Review

Wolf's Rain is one of the most highly anticipated series of this season, and for good reason.  By the creators of the anime masterpiece Cowboy Bebop, featuring a musical score by the infamous Yoko Kanno, and vocals by the incredibly talented Maaya Sakamoto, this series proves to be the next big series in anime. 

I was taken in before I had even seen a single episode.  For me, combining my favorite animal, the wolf, with my favorite animation group and favorite composer just proved to good to be true.  After seeing the first episode, I was blown away.   Usually it takes me a good four or so episodes to really get into an anime series, but this one had me in by the opening of the first episode.  This definitely ranks up there among my favorite series.

The animation is very good, and the music is beautiful, and touching at times.  The soundtrack for this series has a Brazilian feel, and was partially influenced by flamenco music.  The character designs are unique, and the characters themselves are very believable, with distinct personalities that give depth to the series.  The four main wolves have a very detached feeling to the world, and their inhuman mannerisms adds to the fact that they are not humans, even though they carry the appearance.  The backgrounds are very realistic, and give a very desolate, haunting feel to the anime.  Much attention is paid to detail with the backgrounds, with every crack and uneven surface in the stone of the buildings visible.  For the most part, the colors are not bright and vivid, but have a brownish and greyish overall tone, and are washed out in many scenes, creating a dreary feel to this post-apocalyptic society.  This creates the feeling of despair, and further adds to the desolate mood of this world.  The colors, tones, color contrast and brightness vary with the scenery and time of day, making the animation realistic, and allowing the characters to fit in with the scenery flawlessly.  The characters are also colored realistically, with natural skin tones and hair colors.  The dramatic shading detail creates depth and dimension to the characters and their background. The concept itself is incredibly original, breaking away from the set of genres that other anime series often fall into.  It mixes genres of science fiction, fantasy, action and drama. 

The only flaw that I have seen in this series is the four recap episodes, 15-18.  There is no new information revealed in these episodes; they simply took scenes from the previous 14 episodes and pasted them together.  This cuts the storyline short, and leaves the remaining episodes too rushed to try to explain a lot in fewer episodes.  The ending left me feeling a bit underwhelmed, and I guess it is assumed you are supposed to draw your own conclusions about what happens.  The only consolation is that a representative of Bandai stated that there will be four extra episodes, 27-30, that will come out on DVD only in December of 2003.  Whether these episodes will take place after the ending or sometime in the middle of the series remains unknown, but any new episodes will be well received by myself and the rest of the Wolf's Rain fan community.

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Very rarely has an anime centered around wolves.  San has a family of wolves in the masterpiece Mononoke Hime.  Inuyasha's rival, Kouga, is a wolf youkai (demon) who lives with other youkai and wolves, and can command the wolves to assist him.  Saitou Hajime in Rurouni Kenshin is referred to as the Mibu no Ookami, or Mibu's wolf, and is often represented by a wolf.  In Fushigi Yuugi, Ashitare is a half-wolf creature capable of morphing from his humanoid form to a wolf one.  In Escaflowne, there is a population of wolf-people that inhabit Gaea. And wolves have made minor appearances in several anime series for a fleeting moment, but have no relevance to the storyline.  But never before has an anime series had wolves as the central characters, and I find that very intriguing.