Shows that have to include “the Animation” in their title don’t have a great track record, do they? Which is to say, most of them that follow that scheme seem to be mobile gacha adaptations, which are a troubled corner of the already troubled video game to screen pipeline.
I may have said this in the past, but it doesn’t need to be this way. Video Games can have amazing stories, even if the addition of “viewer” agency tends to lens how those stories are told. Even mobile gachas, while no doubt rife with no-effort cash-grabs, include engaging tales told with memorable characters. There are barriers to adaptation, and some uncomfortable choices can be made, but with a good base material and a clever and invested studio involved, it could be done. It could even be amazing.
Considering that the game itself shut down entirely in about a year after this thing came out, though, I’m going to lower my expectations. The pitch is fractured fairy tales? Let’s just hope that it’s better than later RWBY seasons.
So, the concept of Grimm’s notes begins with it taking place in a multiverse where each world (or “Story Zone”) is a classical fairy tale. And, keeping the fairy tale on track and ensuring it repeats endlessly and cyclically, every person in this multiverse is born with a Book of Fate that seems to detail each and every thing that will happen to them or that they will do.
On to this horrific concept come two sorts of individuals – the “Chaos Tellers”, outside beings that seek to overthrow written fate, and a group of individuals born with blank books which apparently makes them planeswalkers capable of shapeshifting into other fairy tale characters to borrow their power. The latter group is out to restore order, setting every story back on its script and thus “fixing” what the Chaos Tellers messed up.
So, I know I haven’t even really gotten into the summary here, but if you’ve read or watched Witch Hat Atelier, there was probably at least a moment where you thought “You know, maybe the Brimhats have a point.” But, chances are, you pulled back from that, at least a little, as you continued to engage with the media. This whole effect is because that narrative is good. It creates a group of antagonists who are at least reasonable to themselves, and because of that who can make a good point or two about their outlook on the world. At the same time, enough care is taken to show that they’re still not exactly on the up and up, and that there are also very good reasons to oppose them.
The very pitch of Grimm’s Notes here creates the same effect, but in an incompetent form. I’m just going to come out and say it, quiz me at the start where my sympathies lie and I’m 100% with the Chaos Tellers.
This setting is horrifying. It’s bad enough if you’re Villager A who has to live with every moment you’re going to experience, from minor encounters all the way to your death already spoiled, or if you’re Little Red Riding Hood (the main character of the first episode’s Story Zone) who has to face up to a harrowing tale but who will at least come out okay.
But, imagine being cast as an Ugly Stepsister and knowing from the moment you’re born that you absolutely have to be awful to a decent person and also absolutely have to maim yourself trying to fit your foot in a shoe and then have doves peck out your eyes so you live the rest of your life blind and in pain. It’s one thing when a character is just like that and will do the bad things and suffer their consequences naturally, but when it’s foisted on them and they’re aware of it but unable to change it, still compelled to do the deeds even when they know full well the futility of it, that this suddenly becomes Hell.
So, when you tell me that there is a faction injecting a little anarchy, and with it free will, into this clockwork existence, it’s hard not to side with them. But the attempts the show makes at actually presenting the Chaos Tellers in an empathetic way where you can understand their motivations rather than simply displaying them as supernatural jerks possessing something or someone and needing to be shown the door are weak.
In the first episode, Little Red (the possession victim of the episode) expresses some resentment for her situation, but it’s not given a lot of weight because she’s trying to burn people alive at the time, it just comes off as angry nihilism. This is pretty emblematic of the Chaos Tellers possessed individuals we encounter throughout the show. They’ll have a couple lines about breaking out of their fates, but since they’re doing overwhelmingly destructive and evil BS, it’s hard to imagine that the creators wanted you to take it seriously.
And what about our heroes, the ones setting right what the Chaos Tellers set wrong? They’re introduced essentially in media res. The team consisting of main character and newbie Ex, Nice Girl Reina, laconic flat affect girl Shane, and big-mouthed big-guy Tao is already formed, already traveling, and just seems to fix these messes as a matter of course. Over time we get some bits and bobs that maybe they have bad history with the Chaos Faction or that Chaos is doing damage on some sort of cosmic level, but there’s not a lot of work put in to getting the audience to feel for the heroic mission. They’re just the protagonists, and you’re meant to roll with that.
They’re no less generic in terms of their capabilities either. Fairy tale characters can vary greatly, but most of them aren’t exactly powerhouses with loads of combat capabilities. The characters that the cast starts being able to transform into include Shane as Robin Hood (not exactly a fairy tale character, at least not a Brothers Grimm one) who gets upgraded from regular archery to shiny magic arrows, but close enough; Tao as Goliath (That’s biblical, which will get people mad if you call it a fairy tale) with the power of video game tanking… um, sure, I guess; Ex as Alice of Wonderland fame (also not a Grimm’s fairy tale character) who gets to be a swordmaster for no reason; and Reina as Cinderella, the only actually Brothers Grimm character of the lot and in this universe somehow noted caster of healing magic.
Later we get other summons, like Ex being able to call on Little Red for… um… giant fire tornadoes. I think he has her confused with Jaya Ballard from Magic: the Gathering. Easy mistake to make I guess.
Anyway, to keep ripping into the premise right here at the start, this is a pretty lame setup to begin with as not only does it reduce unique and interesting characters to ultra-generic character class powers (our party literally starting with tank, healer, ranged dps, and melee dps), it dodges the creative potential of actually doing something with elements of these stories. A more flavorful kit would force the characters to be creative and get us interesting set pieces, but I guess that would require the writers being creative. I guess a lot of the heroes in particular are often without particular competences, but you could work around that and maybe pick up interesting side characters or even antagonists.
Plus, watering down the theme to just be all myth and legend starts stepping on the toes of the Fate franchise, which actually knows how to use their public domain characters (even if they do make King Arthur a girl).
Since this is very much a “monster of the week” (or “Story Zone of the Week” if you prefer) affair and I’ve more or less hit the high notes of Episode 1’s Little Red encounter, let’s move on to Episode 2: Don Quixote! That’s not a fairy tale, it is a novel, but I feel like if I keep picking on that fact we’ll be here all day. Anyway, did you guess the instant I said “Don Quixote” that we’d get to tilt at a windmill/giant? I hope so because it is bloody obvious.
So after we beat up the windmill with out of place little red incineration and restore this story to its normal, tragic old self where the Man of La Mancha is totally delusional and his beloved maiden doesn’t exist, we move on to, once more, something completely different! This is a flashback to how Ex joined the party, and also serves as a more proper introduction to an antagonist who appeared and vanished arbitrarily in the previous episode, who is called Loki.
In the flashback it seems that Ex grew up in the story of Cinderella, and actually became her childhood friend. When a Chaos Teller (possessing the Fairy Godmother and spurred on by Loki) attacked, he joined up with the main party to save her and her happy ending, and the rest is history: with nothing more for him in his homeworld, he joined the party. Funny that such a thing took two episodes.
After that we get Treasure Island. And I said I wouldn’t nitpick, but I am convinced that the writers behind this episode never actually read Treasure Island. It doesn’t just take liberties, it takes unnecessary liberties. Like I think they confused Treasure Island with The Goonies because the treasure is discovered in Flint’s wrecked ship, and the island is strewn with absurd knockoff Indiana Jones traps.
Also, Silver has a peg below the knee not a leg lost at the hip and his dream is to be the greatest of all pirates like some kind of One Piece character. He goes on about his dream like Columbus from Fate: Grand Order and is of course the Chaos Teller of the episode.
The real headline is that like FGO, we’ve gotta have a Swimsuit event in there somewhere.
You know, at least when FGO did an anime outing they adapted one of the serious stories and not… this.
After that, it’s on to Snow White, where Ex gets mistaken for Prince Charming, to which Snow White herself is as close to awkwardly horny as this show’s media standards will allow. This one technically has no Chaos Teller, with the blank tomes causing trouble by their mere existence (for a definition of trouble, their interference technically allows this generation to be happier than average. Somehow this is okay when Chaos Tellers aren’t.) and is the start of the sort of middle run that I won’t go into too much detail on since they don’t really matter a whole lot.
So we have Snow White which puts some extra focus on Ex. Following it, we visit The Snow Queen (which puts a little extra weight on Shane and introduces a friendly evil faction member, Curly) Momotaro (with bonus focus on Shane and especially Tao, who came from there), and Aladdin (the focal episode for Reina).
We then move on to the well-known fairy tale of… Joan of Arc.
Okay, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to nitpick a premise again, because this one makes me actually deeply frustrated. Grimm’s Notes… you’re not sodding Fate. You’re the Gacha version of Pagemaster. Nonfiction is not your wheelhouse. It doesn’t belong. And filing Joan of Arc alongside Alice in Wonderland or Snow White is an insult.
The more I think about this, the madder I get. I understand that Jeanne D’Arc is a fairly mythologized figure – after all, she’s a Saint, so at the risk of ruffling a few feathers there’s clearly some fiction in how she gets depicted nowadays.
But we have serious, credible accounts of her campaigns in the Hundred Years’ War. We have the records of her trial. She’s actually a bit of a rare historical figure in that we know what she looked like in pretty great detail because it figured in some of the testimony (Kinda short even for a woman of her era, pretty strong seeing as she grew up doing hard farmwork, a bit tanned because again farmwork, dark hair, thick thighs, and a great rack, the latter two that her fellows would swear under oath caused no impure thoughts. She’d be depicted as a pale willowy blonde in later art because that was just how artists of the period depicted “holy maiden” archetypes).
Point being that she, her fellows like Marshal of France and later suspected serial killer Gilles de Rais (who figures in the episode. You could have gotten away with Bluebeard, show), and the time and place she inhabited belong to the realm of historical fact, not the realm of stories. If you’re going to mess with her, you need to be doing it from a different angle.
Appropriating that history like it’s just another fictional tale, treating the Hundred Years’ War as something that can or even should exist in this setting where everything is in endless reruns (thus implying that France gets its teeth kicked in by England for all eternity with massive death on both sides, punctuated by generational Joans that never actually bring the war towards a conclusion) is… not literally the worst disservice to historical events that has been done in animation, since humanity has produced some real stinkers, but it still brings me to my boiling point.
Forget this artsy blonde Jeanne, Ex swooning for her heroism, or Curly actually giving the show’s one intentionally good pitch for the bad guys when she shows up to tempt Ex to change her fate, this is a Story Zone I want to be collapsed. It should all just burn. In fact, I know just the pyromaniac for the job.
Sadly, I can’t actually just roast this Gacha with another Gacha, but we’re almost at the finish line: That particular Story Zone represents the last temptation of Ex and the last barrier between us and an endgame in Wonderland.
Yeah, for the last two episodes we visit a Story Zone that’s been alluded to from the beginning. We even already know that Reina is a massive Alice fangirl, so hopefully the creators actually know this one.
It turns out to not really matter, because Wonderland is pretty distorted in-character. The first episode is moderately standard, winning over an Alice who has sided with Chaos Teller Queen of Hearts to bring law and order to Wonderland, but at the end, tuning… doesn’t work normally.
That’s because it’s on to the sequel, Through the Looking Glass. And who should be there but Loki… and the dreaded Jabberwock as a boss fight.
Now, while there is a famous illustration of the Jabberwock, it is this wonderland sort of creature, so you can get really creative with its design, making it big and weird and… they just make it a slightly different dragon like every low effort Alice version, don’t they?
Anyway, it chases everybody off, which results in the party being split and Ex having a moment with Reina that I guess is meant to pay off the romantic tension that was kind of there (sort of) in previous episodes, like Reina getting jealous of Snow White or Jeanne, or Ex of Aladdin getting flirty with Reina. He promises to always be with her, and then Shane and Tao catch up. They find the March Hare and Mad Hatter and then go to to the Red Queen’s place where Loki and the Jabberwock catch up.
So do they have some new cool trick to actually beat the Jabberwock that sent them running before? Of course not! It’s the same generic combat as always. Loki reveals that he’s just a blank book holder like them, installs Super-Aladdin, and thrashes the party until Ex, due to needing to keep that very-important-maybe-romantic promise to Reina is chosen by Grimm himself, and connects up that way. Grimm, naturally, deletes Loki pretty easily, though Curly and her religious order – at the very last minute given some actual development in that they only see those with blank fates as people, hence collapsing Story Zones – remain at large. Through the Looking Glass is tuned and plus one couple (maybe) the story continues and the show ends.
Good grief.
Now, I know what most of you expect right now: Me to deal this show that made me so frustrated a Fail so I can just get on with my life. But… I don’t think it’s worth that. The grade I have for Grimm’s Notes the Animation is a D, and I will explain.
This is, in a sense, D for “Dead on Arrival”. The premise of the story, doing metafiction where all the fictional characters have spoilers for their existences, I don’t think is salvageable in the realm of scripted media. Given that the game went down in flames, I doubt it played very well there, either.
It’s sad. Other properties have managed to work with the same sort of theme. The Fate franchise is probably the most notable, as I’ve referenced all across this review, but I remember other takes. Most notably, the 2000 miniseries The Tenth Kingdom did a beautiful job of creating a world that integrated many classic stories all over the place in a way that felt like it was a legitimate other-world even if the tropes were alive and well. There was even some decent fate discussion – the character Wolf laments that people in his world tend to find true love and live happily ever after or get killed by horrible curses; that’s just how things go, and it’s not like anybody knows for sure which one they’ll be. Less proudly, the card game Force of Will also used its Fairy Tale characters and motifs better than this show.
When it comes to the technical aspects – the writing of particular scenes, the performances, the animation – it was all bog standard to slightly substandard, relying too much on canned attack animations for the super modes both otherwise being decently nice to look at with good visual designs for most of the Story Zones and their characters. The music I actually would consider to be better than average. The OP is nothing to write home about but is reasonably catchy, and there are a couple in-episode tracks that are actually fairly beautiful. Plenty is invisibly doing its job, but it’s fairly rare to really sit up and take notice of the background music in an anime. We’d miss it if it were gone, but it’s not really forward in the conscious mind unless it’s really good or really bad.
All in all, it’s just not enough to save the core idea. This needed to be taken back to the drawing board; there may have been ways to save it, but they would all require fairly comprehensive rewrites. Like, the question of whether those living under deterministic destinies are thinking beings worthy of being called people is a good one, and making villains of the side that says “no” would be cool. What if instead of establishing versus overthrowing fate it was a battle between rewriting and destroying? Those who try to change the paths carefully so these realities can reach a true future, and those willing to sacrifice whole worlds for higher ambitions? That might work.
The whole book of fate idea is… tough to work with, at least when characters are party to their own fates. We never see the Storytellers who theoretically establish each Story Zone (unless you count Grimm’s cameo); if these demiurges were made more present they could take some of the burden of keeping the question of determinism in the show while letting us not have to constantly question how and why the characters are such automatons and never really act positively on their foreknowledge, because they wouldn’t have to have it if the Storyteller was around to keep a grip on that sort of thing. But then the question of how Chaos Tellers can usurp the zone would need new answers.
It’s not easy… it’s also probably not worthwhile. And that’s the summary of Grimm’s Notes: probably not worthwhile. Go read a book instead. Maybe Treasure Island, after this mess somebody has to.
PS: That’s still better than the later RWBY seasons.