The Fire Hunter Anime Review

The Fire Hunter is one of the most bizarre anime I’ve ever seen and I’m not even talking about the story. That story is a complete snoozefest but it’s the production where this show makes itself unforgettable because I have never seen an anime that looks this cheap, every aspect bursting at the seams as it tries and fails to inject any sense of momentum into this plot. The story or more specifically the concept is what’s initially interesting as it’s set in a world where humanity has become allergic to fire, so allergic that their bodies spontaneously combust at its mere presence. As you’d expect that kinda put a stop to civilization as we know it with most of the population existing in either the capital or remote semi independent villages with only a land train system to connect them. Add in mysteries forest dwelling people, gods in the form of man who rule from their divine perch over the capital, and a whole system of harvesting monster blood to be repurposed into a safe form of fire and you have a truly inspired setting to explore. Initially it seems like that’ll be this series’s core strength and its dual leads come from totally different backgrounds so the whole thing is tailor made to explore every possible mystery that this world offers. The first red flag was the production which I’ll get into later on, but the 2nd and probably most crippling flaw is the characters, they’re universally sucktacular.

Touko is the first protagonist we meet and she’s a little girl who just had one of the monster slaying Fire Hunters die in her defence, setting her up understandably as a useless weakling. I can’t fault her for that, she’s like 10 years old so not exactly an independent person and that’s where the problems start arising because for a story like this why is one of the leads completely useless and incapable of having agency. She just kinda exists, incapable of saying anything remotely intelligent or reacting to her world in any way other than screeching. Ok actually for no apparent reason she’s able to kill the monsters with the sword she got from that deceased Fire Hunter but there’s never an explanation for it and it all leads up to a pretty insulting final twist at the end, her character arc is very obvious but never earned, and she never did a single endearing thing in her time. Her co lead Koushi is a teenage gent so maybe he’s the real pusher in this narrative, oh wait no he’s a bespeckled useless nerd like yours truly. He’s somehow more useless than the Touko, feebly reacting to everything around him and his big brains never end up accomplishing anything. His arc is kinda like Tyrion Lannisters in book 2 of ASOIAF, just without the brains and the people skills that helped flesh out the setting of those books.

The plot just happens in this show and our leads never do a single thing to further it, they honestly have no purpose in this story. In season 1 I thought some more exposition that fleshed out the world could be welcome only because everything else was so uninteresting but by season 2 I realised that maybe more exposition was necessary because everything that unfolds just doesn’t make sense anymore, the whole gods plotline came off as incredibly anticlimactic and muddled. The side cast are all painfully one dimensional and the somewhat intriguing characters like Akira and Yuoshichi go completely unexplored while the love interest for Koushi, Kira, was so flat that she was just the Saori Hayami character to me. The first season is all about building up a conflict between the gods and the forest people and it sounded like it would make for a dramatic clash, but it ended up being one of the most anticlimactic conflicts I’ve ever seen presented. All of Koushi’s work in season 1 ends up unutilized, the scale is nonexistent, and the drama has every ounce of intrigue sucked out of it all for a messy walking sim of a main plot. I guess that’s what I’d fault the series for most, it never utilises its unique setting and the slow burn of the first 10 episodes never ends up serving a more involved and high stakes story like it set up.

This tedious narrative is not served in any capacity by what I can only say is the worst 2D anime production I’ve ever witnessed. I believe it when people say this was a passion project for director Junji Nishimiura and writer Mamoru Oshii because the only reason I could see something so lacking in afforded resources get made is out of love, but the constraints completely overshadow their intentions. The only good things here are Kenji Kawaii‘s appropriately atmospheric score and artstyle which has the same grainy look that Mushoku Tensai adopted, giving it a textured palette that makes the lower detailed drawings not look as out of place, important because there’s a lot of them in here. The characters benefit the most from the artstyle because when they look good they look good, the problem is that they rarely look good and the moment animation is introduced they become godless monstrosities that look nothing like their models.

The direction has some unique choices to be sure, like when a reaction shot is needed instead of it being through a series of cuts to different characters they instead paste literal panels of characters faces over the main shot, slowly panning upward through until each character has shown up. It looked atrocious the first time because it was in the middle of an actual animated sequence, but after that it’s always done on static sequences, I think the intention was to conserve their animation budget or time constraints but it’s an effect repeated so often that it becomes groan worthy each time. Then there’s the still frames, probably the weirdest choice yet. So obviously this show isn’t an animation powerhouse and relies on still frames a lot but unlike other shows it emphasises this fact by completing changing the artstyle to a crisp and colourful one, they look so particular that I wouldn’t be surprised if one person drew them all and I gotta say good job, they’re the most gorgeous still frames in the business and put the normal artstyle to shame. But again the problem is how they’re utilised because there’s zero tact, every semi significant moment abruptly cuts to one of these frames in whiplash inducing fashion, and most memorably a character’s introduction is made hilarious by how abruptly the still frame of them popped up. They’re beautiful in their own right but they serve as a very inorganic crutch for this series and as such probably do more harm than good.

The CGI that gets used doesn’t look good but it is the least of this production’s woes, because the actual 2D animation actually harms the story. Yasunori Miyazawa is a veteran animator with a distinctly floaty style, he’s not one for model accuracy but he makes up for it with fluid erratic energetic movements, all of which is one display here but missing one key factor, the fluidity. He was the most ambitious and distinct animator on this series and did a very impressive amount of work, which is a problem to me because every single cut he did for season 1 looks awful. I’m no animation guy so I can’t tell you what’s wrong but I think there’s a lack of in between animation on his cuts because they’re so erratic that they’re impossible to follow, on top of him seemingly being unable to draw animals with alot of these cuts involving dogs looking absolutely horrific. His contributions to season 2 are better mainly because they are not action based, his character animation still has the jank but it’s in a charming way. He did put out one of the most atrocious action cuts I’ve ever seen for episode 14 though, if you have any clue what’s happening then congratulations because I sure don’t. I mean no disrespect to him specifically because I can only guess at how bad the behind-the-scenes was on this show and that’s not his fault, but his presence is so large in season 1 and in my opinion very detrimental. Season 2 is less animated overall but the character art is sharper and Takuya Saito did some really nice character animations but that’s about it.