CRAFTING A TANGIBLE, AGING WORLD – FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END PRODUCTION NOTES 01-04
October 5, 2023 kViN Comments 5 Comments
Frieren is, at its best, a story tightly written about time; its passage, how different people perceive it, and the tangible marks it leaves in the world and its inhabitants. Its anime adaptation is a beautiful spectacle, but what makes it truly extraordinary is how it imagines that setting and people beyond the original boundaries, solidifying their existence so that you can feel their aging almost physically.
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End ventures to find what lies beyond the traditional ending to a fantasy tale, but to properly understand its extraordinary adaptation, you’re best off taking a small detour to explore what happened before that trip; projects like this one aren’t something you see every day, month, or even year, so how did we get here?
Producer Shoichiro Taguchi of TOHO, one of the two planning companies for the anime alongside original publisher Shogakukan, explained that their relationship with the series was abnormal since the start. Speaking to Mantan for a brief interview, Taguchi revealed that he found himself drafting an animation proposal after the very first chapter in 2020, something that usually takes a much longer time as new works—through their own content, or through their popularity—first have to inspire confidence to potential producers. Incidentally, this is also a good reminder that the production process is a somewhat fluid, vague process, for as much as fans sometimes desire clear-cut timelines; Frieren certainly hasn’t been in active production for 3.5 years, but to some degree, this project began forming that long ago.
Taguchi’s actions began gathering a team, as if knocking a single domino piece that eventually sprawls into paths towards stunning creators all over the world of anime. In that same interview, he noted that his experience within an anime studio—he was on his way to becoming an important producer within Studio Trigger before leaving for TOHO—had made him aware of just how important the influence of a project’s Animation Producer is. And he’d always known that when it comes to renowned AniP in the current industry, Madhouse’s Yuichiro Fukushi is certainly up there with the best leaders of production lines in Japanese television. It’s no coincidence nor mere inertia that he keeps being surrounded by brilliant artists, who recognize his tremendous effort to get them the help they need and his attempts to carve spaces to do what they love, in an industry that rarely guarantees those; even if sometimes, the price to pay for personal expression on the level of Sonny Boy is to make half of Takt Op Destiny.
In the same way that Taguchi had been looking for an excuse to work with Fukushi, the latter had repeatedly pitched projects to rising directorial star Keiichiro Saito. Although we have already introduced him at length across various articles, we mostly framed his rise through his relationship with other creatives, so it’s worth adding that he had just as strong of a bond with Fukushi. On top of being a regular contributor to multiple Shingo Natsume works that Fukushi managed, Saito went as far as taking over one of them for his actual kantoku debut—the ACCA 13 OVA back in 2020. As Saito revealed in the November issue of Nikkei Entertainment, Fukushi had kept pitching him various works to direct on his own, but he kept declining them because they were too bombastic for his tastes. When he approached him with Frieren, then, he felt that he might have finally gotten his taste right; mind you, he was aware that the series does have an action component, but trusted the flashy animators that always gather around Fukushi to be able to handle that properly.
Once you have a series director and animation producer with this much magnetism, the snowballing effect cannot be stopped—though the fact that Saito was also due to direct Bocchi the Rock meant that there was no time to spare, and as we’ll see, also caused him to delegate tasks in a way he didn’t do for his first TV show. To see how that actually manifested, let’s delve into these first few episodes.
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To be more precise, let’s first delve into how these first episodes were broadcast, because those are some important details as well. Although streaming platforms have gotten the first 4 episodes of the series separately, they first aired together in NTV’s prestigious Friday Road Show slot; which is to say, the type of nation-wide, mainstream platform that TV anime is rarely granted. While animated works do earn that honor sometimes—shoutout to the Minions movie that will follow up Frieren this week—it’s quite rare to see anime in there, other than iconic films such as Ghibli’s works. Another recent exception to the norm would be Violet Evergarden, which took over the slot for multiple weeks and at one point had the TV show re-edited to fit its length. What makes that even more relevant, as you might have already guessed, is that Frieren’s composer Evan Call was appointed because people like Taguchi were fond of his work on that series.