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This Week in Anime
In the Evergarden of Good and Evil

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

The conclusion of Violet's story is here; love, loss, and picking up the pieces of war. Nick and Steve look to see if the gorgeously rendered finale sticks the landing.

This movie is streaming on Netflix

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Nick
Steve, working on this column we get to cover a lot of varied and surprising stuff. But I can't say I ever expected us to cover an anime sequel to Terminator 2 here.
Steve
And like Terminator 2, this movie also ends with the protagonist lowering herself into a vat of molten steel! Albeit figuratively. Welcome back, Violet. Glad to see you're as chipper as ever.
Seems like just yesterday we were talking up Violet Evergarden I: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll, the surprisingly affecting side story entry in this lavishly animated franchise. And now we're seemingly waving goodbye to Violet and her ridiculous name with Violet Evergarden: The Movie, so-named because they say "Violet Evergarden" 10 times in the opening 15 minutes of this thing.
Almost four years since the TV series debuted and they're still trying to convince us that she has a totally real name. Can't say it's worked on me, but I can respect their commitment to the equivalent of throwing a set of darts at a horticulture magazine.
Also just worth reiterating here, since I gather we both have less than kind words for parts of this film in particular: Any criticisms or jokes or gnarly dunks we make towards the film are not meant as insults towards Kyoto Animation, the cavalcade of talented artists who worked on this, or any of the victims of the horrific arson attack. It's simply criticism of a piece of fiction, same as any other film, so hopefully folks can keep things chill, y'know?
Please, everyone? Like, I don't know why else you'd be reading this column, but we make a point of making fun of and poking holes in pretty much everything, even anime we love and respect. And I can safely say I genuinely enjoyed this movie! But I'm still gonna have some choice Words for it. That's how TWIA rolls. It ain't much, but it's honest work. And by work I mean shitposts.
And hey, while I was decidedly negative on the TV series, I did end up really enjoying and connecting with the story in Eternity. I was actually hoping to say the same about this one, until I realized it's focused on by far the dumbest part of the TV series: Violet Evergarden's ridonculous backstory.
Eager as we all surely are to forget it, Violet began her story as a child soldier taken under the wing of the similarly-improbably-and-florally-named Gilbert Bougainvillea, which result in both of them losing some limbs and being separated when the war ended. Violet's tale since then has been one of growth and healing, experiencing the sights and sorrows the world has to offer beyond the horrors of war, with her holding her memory of the major dear while forging bonds with new friends far and wide. It's been beautiful, and occasionally, transcendent.

Except it turns out Gilbert has been living on a remote island this whole time and well I guess we're gonna have to reckon with this huh.

I'm on record finding most of the TV series decidedly maudlin, held back by a script that's so in love with big, tearjerker sentimentality that it often forgets to do the leg work to earn those moments with its writing. But there are certainly isolated stories or sequences that work really well! And that dichotomy is the defining tension of this movie, as it uses every single ounce of filmmaking power its creators can muster to beg you to forget how stupid and out of place Violet's feral orphan super-soldier backstory is.

To jog folks' memory, Violet didn't enlist in the army or get conscripted by circumstance. Gilbert's dickhead older brother found her on an island, saw her murder his whole naval company, and decided he can't not turn her into a living weapon. Gilbert then just went along with said plan before falling in love with his 12-year-old adopted daughter/murder machine.
Despite all that, it's a testament to the film's craft how much it made me want everything in it to work. Genuinely, this is one of the most meticulously gorgeous animated movies I've ever seen. The premiere artisans of their respective crafts are on full display, and if you're as enamored with the minutiae as I am, it makes all 140 of the minutes just fly by. I mean, where else are you going to find individual skirt folds drawn this laboriously?


And if painstaking attention to Victorian-adjacent fashion doesn't matter to you, boy you better close that Netflix tab quick.
Oh there's for sure a timeline where I watched this film on mute with the subtitles turned off and had a great time. Unfortunately that's not this one, and the result is me making this face for roughly a third of the runtime.
Mercifully, it's not exclusively about the awful endpoint of wartime child grooming. There's weightier and less objectionable stuff both thematically and dramatically. A major one is the encroaching obsolescence of the auto memory doll job, heralded by the arrival of the telephone and fulfilled in the film's frame story, which takes place a couple generations in the future.
The first half of this film is actually a lot of following up on the more memorable stories from the TV series. We follow a teenage girl who's in fact the great-grandmother of the mom from episode 10 who left 50 years worth of birthday letters for her daughter before dying. It's a neat detail, though the framing story itself is surprisingly bare.
It doesn't end up adding much at all to the narrative outside of recapitulating one of Violet Evergarden's most memorable episodes, but I kinda like how it sandwiches the movie in a sense of mono no aware—of transience. For better or worse, this is the end of the story.
Sure, it just felt in the beginning like we were setting up something a little more complex. Like maybe this girl starts researching Violet through the records left of her, discovering new details about her life and how she retired from being a Doll in tandem with it playing out in the narrative proper. As-is, she gets one scene in the middle of the second act and then closes things out having learned an important lesson off-screen.
There's a lot I would've liked the movie to expand on. For instance, as much as I respect Taichi Ishidate for storyboarding the entire film, he's a coward for not making this a true match cut.
If we're getting petty, there's also disappointingly few shots of Benedict and his trademark slutty heels. We have how many shots of Violet's shiny metal hands, but this is all we get for my boy's immaculately unprofessional footwear? SMH.
I was looking out for them the entire runtime and all we get is that one shot. It's a crime. But, if I may speak in Micchy's place as TWIA's resident hand pervert, Violet's robo mitts have never looked better. Like, it's kinda wild to consider that some of the best traditional mechanical animation of the 21st century is in a period drama about writing letters, yet here we are all the same.

They look very cool. And heavy. Keep that in mind until about the 2-hour mark of the movie. Anyway, the actual proper story of this movie doesn't get started til about 30 minutes in, when Violet is called in by a sick child in a hospital, who is dying from Acute Indie Rock Frontman Disease.
Poor boy isn't going to live long enough to write that concept acoustic album about Emily Dickinson, but at least he has Violet there to write some heart wrenching parting letters to his family—if she can pass the stealth check, that is.
Surprised that fat bustle she's always hauling around managed to fit under there. Keep the mechanics of that dress in mind along with her arms, by the way.
Look if the movie is going to use her child soldier upbringing to explain its inexplicable romantic backbone, then I'm going to use her child soldier upbringing to explain how inexplicably well she handles a petticoat. Fair's fair.
Just saying, the scene would have been infinitely funnier if Yuris' hospital bed was just ever so slightly uneven because Violet's skirts are dummy thicc.

Anyway, Yuris' setup is perhaps a tad cliche, but his scenes are actually my favorite in the whole movie. One of my criticisms of this franchise is how it tends to sweep the uglier, thornier parts of grief under the rug in the name of catharsis, but Yuris here is allowed to express some genuine anger and selfishness that is so often a part of coming to terms with death.

You really can't find a cheaper source of melodrama than a dying child, but I also really loved Yuris' parts of the film. Again, Kyoani's craft is so important here. They let him feel like a kid, misdirected ire and all, and he also provides the film an emotional locus that had nothing to do with Gilbert. That's good! Plus, he teaches Violet how to do a thumbs up, and that alone justifies the film's existence.
It also seems like, at first, they're going to develop something with him and Violet. He expresses that he's tired of people walking on eggshells around him, and just wants them to be honest about his impending death. And then Violet uses that same language to tell Hodgins to stop micromanaging her own emotions.
And in isolation, it's like, yeah! Violet's learning to assert herself and telling her friends to stop babying her. That's another important step in her growth as her own person. She's taking a purposeful step away from her past as a tool of war. HOWEVER, in context, she's doing this so she can keep obsessing over her memories of Gilbert, which ain't so great.
Also she's doing that by hanging out with Dietfried, the aforementioned dickhead brother who originally handed her off to Gilbert and told him to make her a soldier for shits and giggles. The movie tries its hardest to omit that part but like Pepperidge Farm, I remember.


You see, he's actually changed since then. At some point. Off-screen. Hasn't actually apologized or anything but I'm sure it'll come eventually.
Also, answer Cattleya's questions there: YES. THAT IS A VERY GOOD REASON.
At least their awkward as hell boat party makes for the funniest moment in the movie?

Someone taught Violet the art of silent sass. But also, seriously, I do kinda like the weird bond they begin to forge here. They both have emotional baggage and hangups about Gilbert, and for the first time, you can start to see them commiserate about those. I think there's fertile ground there. The writing may not plant much in it, but the direction most certainly communicates it.

Sadly what the writing plants is "I was a jerk because I hate my dad" to explain away Dietfried and we just never get more than that.
Love to have a normal conversation with my father.
Love to explain my own father's patriarchal militarism to him. Amongst the flowers.

But really, VE's need to soften its most morally reprehensible character for an easier, cleaner resolution is emblematic of its worst writing instincts and just kneecaps any fondness or emotional connection the visuals painstakingly try to evoke.
That really is the endemic rot that taints the core of the film. There's plenty here that could work with a lot of elbow grease and the accompanying willingness to get messy, but everything tangential to Gilbert is so sanitized and underwritten that even some of the most talented visionaries in anime can't make up for it.
And it's a shame because there are individual moments, tiny character-focused sequences that are gorgeously realized. When they figure out Gilbert might be alive, Violet has this entire mini crisis about her desire to see him again that, in a better realized story, could be incredibly affecting.
And overall, presentation-wise, the second half of the film makes a huge dramatic swerve into its characters' interiorities. It looks and feels different, and it hints at another way this story could have gone with an analogous amount of care put into it.

That sequence of Hodgins standing outside Gilbert's door, trying to prepare himself for either disappointment or the shock of seeing a friend he's thought was dead for years, is fantastic. It's tense, captivating, and does so much to get you into his headspace.

And there are even moments of just totally indulgent beauty that are almost completely separate from the narrative. Like the Hymn of the Sea ritual held on the island Gilbert's been hiding out on. This moment makes me want an anime equivalent of Midsommar so bad it hurts.

It's so good! This all could have been so complicated and painful and nuanced and cathartic if it weren't always hilariously and constantly obvious that this was all just a prelude to Gilbert and Violet eloping.

Makes me want to clench my fist too.
It is absolutely infuriating to see Gilbert painstakingly lay out every single entirely sensible reason why it's a terrible idea for him to reconnect with Violet – for how he turned her into a child soldier, how he made her totally reliant on him for her sense of identity – and yet the film frames it as him being misguided for not accepting her desperate, co-dependent love.

And they do have a painful and sordid past together. They do need and deserve some degree of closure, and there's nothing to suggest they couldn't eventually find it together now that they've each found purpose outside of themselves and each other. But to try to wrap that into something romantic with not even an iota of the thoughtfulness that would be needed to satisfyingly develop that—that just sucks.
Yeah, like, I get the idea of Violet still loving Gilbert. Emotions are fucked up and nonsensical and sorting them out is a herculean task when you aren't in the middle of a years-long journey to rediscover human connection. But. BUT. Making that endeavor believable requires an immense amount of leg work that this script just refuses to do. Especially when the biggest asshole in the entire show arrives to browbeat Gilbert into reuniting with his child bride.
And I feel like I'm part of the problem: portions of this movie are so good that I want to imagine a version where Violet and Gilbert marrying actually makes dramatic and emotional sense in the end. I think there's plenty of space for romances, even unhealthy ones. But you gotta write it. There's no getting around constructing the necessary words and actions to get there. You can't just will it into existence by puppeteering enough secondary characters. Give me something messy, not vapid.
And I especially hate the fucking resolution they give to Dietfried. Where he just quietly accepts that we all have our demons and sometimes you fuck up a little and teach a 12-year-old nothing but murder until she's maimed and emotionally unstable. We all make mistakes. Do what you need to cope.
Oopsie I made a childy-wildy into a soldier-woldier. Uh ohhhhh. Welp see ya. It's such a shame that the third act of this film is so disappointing. All of these exquisite pictures of Violet crying, for nothing.

To be fair, there's at least one reading of this finale that does work slightly better. In that when Violet dramatically jumps off the departing boat and into the water, the combined weight of her prosthetics and her fuck-off huge dress drags her into the ocean and she hallucinates the last 10 minutes while Hodgins performs CPR.

Does it make sense? No. But neither does wrapping up your story about Violet growing as a person and connecting with the world/people around her by quitting her job to live on a remote island with the man who hurt her to begin with.
Also! The narrator tells us that, after this over-the-top boat-diving gesture, Violet does go back for a while to finish up her work before returning to live with Gilbert. Like, on some level, the story understands that her abdicating every other responsibility and friendship she has is a bad thing, yet it still makes her do it anyway. It's bad writing, but at least this kinda hilariously undercuts the romanticism of this moment.
Oh right, we forgot that in the middle of all this Yuris dies before Violet can write his final letter. So Benedict and Iris have to rush through the night to get his closest friend to a phone long enough to say goodbye. You'd think that would maybe have a lesson about Violet's connection to her clients being more important than reconnecting with Gilbert, but nah. The lesson is "Phones are good, actually."


This dead child is brought to you by Alexander Graham Bell, I guess.
I suppose it is nice to be reminded that phones were once used to connect people across long distances before they became a chassis for daily robocalls about car warranties.
I mean, if ever there were a time where connecting with a dying loved one over the phone would be especially resonant, it's right now. And in isolation this sequence definitely made me cry. But as soon as it's over we're back to the eventual payoff of this:

Which is some weird, twisted callback to Violet's pinky promise with Yuris???A promise she objectively failed to keep because she was pursuing this jackass??? What is the point???
If a dying child tells you it's okay to marry your emotionally stunted war daddy, then that means you have the green light. I guess. Personally I wouldn't put that much stock into what a kid says no matter how tragically they're written, but I must just be built different.
And that's the end, pretty much. Our narrator makes 2 stops on her research vacation and learns everything about Violet's life, and along the way learned to write letters to her parents sometimes. So I guess the ultimate resolution of roughly 9 hours of Violet Evergarden is to text your mom sometimes, kids.
I can't think of anyone I know who wanted Violet Evergarden to end this way, but here we are all the same. And like I said earlier, with the inclusion of the aforementioned giant asterisks, I did still ultimately love watching this film, and I'm still fond of the franchise. My memory of seeing the prior film in Kyoto in 2019 will always stick with me, and it's so heartening to see Kyoto Animation continue to touch my own heart like this. They even credit all of the people who couldn't contribute to the film. It's still overwhelming to think about. Just wish we could have gotten all this minus the child grooming part.
And I get that, but man does this feel like a big fat letdown. For all my quibbles, I could at least get behind the trajectory of Violet's arc before this movie. But knowing it was ultimately build up to this? Sours the whole deal for me.
Well then at least our time in the Evergarden is over now. Which doesn't make it much of an Evergarden in the end, come to think of it. More of an Ephemeralgarden.
And personally I'd like to commend us for not making any jokey versions of Violet Evergarden's name here. We could have. We workshopped like 20 of 'em before this. But I admire our restraint.
I may not have much of a green thumb, but I do know some comedy seeds are best left buried forever. Good job, us.
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