So, when you look back at older Fantasy, in a certain time frame for anime and a different one for Western media, there’s this palpable “anything goes” feeling to it. You’d be introduced to weird worlds that don’t respect any sort of conventions about technology or story format or these ideas of a standard “fantasy” that have largely emerged across the genre. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a work that will buck the current trends. For anime in 2023 that sometimes feels practically wedded to the Video Game Rules Universe, and only slightly less tightly bound to Isekai and/or Harem, Giant Beasts of Ars is the blast from the past and/or breath of fresh air that marches to the beat of its own drum.
To explain Giant Beasts of Ars, I might as well start with the titular entities. Ars is a world where civilization is beset by gigantic beasts. They’re strange, mostly animal-like creatures of prodigious size, and present a great threat to life and limb. And if you’ve seen other comments on Giant Beasts of Ars or maybe just sort of jumped there yourself… no, it’s nothing like Attack on Titan. Ordinary Giant Beasts (there are extraordinary ones) are just treated as something of a fact of life, and humans (and other humanoid species, of which there are many with simple and descriptive names living all in their own villages as well as appearing in cosmopolitan settings) being the ingenious creatures that they are even deliberately hunt the Giant Beasts for the various resources that can be extracted from them. The Giant Beasts are everywhere and if being the title wasn’t enough of a hint they are rather important, so I might as well start off the same way narration does.
Our real story begins with a young lady with super powers escaping from the evil lab that held her and was experimenting on her, ending when she finds her prison is on an island and dives into the sea. If your mind went there… no, it’s nothing like Elfen Lied. Well, I suppose it is closer to that than to Attack on Titan, except the part where this girl, #22, is a nice and polite little ball of energy who’s first impression is apologizing to the guard she walloped when kicking her cell door off its hinges and into the opposite wall.
Now, while Giant Beasts of Ars is more a scion of the free-wheeling anything-goes school of fantasy it still does have its tropes, and elements borrowed from elsewhere. Thus, #22 escapes from the soldiers that got lost on their way to Castle in the Sky (complete with a comedic commander and subordinate) and their weirdly polite yet oddly threatening drug-addicted Colonel Musca impersonator, Mezami. She surfaces in that gray blocky town you’ve seen a million times before and runs into (literally) and gets help from a woman called Kumi, who #22 will ultimately borrow the name of, dubbing herself Kumi the 22nd.
Kumi also runs into Myaa. Myaa is a cat chapeau, a member of the chapeau race of seemingly identical halfling-like girls who wear strange chibi animal hats and have verbal tics around their animal’s mannerisms. This means Myaa ends her sentences in “nyaa”, which the subtitles amusingly translate as talking almost entirely in cat puns. I’m not kitten, but while this kind of thing might kick meowt of a different story, Giant Beasts of Ars is just strange enough for it to come off as purrfect for the material.
Or, to be honest, it’s tolerable at best but I wanted to provide a sample.
Myaa gets Kumi a ring, which she claims is a legendary artifact known as the Ring of Promise. Since it magically fits itself to Kumi, this means she’s the proper wearer (or, outwardly, a fine buyer) and we have some hints that Myaa might be part of an ancient conspiracy that won’t really pay off until the last episode.
At the same time, a washed-up drunk of a spearman is looking for work, and gets involved with the local Giant Beast hunt. He gives his name as Jiro the Already Dead, because everyone in this universe seems to go by “Name, the Title”, with customs that will be expanded and expounded on later in kind of fun ways. He shows off some impressive stunts during his operation to obtain the coin needed to keep drinking, and is approached by Mezami in the bar, looking to recruit him. Jiro tells Mezami off and later continues drinking on his boat… er, magitech flying hovership out at port.
The same night, Kumi gets spotted by the soldiers looking for her. There’s a chase scene, which ends with her being cornered at a pier. Arrows are shot at her, and the pain and distress causes her to start leaking energy; at first black clouds that seem to disintegrate whatever (or whoever) they touch and then a bright energy that engulfs her in what seems like a prelude to kaboom. While this is going on, a strange giant beast with a glowing red eye attacks the city, crushing the outer defenses with ease. Jiro sees this, rushes over to Kumi, and does his thing.
Jiro, it seems, is a Paladin. In this setting, that means he can serve as a regulatory vessel for the power of a Cleric (which he recognizes Kumi as), which would otherwise be uncontrollable or nearly so. Jiro calms Kumi’s power and in the process they pull a fusion that lets him fight with incredible might, taking out the red-eyed beast. In the aftermath, the two of them are picked up by Myaa, who helps them evade the authorities. Initially, Jiro wants to leave Myaa and Kumi to their own devices, but he ends up roped in to going with them due to accidentally leaving his magical paladin spear behind. Myaa holds onto it even through getting captured by the imperial soldiers, and this Jiro’s bond with the weapon causes him to break Myaa and Kumi out of prison, thereafter grudgingly accepting the team-up. They skip town in the hover-ship, with more fusion fighting action to delay pursuit.
A detour in the intended escape, however, places the trio in one of the villages of the not-exactly-human species of this world, in this case the furry-eared and tailed Therianthropes. There they meet a young would-be hunter, Melan the Hasty, as well as an experienced veteran named Deagle the Rock-Smasher. A hunt goes awry, however, when one of the beasts becomes a much more powerful red-eyed beast, forcing Jiro and Kumi into action. During this, they rather directly save Melan’s life.
They push on a little, and encounter Romana the Healer, a rabbit-eared medic who sharks Jiro at a gambling game after mistaking him for a slave trader intending to sell Kumi. When Jiro offers up his paladin weapon rather than the girl, she realizes her mistake, not that she likes a paladin much more than a slaver.
Before this can be resolved, word comes from the Therianthrope village that a flood is forcing an evacuation, and Jiro is asked to help, including removing a normally peaceful river Giant Beast from the area. Of course it bugs out and gets the red eyes, and this whole sequence manages to achieve two things: convincing Romana that Jiro, however sour, isn’t a bad guy so that she’ll join the party, and getting Melan to join up both to pay Jiro and company back and to hopefully learn more of the wider world at the paladin’s side.
The next stop is the village of the ogre-like Mountaineers. Jiro initially thinks he’s going to have serious trouble, since in days long past he once fought the Mountaineers and killed many of them. However, seeing as he’s coming in peace now, they offer a warm welcome of sparring and feasting, courtesy of the Mountaineer chief Babaan the Side Striker.
This is also where we get a better explanation of customs around the names, which I’ll share since I think it’s interesting: evidently, children are typically given silly or minor names as a ward against the bad luck that’s thought to be brought on by giving them too awesome a name too soon, and thus most individuals will change their name as their situation changes, with the bestowment of adult names being a kind of big deal. Jiro the Already Dead, for instance, was once known as Jiro the Thunderbolt before he went through his washed-up drunk phase. An aged swordmaster we see a few times (more on that in a bit) is known to just about everyone as Zen the Frozen Winter, but says (or jokes) that he now goes by Zen the Decrepit. And, a Mountaineer warrior known as “the Pebble” is promoted to “the Boulder” after proving himself against one of the red-eyed beasts that shows up.
So, about that Zen guy, it’s time to catch up with our subplots!
Giant Beasts of Ars, you see, is structured like one of those vast, sprawling epics. I honestly believe that it could have been fifty episodes like Eureka Seven, with all the places we visit and characters we meet and side stories we indulge in. It’s somehow comfortable in a mere twelve; I don’t feel like we were rushed, there’s opportunity for character scenes and action scenes and introducing all these little elements, but it certainly could have filled a larger vessel.
Because of that sort of outlook in the time frame we’ve got, there are a lot of short scenes spread across the episodes checking in with this person or that, often only for a few seconds to establish they’re still in the show and still doing things.
I mentioned Mezami, who is our main villain apparent. He works for (or with, it’s unclear) a corrupt lord in the human (or fieldfolk as they’re called) supremacist empire called Bakula. Bakula has a political opponent in the form of Tsurugi, the general of the empire and someone who would get along really well with Prince Enrique from Skies of Arcadia. Which is to say she’s principled and honorable and things like Mezami’s mad science or the plans to kick up a war when giant beast attacks are the worst they’ve been on record (no doubt leading to many avoidable civilian casualties) don’t sit well with her. Both curry favor with the aged Emperor, who seems to favor Bakula but who also might be some sort of inhuman overseer.
Tsurugi has a constant attendant as well, and old man Zen acts as her field agent. Bakula has some shadowy agent of his own who doesn’t do much in the run of the show, and Mezami isn’t alone either. He retains the services of the comedy duo of soldiers from the early episodes, who head up the guards at the lab where Kumi came from (not the island, a different one). He also has a couple of field agents: a girl who looks exactly like Kumi, except with blonde rather than lilac hair, and a tough customer sort of dude known as Facade. Facade and Blonde Kumi are out in the world causing trouble, which comes to a head during the Mountaineer arc when Facade first fights with Zen and then is found by our main hero team to be at the epicenter of an outbreak of the red-eyed beasts.
During this, we find out that Facade is someone from Jiro’s past, a fellow paladin, but that he’s lost his memories and had his personality seemingly overwritten. Blonde Kumi seems quite psycho and nearly blows herself up trying to kill Kumi the 22nd and Jiro with her, heavily using her cleric powers to fire disintegration blasts at things. Jiro and Kumi are able to withdraw from the fight with Facade, but Babaan takes Facade and his Kumi on and doesn’t survive.
The entire sequence acts as a pretty severe psychological shock for Kumi, leaving her a little rattled as the crew pushes on. This brings them to the village of the Hornarians (who… um… have horns), another place where Jiro has history. This history is very different though, as the Hornarian chief addresses him as “Son”. We get a backstory-heavy episode that expounds on flashbacks we’d been seeing for much of the show: a young Jiro met the Hornarian chief’s daughter and Cleric Toka, and fell in love with her. He became a paladin and married his cleric, but the whole paladin thing required Imperial sponsorship that saw them on the front lines, where Jiro became war buddies with Tsurugi (a young idealist hoping for rank so she could change the world) and Facade (then a somewhat veteran Paladin). However, when deployed to the far north, they encountered humanoid Giant Beasts more strange and terrible than any in familiar climes, which spoke strange words and used death-ray lasers. There, Toka sacrificed herself, going supernova in order to stun the enemies, leaving Jiro alive but alone in the world.
Here, he comes to terms with his wife’s death, when evidently due to a side effect of being an imperial Paladin he couldn’t even remember her properly until he took a new Cleric (a method they use to ensure Paladins get more clerics and keep fighting). So, Jiro’s been grappling with that one way or another all show. Jiro also comes to terms with being Kumi’s paladin. Even if their relationship is more father-daughter-ish than romantic, he’s still going to look after and protect her like he’s supposed to do for his cleric.
Kumi, meanwhile, gets the resolve that she wants to save her clone-sister, and has the chance when she and Facade arrive to cause trouble. Jiro takes on Facade without his paladin power-ups, using his knowledge of the man’s fighting style to get an edge, while Kumi lures her other self away from populated areas to friendship speech her into submission.
In this we get an extended bit of Kumi’s backstory, from before her proper “birth” in Mezami’s cloning tanks up to her escape, how the people she interacted with and the things she did shaped her, away from being a nearly mindless puppet trained on her other selves to kill and die, slowly seeing the light to awaken as her own person. As a side note, it also reveals that Facade is a “paladin who can operate without a cleric”, seemingly powered by an infusion of blood or magic from the still-beating heart of a Giant Beast. She shares her revelations with her other self, but as Blonde Kumi starts to come around, a phantom of Mezami invades her mind and forces her to self-destruct instead. Kumi’s magic ring activates and contains the explosion, probably protecting Kumi from it as well, but it still leaves a very impressive crater and broken-hearted Kumi
In the wake of this, Kumi and the others end up confined for a bit as the danger of the artificial clerics going boom is seen to be vast. Not that doing so would help stop Mezami, who already has plenty more Kumi clones waiting to be nuclear suicide bombers, but the fear is somewhat understandable. Eventually, Jiro gets through to his father-in-law (with a little help from Zen) and messages are relayed to the various settlements to not start a war because he and his team will be handling Mezami and the lab, which becomes our next destination.
Meanwhile, Tsurugi is still doing things and meets with the Securians, the elf-like masters of ancient ultratech, for cryptic purposes.
In anticipation of Kumi literally meeting her maker and hopefully beating the stuffing out of him, and in respect for all the hell she’s been through, the team comes together to give her an adult name, dubbing her Kumi the Blooming Flower, her own person and not the 22nd of anything.
Jiro and friends stage their attack on the lab. The soldiers are no trouble (and the comedy duo makes a hasty retreat), but Facade is a little more of an issue. He gets beaten and starts glitching out as Jiro and Kumi begin to face brainwashed Kumi Clones, causing Mezami to reveal that all those weird crystal drugs he’s been taking would seem to have an effect, as one of his eyes turns into an eye just like those of the red-eyed beasts and he chokes Facade seemingly to death with one hand. Mezami, however, evidently never learned that it’s actually hard to kill someone with asphyxiation, so Facade comes to later and escapes more insane than ever.
Jiro and Kumi first face down one Other Kumi and subdue her, with Romana and Myaa (helped by Melan) taking her off to convalesce and hopefully be deprogrammed. They then face a whole room full of Kumi Clones prepared to blow, at which point that Ring of Promise once again displays a little deus ex machina to knock them out.
This leads to the fight with Mezami, who goes ahead and rambles about the gods and the truth of the world and how Kumi (our Kumi) is somehow the perfected specimen who will let him do something presumably evil. As he rants, he completes his metamorphosis into a miniature version of the three-eyed humanoid beast that was the boss of the beasts from when Jiro lost his wife, the real one being in a magic stasis tank behind him. Mezami no-sells the Paladin powers and even reaches his hand into Jiro’s spirit to yank Kumi back into the physical world, but Kumi has the last word when she gets next-level angry and her eyes turn bright green… as do those of the Beast in the tank, which reaches out, grabs Mezami, swallows him, and then sinks into the unknown depths below.
To an extent, this was a load bearing boss incident, but Kumi (passed out) is brought out by Jiro into the light of day. There, Tsurugi is waiting with a Securian force in order to properly shut everything down, and hopefully provide a happy ending with a ritual that can seal the power of all the various Kumis away, letting them lead normal lives.
All is not quite well, though, as it’s found that while she might have an option for a normal life, Kumi the Blooming Flower at least won’t have a long one, as her condition is diagnosed at six months to a year left, less if she doesn’t give up being a cleric and fighting.
Everybody goes to the home of the Securians, which is the kind of sterile retro-tech Clarke’s Law sort of place you’d expect. They reveal that the cloning technology Mezami had was an abuse of their own (which they need because they only have a couple natural births a century), and that because of that they recognize Kumi as kin and are more than happy to help her (and presumably her clone sisters) live her best life.
The ritual to remove Kumi’s Cleric powers, however, is interrupted when Giant Beasts begin attacking. There’s some good hang-time on it, but even with the fact that it will shorten her life to have powers and that the Ritual, once started, can’t be interrupted and restarted, Kumi of course chooses to fight alongside Jiro once more. He goes ahead into the fray before she does, though, in order to protect her, and the scene of her decision is actually a good one with Romana and the Securian Chief acting as voices of reason but ultimately accepting her as an adult who can make her own decisions.
Now, getting into the final battle requires a lot of groundwork. This is a place where the show does in an episode and a half what would have taken most shows a whole arc, and I don’t blame anyone who got kind of confused with how fast it goes by. So, here’s the straightforward rundown of things that have been said, now or in previous scenes too brief to highlight when they happened, about our finale.
The myth arc for Ars is this: Long ago, the gods made Ars. Something happened and they went away, but when the world is “ripe” they’ll return to harvest it, a process that is said to begin with Giant Beasts eating up all the pesky mortals in the Time of Judgment. The Red-eyed beasts are the start of that, but the Judgment seems to begin properly now, with masses of red-eyed snake Beasts emerging the world over to attack everyone, everywhere, but especially the Securians whose whole existence was evidently about preparing for the Judgment, since in their location and nowhere else a mega-colossal humanoid beast that spawns an endless stream of the snakes appears.
Everybody who’s anybody shows up for the fight, at least somewhere. We cut to all the villages, and the Imperial capital, and if you’re not there you’re at the Securian lands dealing with the big snake swarm. Facade shows up in crazed hunger for his memories, attacks Jiro demanding them or Mezami, and then has what at first looks like a mutual kill with Zen. Helpful Port Lady Kumi (who our Kumi lifted the name from) shows, reveals she’s a cleric who made retirement, and takes on some snakes. Myaa disappears, conferring in mental space with the other parts of what seems to be the Chapeau hive mind.
Ultimately, Jiro and Kumi face off against the big spawner, but it proves far too tough for their abilities. This is when Myaa arrives with Melan, returning the ring that Tsurugi had taken in order to have it analyzed. With the Ring of Promise, a final trump is able to be deployed
Myaa leads Jiro and Kumi into some sort of mental or spirit space, merged with the other Chapeau to grow up into, as Melan tactlessly puts it later, a hot lady version. Kumi accepts her destiny, and she and Jiro fuse… in reverse, with Kumi doing the chant and ending up the one on the outside. She returns to the real world like that, the Ring of Promsie becoming a chakram that fires laser beams, erasing endless seas of snakes and then letting her beat down the spawner and kill it, which also kills all the snakes swarming the world. She comes down from that high, Jiro is ejected from the weird experience of being the fusion material rather than container, and all seems to be preposterously well, with most anybody with a name revealed to have survived, Myaa still full-sized and no longer wearing a cat (mannerisms preserved, though), et cetera. You could even probably suspect that Kumi’s limited lifespan might not be a problem after that whole ring role reversal thing, though they don’t say anything to that effect so who knows. There’s still a lot unresolved though, like Bakula and the Emperor being evil, but the adventure continuing is a fine…
Then, giant monoliths appear floating in the sky above, titanic blue beast eyes emerging on their surface, and the Securian leader declares that the Time of Judgment has truly begun. The end!
So, yeah, for all my talk about how Giant Beasts of Ars is the twelve-episode version of a fifty-episode Eureka Seven style fantasy epic and it mostly fits in the shorter run time? I guess it didn’t quite fit because that’s an even more abrupt and dramatic cliffhanger than the similarly constructed return of Project Boomerang in Ergo Proxy. Gonna be honest, the show loses points for that alone.
So, let’s break down the elements of Giant Beasts of Ars and see how it fares.
The story is very basic, a not-too-long chain of “go to another village, beat on a beast, and maybe get closer to this whole rather small conspiracy”. There’s nothing wrong with being basic, but in terms of its formula or actual action, it’s not trying to break the mold too hard.
The writing is surprisingly good. Jiro is a grump, and often one who rubs the other characters the wrong way, but he’s not too bad to watch. Melan, Myaa, and Romana have their obvious themes, but they’re personable enough and do have some dimensions to them. Kumi is a real cutie who manages to be happy and positive the majority of the time as she goes through this deadly and harrowing adventure without going so far that she doesn’t feel real. She has bad days. She cries, doubts herself, and struggles with the hard questions in her short little life. She forms bonds with those around her, but while her kind and effervescent personality certainly help she does actually have to bond with them rather than having people inexplicably magnetized to her like certain problem characters. Continuing to talk about how this could have been an epic, I think I would have enjoyed spending epic-length time with these characters and seeing even more of how they reveal their other sides and how they grow.
The worldbuilding is really beautiful, in a specific sort of way. For a setting that seems as bland and single-issue as the pitch of Giant Beasts of Ars might make it out to be, a ton of work was clearly put in to the world and the culture. I love what they do with the names, how they establish it, how it works, and how it’s ultimately used to make an powerful emotional moment for Kumi when she becomes Kumi the Blooming Flower. The art is actually really great. Ars feels like a full, breathing world, with different biomes and its own flair. All the towns of the various races have their own vibes, they look like fantastical places these different people would build, like the Therianthrope tree dwellings, the tiered fortress of the Mountaineers, or so on. Even some of the plain establishing shots really go the extra mile. The imperial capital could have looked like anything, just a big city, but instead they give us this mountainous place with a jagged twin-spired palace dominating a unique and compelling skyline.
I even have a weird affection for all the bizarre and specific fantasy races. I don’t know how much their “on the nose” names were an artifact of the translation as opposed to the original material, so I’m not going to judge that, but their presence and role in the story hearkens back to some of that weird pre-Tolkien fantasy that just shrugs and says “Oh, yeah, these people live here and we’ll just call them demons and they probably have horns, while over in the other place we’ve got Witches and Goblins and what have you and they’re all different and have their own things going on.” Is it strong organic worldbuilding with roots in understanding the natural history of the world? Hell no, it’s pulpy fun. But I do enjoy it for that. When the world generally seems like a living and breathing place with its own culture and mythos, I can take a little pulp cheese.
The art is overall decent. I won’t say it’s anything superlative, though the transformation/fusion scene at least has some quite creative visuals to it, but the action is easy to read and clean to watch while at other times the characters move with grace and generally look good on screen. It’s a cut above average, at the very least.
Giant Beasts of Ars really surprised me. I went in expecting to be spoon-fed familiar dreck but came away having experienced a fresh remix of different touchstones than the ones you normally see nowadays, reminding me of things like (at the risk of referencing an old western novel on my anime blog) The Worm Ouroboros, or the more wild and crazy Ghibli adventures. It doesn’t quite “get there”; it wears its brief run time about as well as it could except for the ending, but it does still feel like it was held back a little from realizing what it might have been. It’s not the most completely bizarre piece of media you’ll encounter, it clearly has peers and predecessors, but honestly that’s a good thing when it still manages to feel fresh.
In a way, its blessing and its curse is that Giant Beasts of Ars is an original anime. There was no other source material this was drawing on. This is great, it’s daring to show us something new… but it did probably hurt the show’s buzz and when the ending came out the way it did it kind of sucks to not have a source material you can fall back on to find out how the story concludes rather than simply stops.
For all that, I offer Giant Beasts of Ars an A-. For the fantasy lover who wants to see something that’s not the millionth “trapped in a Knockoff JRPG with hot chicks” variant, it really is a treat.