The thing you have to know about Haibane Renmei is that it’s not going to give you the answers to the questions it raises. Why are these ‘Haibane’ and the people of the town unable to leave the walls? What happens when they vanish? Where do they come from? Why do they have wings and halos? Well, the answer to the last one is pretty easy – because it looks cute, and the creators thought it would be neat. And here, I think, we get to the crux of Yoshitoshi Abe’s writing: he likes to introduce bizarre circumstances and unorthodox plot developments to his anime, because it makes people think. But ultimately, this is a weak form of storytelling. Some people enjoy vagueness, because it lets them fill in the blanks with what they want to hear. But I only care about what the writer was trying to say. When I’m almost certain that it was nothing more than ‘draw your OWN conclusions’, I am invariably disappointed. So it was with Haibane Renmei.
A new Haibane is hatched from a cocoon. Because she dreamt of plunging to earth from the sky in the cocoon, she is given the name ‘Rakka’, which means ‘falling’ – and it is the Haibane’s tradition to name each newborn after some aspect of their dream. Rakka finds her feet in her strange new world by accompanying each of her new acquaintances to their jobs. Then the limitations of a 13-episode series seem to hit, and all the characters’ stories but one are dumped, giving a sense of climax, albeit a hastily cobbled-together one, to the final episodes.
I’ll say this – it’s a beautiful anime. Gorgeous art, excellent music and animation, nice, varied character designs and beautiful scenery. The characters are mostly drawn from typical anime stock, but that’s okay; in such a brisk series, they don’t get dull, and stock characters have becomes stock characters for good reason. However, the story is deeply unsatisfying, simply because it’s several episodes of excellent exposition and mystery, a climax as one character disappears abruptly, and then there’s an apparent realisation that all these good ideas don’t actually lead anywhere: an interesting backstory set up for the last episodes gets resolved far too quickly, and a false conclusion in the end satisfies none of the evoked curiosity, leaving only a sense of bathos and indifference.
An enjoyable anime, but an irksome ending. Much is promised, little delivered, and it’s very apparent that no matter how hard you look, the answers to your questions will never come. There’s just not enough there.
(originally posted 13.10.05)
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