A girl is falling from the sky. She has no idea who she is or how she came to be falling, but she is strangely calm in the situation. A crow flies alongside her at first, then begins tugging at the hem of her white gown, vainly trying to save her. "It's no use," she tells it, "but thank you anyway." The crow surrenders to the inevitable, flying off just as the clouds break to reveal the countryside and town below. Only as she sees the ground rushing towards her does she finally cry out...
Next we see a young woman in her early twenties walking down a dusty hall carrying boxes. She is unusual in several respects. She has a halo over her head, she has a small set of grey-feathered wings sticking out of her back, and she is smoking a cigarette. She stops to look in one of the abandoned rooms, noticing a huge white cocoon has filled most of it. She runs to get help, and soon there are four other women (also with halos and short, grey-feathered wings) helping her clean up the room. The young girl who was falling from the sky is now floating inside the cocoon's liquid. The others wait for it to hatch, and speculate about what sort of person is inside. After the cocoon breaks open (drenching everyone in the process), the mysterious girl wakes up on a bed in a different room surrounded by the smiling faces of the five winged women. The one with the cigarette leans forward. "Tell me," she says, "about the dream you had."
Thus begins the strange and hauntingly beautiful anime series Haibane-Renmei. The falling girl has found herself in the timeless dream-like world of Glie, a small town and countryside surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable 30-meter-high wall. Glie is inhabited mostly by normal humans and a few colonies of haibane ("charcoal feathers"), the not-quite-human angel-like beings. The young girl has appeared in the haibane nest in an abandoned factory called "Old Home," and is named Rakka (the Japanese word for "falling"). Although she is about 15, she suddenly realizes she has no memories of her life before this. "Nobody knows who you were before," explains Reki ("pebble"), the cigarette-smoking haibane. "That's the kind of world we are in. Nobody knows why." Reki introduces the other four haibane: Nemu ("sleep"), Hikari ("light"), Kana ("river fish") and Kuu ("air"), explaining the tradition of naming haibane after their cocoon dream. As the newest haibane, Rakka is presented with a glowing halo (which temporarily requires a wire and headband to hold it in place), then goes through the painful process of sprouting her wings.
"It was easy," ABe says in an interview in one of the Japanese Haibane-Renmei DVD inserts, "because there are not many rules about the number of pages, character development, and consistency when you are writing a dojinshi." His first haibane dojinshi had no story, just little "snapshots" of what daily life is like for a haibane (such as getting a halo caught in the door of a subway). The second and third ones, released in April 2002, were called "Charcoal Feathers in Old Home," and they told the story of the arrival of Rakka to the haibane world.
The strangest rule of this world is that no haibane or human may leave Glie. There is only a single gate in the wall surrounding Glie, and only the group of traders called the Toga may pass through it to the outside; even then, they are only allowed to deal with the Haibane Renmei while inside Glie. Eventually, the viewer comes to realize that Glie is... well, that's sort of a secret for now.
One of the first elements a viewer notices about Haibane-Renmei that sets it apart from other anime is its color scheme. ABe's artwork is known for its moody coloring, so the anime is given a very subtle color tone of mostly blues, greens, browns and grays. "I cannot understand why other anime use such flashy colors," ABe says. "If you have too many strong colors, you cannot tell which is the main one, resulting in a less memorable image."
Another strength of the show is its music. You're Under Arrest's composer Kow Otani produced a wonderful complement to ABe's vision, with a mixture of classical and lyrical selections. But what viewers will remember most is the haunting closing piece, "Blue Flow." Composed and sung by the musical duo of Aki Hatake and Masumi Ito (who go under the name Heart of Air), this ethereal song perfectly summarizes the spirit of the show.
From here, the story turns darker. Rakka goes into deep grief and begins facing uncomfortable quesions about her own existence as a haibane. And although a fair amount of acting skill is obviously required to play such a character (ABe describes Rakka as "chaotic," expressed visually by her dishelved [sic] hair) the Japanese staff took the courageous step of hiring a first-time voice-actor, Ryo Hirohashi, to play Rakka, whom creator ABe describes as "brilliant."
For the English voice of Rakka, New Generation Pictures (a translation and adaptation studio) chose Carrie Savage, an actress who has already performed in several anime series, most notably as Fuko in Strawberry Eggs and Hina and Eileen in Dangaizer 3. "Rakka is different from the other anime roles I've played so far because she's deeper and seems to be acting more from the heart," said Savage when interviewed halfway through recording the series. "I think it's cool that Rakka is asking the same questions that most of us ask in our hearts in our own lives, the sort of universal questions like, 'Why was I born?' and 'What is my purpose for being?'" Jonathan Klein, the director of the English dub, is no stranger to ABe's anime, having served as the English dub producer and script editor on NieA_7. "Having worked on NieA_7 gave me the opportunity to understand ABe's style of storytelling," Klein says. "That helped me a lot more to understand the story and characters than if I had just come in to direct Haibane-Renmei without knowing his work."
By the end of the series ABe is tackling serious spiritual themes with a curious mixture of Christianity and Buddhism. Clearly the angel-like image of the haibane is taken from Christian imagery, but mixed into this are the Buddhist ideas of atoning for sins in their previous lives and having to achieve a level of understanding in order to reach their "Day of Flight" where they are allowed to move onto the next level of existence. Both Reki and Rakka must resolve problems from their pasts and must face forgotten parts of their cocoon dreams. Ultimately what they are both looking for is forgiveness and salvation, a search which leads them to one of the most powerful conclusions of any anime series.
After C.S. Lewis wrote his famous Biblical allegorical science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, he wrote to a friend saying, "I am convinced that any amount of theology can be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of science fiction." Expand "science fiction" to include all the fantasy worlds of anime and that is exactly what has happened here. In many anime series we come to care about the characters and what finally happens to their lives. But in Haibane-Renmei we have the first anime where, in th end, we care deeply about the fate of the characters' immortal souls.
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