dangerous as we were lead to believe, so weak they could be killed by a child and thus no real threat at all, or Touko has no business killing one as an untrained civilian. Neither are particularly good for the story, and this happens multiple times. And to top it all off, I sort of just can't stand her voice. This is separate from the narrative issues, but it's worth saying: I hate how Touko sounds.

  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.

  

  OST

  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.

  

  Passion Isn't Always Enough

  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!

  So... Fire Hunter. In case it wasn't obvious by this point, I really didn't like how it turned out. My initial impressions of the series was actually pretty good! Fire Hunter had the premier of the season, fantastically setting up an interesting world and two engaging plotlines. All the pieces were in place. I was strapped in and ready to go! And then... the next episode happened. And the next and the next. Initially it was just some production woes. Animation was stilted or nonexistent, backgrounds and characters got less and less detailed, compositing was abandoned almost entirely it feels like. These sucked, sure. But an anime doesn't have to be particularly animated to be good. I'd have accepted a power point if Fire Hunter could have at least made it palatable. Where it went wrong was when these production woes started to effect the story.

  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.

  

  Conclusion

  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.

  Thanks for reading! If you want to leave a comment, positive or negative, you can leave it here.

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