Review
Once in a while they appear. They surprise you by deviating from norm, by showing you it is possible to entrance an audience with things you never thought could do that. These shows, rare as gold, teach us animation can be much more than amazing action sequences, shocking deaths, highschool life, and exquisite superpowers. Kemonono no Souja Erin (Beast Player Erin) is one of those. This is a piece of medieval fantasy that doesn't focus on adventure or warfare, a slice-of-life without cute half-animal girls or school romance, a coming of age tale without the weak-willed stupid protagonist. This, my friend, is a jewel of the japanese industry overlooked by a fanbase whose major demands are ecchiness and superpowers. Pick your best spot on the couch and enjoy this calm and wonderful ride.
Beast Player Erin is the tale of a young genius girl, Erin, and her steps in a world restricted by ancient codes and laws, where beasts are tamed for the sake of men and punishment often goes beyond the boundaries of justice. Her curiosity, her intelligence, and her cunning take her from the remote Ake village, where the dragon-like mounts known as touda are raised for the duke's army, to the highest peaks of the world, where she learns about the majestic beast-lords and breaks ancient codes and conventions.
- A charming visual presentation
The very first thing to notice in Beast Player Erin is how it looks like a children’s book. You are gifted here with pencil-worked background images of beautiful landscapes and weird-looking houses, offering scenes with flowers, green fields, and bright blue skies. It is a rough work, made to look more like hand-drawn pieces of a book than computer-generated images. It doesn’t try to be realistic, it only tries to be sweet and simple. The character design goes at similar lengths, providing expressive characters with cartoonish styles, simple shadow effects, yet with sharpness and bright colors.
Simplicity Overdone and Overused
Although it has amazing artistic choices and a superb consistency, there is an abuse of simplicity for the sake of art. The background images have low resolutions that don’t match the character artwork, animation is basic at most, and the special effects used are so old-school inspired it makes Beast Player Erin look like an 80’s show from time to time. It also doesn’t help when so many scenes are recycled through the tale, reused to exhaustion. All of that fortunately never truly harms the overall experience but, considering this is a work done by Production I.G, they could've put a little more effort to transmit their artistic view.
It makes up for those faults somewhere else
If the animation lacked courage to perfect the artistic work, the sound direction covered it. Beast Player Erin creates a powerful audio experience, starting with a wide array of voice-actors, going from comical voices of clumsy thieves and the treacherous speech of a suspicious noble to the sweetness of Erin's childish voice. It goes beyond that, promoting a majestic soundtrack with classic eastern rhythms capable of delivering epicness, fear, sadness, and happiness whenever they are needed. This soundtrack, in fact, is a major player in turning the slow-paced tale and recycled scenes into a continuous experience of discovery, wonder, and shivering. This is a marvelous work, mixing originality, quality, and execution with perfection.
Slow and Steady Wins The Race
Beast Player Erin offers a slow pace. This is by no means a thrilling experience of rush and action. Everything in the show is calm, quiet, and subtle. The climax of episodes lies not in deaths, fights, or dramatic twists, but in events where Erin discovers something new, when she reaches a conclusion to keep her moving forward. This is a quiet ride for most of the time, starting with the charming young girl learning about the world and ending up as myths and ancient history come to play in a dance of betrayals and scheming.
The Three Phases
Although the heart of Beast Player Erin lies in its middle arc, where a teenage Erin meets Lilan and starts to break the conventions of her people, the show offers a starting arc of young Erin and closes with a final arc when she is a young-adult directly clashing against the important figures of the kingdom and unveiling long lost mysteries. These three phases can offer very different experiences, with its middle part bordering an unconventional high-school slice-of-life and the last one becoming much more intricate in of schemes, politics, and even action.
Maybe too much memories
Beast Player Erin’s slow rhythm is a choice more than a flaw, but it becomes annoying when there are so many remembrance scenes coming and going. If those scenes were new, if they had a narrative different than just simply going again over the scene, perhaps the very pace of the show would feel quickier and the entrancement would be even greater. A pity, but for everything else done in this tale, it is a able issue.
Glorious Erin
Erin. She alone can carry the show on her shoulders. She is one of the most interesting, awe-inspiring, and charming protagonists of japanese animation. As young she is a vibrant girl in search of knowledge, a caring child who loves her mother, who keeps walking in the wilderness observing life and learning from it. She is sweet, calm, intelligent, and yet a child nonetheless, innocent and naive. As she grows you get to see her evolving in all aspects. The codes of the world clash against her beliefs, her lust for knowledge and her curiosity conflict with each other, the people around her become key players to help her overcome the barriers she faces. She cries, she loses hope, yet she is a brave girl who manages to find strength to keep on going. She doesn’t fight, she knows no magic, she is never linked to ecchiness or perversion, she is a girl as it fits being a girl in a medieval world, yet she is a rebel, a revolutionist of her own. Damn Erin. She makes every other protagonist a dumb wooden plate if not for a few exceptions.
And we also get Lilan and everyone else
If having such an amazing protagonist is not enough, Beast Player Erin brings to the table a vast array of characters. Most of them exist to aid Erin in her trials, to give her a push when her own strength fails. You first get her mother, Soyon, a strong woman in all regards, one Erin looks up to, but who yet lacks the strength to face the ancient codes and is tied by them. Jone, the wiseman with his carefree attitude and urge to teach is the next important person. Then comes Esal and the people of Kazalm, all of them becoming entranced as Erin shows them her potential and makes her rebel spirit a beacon of light in the middle of these ancient conventions. However, it is Lilan who gets the most important role of all. The beast-lord and Erin form a pair of friends, of animal and woman, of mother and her child. Seeing as Lilan and Erin grow together is a wonder, awe-inspiring. If you have a pet you are likely to see how deep is their link, how strong is their friendship, and how hard it is for them to not truly understand each other. If you don’t have a pet, well... Find yourself one!
The other points of view
Of course, you will be focused on Erin most of the time, but for a few episodes new points of view are presented, such as Ial and his work as a protector of the queen, Shunan and his imminent ascension to grand duke, Damiya and his secret plot, and so on. These additional eyes showing us the world get only an episode or two in the first half, but later become more and more frequent, ultimately merging their paths with Erin’s by the end. It’s a satisfying change of pace from Erin’s rise to scheming and political crisis, and the way they are presented is quite interesting because their seemingly different paths intertwine at many points.
Perhaps too naive
Sadly though, Beast Player Erin’s cast is not all glory. It can get annoying with the amount of screentime Mukku and Nukku, the two comic relief figures of the show, have and it also fails in the villain department where you can point the evil guy and his plot right at moment number zero. This is most likely to be a consequence of the calmness of the show, where turning villains into complex entities would demand far more work and perhaps more episodes considering the pace, yet it saddens to see all the amazing cast being so obviously good or bad most of the time.
Boldly Different
Beast Player Erin is nearly unique. Its calm medieval atmosphere, its drift towards rebellion and the chains of conventions, its outstanding protagonist challenging the world with courage and determination. Whereas most shows would lose to a weak-willed hero, whereas warfare with blood and fights would rob the scenes, Beast Player Erin achieves mastery with just the simple discoveries, with crafting relationships between Erin and her tutors, and by shifting Erin from a child to an adult and making her wiser and stronger in all regards. Whereas shows would break their characters to ridiculous amounts in a vain attempt to hasten their ephemeral progression, here Erin gathers her strength, relies on help, and overcomes problems in a slow and steady rhythm. For a show to be so phenomenal without the flashiness, action, and drama that are typically intrinsic to great works is an amazing feat, and one very few can claim to have achieved.
Comments
So it was my second time watching Erin before writing this review. When I watched it back in 2009 I was absurdly surprised. The first episodes weren’t enough to truly catch me, but I was in a good mood for a slow paced show such as Beast Player Erin. The art style, the more childish look, everything worked in favor of the calm and steady story, making me drift for the first sequence of episodes and slowly luring me to watch the rest. Then came the changes, first with a dramatic event and a plot twist that made me "wow" for the first time, from there I couldn’t know what to expect of the show. It looked kinda ordinary and slice-of-life thing, but then new points of view showed something else. Erin started to prove to be a genius girl but I still couldn’t see how she would fit the big picture that was presented.
These unexpected events and the take on Erin's daily life moments, from learning from her mother to soaring through the skies, make this show something unique. I could say
Twelve Kingdoms is similar, but that’s only in the fact that both picture a low-fantasy setting.
Seirei no Moribito (which is from Uehashi Nahoko as well) would also not be a good comparison because it’s very action-based. There’s simply nothing that truly mimics Beast Player Erin that I’ve watched, and managing such a feat and delivering it with great quality was something that caught me totally by surprise. Shows like this proves that flashy action and impactful stuff are not the only way to grab the attention in the visual media, a solid setting and a good storytelling can amaze in the same degree.
Even someone like me, who prefers more action, warfare, heavy intrigues and stuff, am unable to deny Beast Player Erin’s successful use of ordinary elements to create such a deep story and great moments. Some may argue about the slow pace, some may argue about a simple setting, etc. These issues, even though small, are there, but the fact is the show manages to deliver what it intends to and do so with great quality and in a time that 99% of others rely on flashiness and fanservice. A rare feat and because of that it became one of my favorite shows.
