Minutes ago, I finished watching the anime series Moribito : Guardian of the Spirit, and so I thought I would capture my impressions of the series while they are fresh in my mind and have not been occluded by the passage of time and oh so many thoughts.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh right… the show.

The basic thought is that the young prince of an Edo style kingdom has been chosen to bear the egg of a mighty water spirit within his soul. The boy’s mother, the queen, hires bodyguard Balsa (yes, just like the wood) to spirit the boy away from the royal palace so that he will be safe from his father (the Mikado), whom it is feared will be forced to kill his own sun in order to prevent the water spirit from being in line for the throne.

Seeing as, at the beginning of the series, the spirit is thought to be a demon, this is not entirely unreasonable.

So off they go, the ten year old prince and his tough as nails female bodyguard, Balsa, mistress of the spear. Off to flee the Mikado’s assassins.

At this point, I thought the show would be like Lone Wolf and Cub, a warrior and an innocent child versus hordes of bloodthirsty enemies, and the first five episodes bore this out. But then, out of the blue, they find a city and settle down, and it becomes an entirely different kind of show. One with very little violence, and a lot more character development, especially concerning the young prince.

This took me by surprise, and it took me a few episodes to get my bearings and realize that this was it, they were not going to start fighting again. This was now a show about Balsa raising the little prince incognito and teaching him how to survive in the real world.

That made me suspect something that I later found out to be true : the author is female. Had to be. Not because of the female lead, but because the style and pacing were so unlike the typical impatient male aggression based drama.

The show is hardly pacifist. There are some killer action scene wherenbsp; Balsa wields her spear in totally badass ways. She is definitely She With Whom Thou Shalt Not Fuck. But they are few and far between.

Once I made the adjustment to the unusual pacing and style, I quite enjoyed the show. The story is fascinsting and rich, it has good characters, the animation is quite good, and I really cared about Balsa and Prince Chagum and what befell them.

As I implied above, the spirit turned out not to be a demon after all, but a very important water spirit who was responsuble for all the rain in the kingdom. That raises a lot of questions, but this is fantasy, so we’ll just roll with it. This water spirit must die and be reborn every hundred years, and obviously if it failed to be reborn, it would cause a terrible drought, and millions would die.

So the secong half of the show’s 26 episodes are dedicated to learning about this, and how to make sure the young prince survives it.

One thing I liked was that the fearsome warrior Balsa has taken a vow to never use her skills to kill. She will not take a life. This is another thing that you will likely only get from a female writer. We men are far too easily caught up in our testosterone madness that demands our literary avatars dominate their adversaries in the fullest way possible by killing them.

But why kill when it can be avoided?

Another thing I really liked was the character Shuga. He is a palace scholar who discovers that the spirit is not a demon and that killing it would be Very Bad, and he ends up rebelling against the other scholars to get the truth out. He is gentle, intelligent, passionate, and very pretty, and I totally had a crush on him for the whole show.

He was also the show’s silver/white haired dude. Those seem to be mandatory in the shows I watch. There is always a silver haired dude with delucate bishonen features, a somewhat effeminate voice, and the manner of a gay elf.

Doesn’t matter the setting, and they might as easily be a villain as a good guy. But they are always there.

I can only assume they are there as fan service to the females and fags in the audience. If so, thanks!

What else… I enjoyed the overall gentle tone of the show. Gentle, but not wimpy or saccharine. Balsa does not baby Prince Chagum. Instead, she nurtures the strength within him, and stimulates his development of character. That doesn’t mean she is cruel or unnecessarily harsh.

It just means that she is always encouraging him to take that next step up the staircase of life. That, to me, is the right way to parent. Not only because it results in a tougher and braver child, but because it teaches the skills necessary for self-actualization. It teaches the child to always be prepared to do the next thing.

And that’s the secret of life, really. Doing the next thing.

There was some tiny things about the series I didn’t like. Plot elements were introduced as important then, in a later episode, dismissed with some offhand dialogue. There were a bunch of small logical inconsistencies, but that’s par for the course, as is the fact that the ending was not very satisfying.

I am really picky about my endings. Comes from having such an overdeveloped sense of narrative, I suppose.

But all in all, it’s a great show as long as you are not expecting it to be filled with battles and violence and really clear villains. It is instead a story of childhood, nurturing, survival, magic, romance, and it is all written with a great deal fo wisdom, compassion, and heart.

I recommend it.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.