Speaking of the pervasive influence of Tolkien, I started watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (葬送のフリーレン) recently, an anime series that premiered in 2023. It's likely more directly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, though Dungeons and Dragons is largely based on Tolkien, demonstrating how Tolkien continues to shape the fantasy genre worldwide, even indirectly. I would describe Frieren as Tolkien meets mono no aware, the Japanese artistic concept manifested in contemplating evidence of slowly, inexorably encroaching death. Arguably there's plenty of mono no aware in Lord of the Rings already since much of the story concerns the passing of people and civilisations, though Tolkien ultimately places more emphasis on returning glory than Japanese mono no aware stories tend to do. Frieren is clearly a low budget series but it's not bad.
It's available on Netflix in Japan where I see it's rated 16+, despite the fact that it was a thirteen year old student who recommended it to me. I guess folks don't pay much attention to these age ratings. Anyway, for the life of me I can't figure out why the show's rated 16+ though I'm only three episodes in. Maybe there'll be a violent orgy in episode 10 though it would require a pretty drastic shift in tone.
The title character is an elven mage whom we meet as a member of an adventuring party that also includes a human priest, a human hero, and a dwarf. There's no swordplay on this show because it's more difficult and expensive to animate. Even anime series that do include swords usually depict the fights as consisting of glowing swords shooting beams of power.
In the first episode, after a great victory, the party go their separate ways. We follow Frieren for a montage of her studying and wandering over a span of decades before returning to the hometown of one of her former companions to find the formerly vain and feminine young man has aged into a bald, bearded old man. As in Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons, elves have much greater life spans than humans, a fact that Peter Jackson emphasised with the Arwen segment in his adaptation of The Two Towers. Tolkien used the concept as an underlying tragedy in the stories of Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen, romances between a human male and an elf female. Romance is absent from Frieren, as it generally tends to be in anime, so the dramatic problem here is just in that Frieren has to live longer than her friends. She's described as "cold-hearted" multiple times but she does cry at her friends' funerals.
The show reminds me a bit of Violet Evergarden, another show in a Japanese fantasy version of Europe about a beautiful, emotionally withdrawn girl of supernatural abilities who lives with memories of a dead, handsome man with whom she shared a formative adventure but not a romance. It's notable that none of Frieren's former companions marry or have children. The priest, Heiter, adopts a girl named Fern whom he asks Frieren to take on as an apprentice. The wanderings of Frieren and Fern together make up the present time narrative of the series though most of their wanderings consist of Frieren revisiting important places in her adventures with the Tolkien-esque party. The show finds various ways to gently imply the ongoing tragedy of existence and the passage of time. Even a monster that Frieren and Fern fight, one that had previously been a difficult foe for the adventurer party, is now mainly interesting because his formerly powerful attack is now considered a simple, rudimentary spell. He's been outmoded by progress.
Frieren is available on Netflix in Japan.
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