Yoshitoki Ōima continues to show her deep understanding for the emotions of her characters in To Your Eternity, a sprawling tale of suffering, growth, and what it means to be human. Also, for those keeping count at home, this series has made 4/5 ANN reviewers ball their eyes out.
This series is streaming on Crunchyroll
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Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Jean-Karlo
Hi readers, I'm Jean-Karlo and I'm accompanied by your good friend and mine Steve. I've gotten to watch a lot of cool shows for this column, and barring a few Netflix stinkers or blood-suckers I'm proud to say I've enjoyed them all in some way. But sometimes one of those shows or other will grip me hard in that special way. And this? This is one of them.
This is To Your Eternity.
Look, it's not every day we get to watch an anime about an orb.
OOOOOORB~! #GDQ
It's a good shape! Second only to the sequel: rock.
Unfortunately it all rolls downhill from there.
An unknown entity had created the orb and sent it to Earth, seemingly for shits and giggles. The orb can copy forms and shapes, but can only gain new forms after it's neurons have been stimulated enough. Eventually, when a wounded wolf breathes its last on the rock, the rock turns into the wolf and continues on.
I can only imagine this imagery is triggering Pavlovian responses in Wolf's Rain fans.
And this the orb's first blunder, because unlike a rock, which just gets to chill on the ground and enjoy a nice moss blanket, a wolf has to worry about things like food and cold and pain. Rookie mistake.
Might I propose a happy medium?
Definitely something to consider for Orb Mark 2. However, this kind of painful evolution is of course what To Your Eternity is about, and it's not shy about letting the audience know so from moment one. It's a high-concept anthology about what it means to be alive, to be a person, and it is gonna make damn sure it rips your heart out while answering that.
Frickin' superb, you funky little four-legged canine-American imposter.
So it goes that the boy and his wolf decide to make the trek for themselves. The boy knows the general way, it's just heading South and crossing the mountain. And the whole time, through his unrelenting optimism... you know that that shoe is gonna drop hard.
Yeah, along the journey he's just beset by steadily worsening roadblocks, including an injury that ironically matches the one that killed the original Joaan. Not a great sign.
It's the one time the boy's mask of optimism slips off and reveals the despair underneath. It's honestly the most upsetting scene in the whole episode, even more so than his death, in my opinion. But he still gets back up and walks home.
When we first meet the boy his home is warm and loving.
When he drags himself back, the place is just a tomb. The only thing keeping him tethered to the Earth is that the wolf still needs to eat.
I cried when I saw the resolution to this episode, and even now, looking at the screenshots I'm feeling myself well up. The boy has nothing left but the certainty that he won't live to see the sun again, and even if it's purely performative for the wolf's sake he doesn't abandon the hope that someone might come back.
But until then, he just wants people to know that once upon a time, a boy lived there with his best friend...
It's not all bad. At least he's not alone anymore.
If you look at the big picture in an objective way, the boy was doomed from the moment we saw him—all alone, and separated from the rest of his village, who had all already passed. It's enough to make you question what the "point" of his struggles and suffering were. Was it just to keep him living a bit longer? Was it a facade he adopted for Joaan's sake? Was it a fight for a scrap of dignity in an uncaring universe? We don't have an answer. We don't even have the boy's name.
But ultimately it means that someone else moves on with the boy imprinted on his memory, and maybe that's the most any of us ever have.
Fun show!!!
Sure enough, the boy even
begs the wolf not to forget him.
And with our orb having learned enough, he's able to adopt the boy's form and do what he couldnt: continue the journey to the South.
It's as heavy as an anvil, and this is all just the premiere. But it's a very good, very powerful sampling of To Your Eternity's themes and ambitions.
This episode didn't just make me cry, it made me cry just looking over the screenshots for this stuff.
Sometimes, all it takes is a boy and his dog.
I've only read the first volume myself, but it's definitely not difficult to see why people have spoken about the manga in such reverent tones since its debut. Should also mention that it's from the same mangaka who did A Silent Voice: Yoshitoki Oima. Talk about range!
I mean, they're both tearjerkers, but they take very different paths getting there.
The emotional range reminds me a little of the obscure-and-sadly-incomplete-in-the-US manga, Song of the Hanging Sky.
I lack the vocabulary to express just how much that makes To Your Eternity what is known in scientific circles as "My Shit™".
Hey, how about some toilet humor?
The orb continues the boy's journey, but it doesn't really have emotions, higher thought or anything, so he's just continuing his journey while continuously pissing and crapping his pants and also starving to death. Six times, even.
Scratch that, seven times.
He has just about as much awareness and power over his situation as a Sim trapped in a death house with no doors. Or bathroom. But at least he manages to revive himself a bit faster with each death. Now that's what I call the can-do attitude at the very heart of humanity!
And to be fair to our orb friend, he only sprouted human parts a couple weeks ago, and the only person who could have taught him anything is now a popsicle. He's trying his best.
I want to call attention to a curious thing: first, his transformation keeps the leash his human friend used. Second, he also has the wound the boy had. He lacks the awareness to understand that the wound shouldn't be there, but he keeps it anyway. He probably doesn't even understand it's a wound, he just remembers it was how the boy looked.
Also, I think he's a big fan of Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime." No death is wasted indeed.
This part also has the most important line of narration in the show so far:
Because yup, that sure is what To Your Eternity is about.
And now let's shift focus to this impossibly adorable little girl!
This is March, and she only wants one thing in life: to grow up and be a mother herself. Unfortunately, soldiers from the nearby nation of Yanome come by and choose her as a sacrifice to the god Oniguma--and if March welches, her baby sister might be chosen as her replacement.
As with the boy's story, things are immediately and self-evidently tragic, but I also like that March acts exactly like a little kid who doesn't quite understand the gravity of everything yet, and responds by simplifying them into these cute and futile tantrums.
Because she's also completely right! There's no good reason for her to be sacrificed. She's just young enough to not be indoctrinated.
Let's put a pin in that...
At least one other villager agrees with March: Parona, who tends to babysit March and sew her little stuffed animals. She has a good reason to want to protect March from being a sacrifice--as a child, her own sister hid her when a sacrifice was being chosen, and was herself offered to Oniguma. Parona lived in exile from her old tribe for being a "coward" when her own sister protected her.
And March gains another unlikely ally, but you can probably guess who that is.
He gets better.
I just wanna say, the orb reconstructing his own body after having been mauled by a bear is the most
badass thing I've seen in ages.
As the show tells us, death is just another state of being for the orb.
I'm insatiable for weird body horror stuff, so I think the adaptation could've leaned a bit harder into the uncanniness of this scene, but it's still plenty gnarly.
And March, bless her constitution, is largely unfazed and quickly warms up to her new weird friend.
March decides to be the orb's mother, and as such gives him a name: Fushi, from the Japanese word for "Immortal".
It's a very cute arrangement rendering March able to fulfill her dream of being a mother before she's sacrificed to Oniguma. And funny thing about Oniguma...
He's real and he's very large.
He's also the last major player in this arc, and even he gets his fair share of pathos by the end.
Fushi saves Oniguma during the ritual, and the soldiers from Yanome--chiefly, Hayase here--are very impressed with this shape-shifting dog that just won't die. So they take March, Parona, the defeated Oniguma and Fushi back to Yanome.
Seems like a happy ending for everyone! Nobody has to be sacrificed, and Fushi even seems to be learning a thing or two from his new mom.
It seems like March and Parona can be happy in Yanome. They're far from home and they can't ever return, but hey, culture shock doesn't last forever, right?
...Right?
So obviously everything was never going to work out that smoothly. On the trip back, we learn the Yanome made up the whole sacrifice ritual as a means of controlling the resources of the many satellite villages around their capital, and similarly, they see Fushi's immortality as something they can exploit for their own benefit.
Similarly, Oniguma's body is held captive--if only so nobody from March's village can see that their "god" is just a really big bear. What's more, those aren't spikes in its fur--they're embedded arrows.
March is tasked with caring for the bear, but Oniguma eventually dies from its wounds. At the end of the day, it was just a bear doing what came naturally to it. March is the only person innocent enough to not be mad at him for just following his instincts. Fushi, meanwhile, doesn't even understand the
concept of understanding the concept of hate.
Probably my favorite part of this arc is the parallel it draws between March and Oniguma. Although she was originally going to be sacrificed to him, they were both just forced into those roles by the cruelty of others. So of course she's the only one to sympathize with him, and thus be able to grant him a scrap of dignity before he dies. Powerful, and powerfully sad stuff.
March is so loyal to Oniguma, she doesn't even let Parona carve a piece of him to prove he's dead to the other villagers.
It's another great moment, because Parona's motivations are completely noble. She just wants to stop any further needless sacrifices. Those lives are surely worth a chunk of dead bear. But there's also something wrong about that, which March can't give up on. Oniguma is, after all, blameless. He was just an animal, not bound to the imposed whims of humanity, and some part of our humanity demands we recognize that in turn.
This is enough to make Fushi transform into a giant bear crying literal blood. He might not be so great with words yet, but he definitely echoes my own feelings here.
Also, Hayase getting hers by having a giant bear slapping the ever-living
CHRIST out of her.
I don't know what hits me worse--March waking up in the afterlife and being greeted by her family of toys who treat her as a mother, all while she sees herself as the adult she never got to be, or March realizing that Fushi isn't there with her.
And Parona takes it all entirely hard--she's just about to end her own grief over March dying and all March can do is beg her from the afterlife to
not do it. This is just as hard as the boy's passing.
The premiere didn't quite squeeze the full waterworks outta me, but the fifth episode sure did. It's a nonstop concatenation of sadness, of all shapes and sizes. And as with the boy's death, it's easy to see it coming as early as the beginning of the arc, but March grows into such a wonderful character as we spend more time with her, and it legit hurts to watch her have to grapple with saying goodbye. Capping this despair, however, is Fushi, who has finally learned to use his hands to save a life, and thus chooses to do so—both huge developments, and both thanks to his adoptive mom.
As the narration tells us, March's love taught him awareness--and with it, what it means to hurt. He's forced to run away from March's village upon his return, but the series still gives us that one last gut-punch...
I noted that much like the boy, Fushi kept March's arrow wound when he adopted her form.
Meanwhile, Hayase is out for blood...
Yeah, the "ending" of this arc isn't much of an ending—the following episode will pick up with Fushi as he tries to escape Hayase—but this is where March's story ends. Except, again, for the part of her that lives on with her friends and family, including Fushi. You can interpret the wounds on his transformations in a lot of different ways, but one of them is as a physical reminder of the indelible imprints they've made on Fushi himself, who both literally and figuratively carries their echoes within him. As we all do with our lost loved ones, in a less fantastical but no less painful sense.
Or in other words, "pain promotes growth."
But not all growth is positive, as Hayase teaches us. She too bears marks from her meeting Fushi--but where Fushi learned humanity from March, Hayase looks like she's losing hers.
I enjoy watching all of the shows for TWIA on some level. Some of these shows leave more of an impact on me than others. To Your Eternity is definitely a show that has left the greatest impact by far. This show hits your emotions like a truck and really doesn't let go at all. A lot of anime tries at tragedy but can only really hide behind ostentatious visuals and emotional manipulation. To Your Eternity doesn't do that.
I mentioned it earlier, To Your Eternity reminds me a lot of Song of the Hanging Sky in how it focuses on the beauty of a moment and how these characters contemplate what they know are their last moments. And there's beauty in the twilight of a person's life, and the knowledge that it wasn't all for nothing. After all--there's always a friend when you need one.
I really like To Your Eternity a lot too! It's very ambitious, prodding at a lot of very big questions in thoughtful and heartfelt ways. It's also good enough to make me want to examine it more critically than your run-of-the-mill drama, so I do have some quibbles. I wish the storyboards didn't hew so closely to the manga. I wish it relied a little less on its narration and a little more on its visual language for getting its themes across.
Like, not to toot Naoko Yamada's horn for the umpteenth time in this column, but her film adaptation of A Silent Voice is a really good example of taking Oima's already-fantastic manga and sublimating it with her own style. I know that also means that not everyone liked the creative choices she made for the film, but I really appreciated having a different lens that allowed for different parts to shine in different ways from the manga. To Your Eternity, as an anime so far, hasn't really reached for virtuosity yet.
Again, though, I'm only really making these complaints because I think To Your Eternity is good enough to warrant them.
By all means, To Your Eternity might even be the best show of the season. I can't remember the last time I watched something with this breadth and grasp.
There's definitely nothing else like it airing right now! The best analogy I can make is Ursula K. Le Guin giving pathos to the thing from The Thing. But even then, To Your Eternity is its own kind of fable about the meaning of humanity, and I can't wait to see how it breaks my heart next.
I also look forward to the unforgettable friends this show will introduce us to. And I promise you, you're not going to forget them anytime soon.
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