Wolf’s Rain’s attraction is in its somber, apparently hopeless quest by four despairing youths.

Wolf’s Rain. V.1, Leader of the Pack. V.2, Blood and Flowers. V.3, Loss. V.4, Recollections. V.5, War for the Soul. V.6, Paradise and Poison. V.7, title to come.
TV series (26 episodes), 2003. Director: Tensai Okamura. V.1-2, five episodes/125 minutes, v.3-7, four episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Bandai Ent.

“They say when the world is coming to an end, Paradise will appear somewhere on Earth. But only wolves will know where to find it.”

But wolves have been extinct for the past 200 years.

Maybe.

Hundreds or thousands of years in the future when Earth is over-polluted, natural resources are almost all gone and the last technology is breaking down, the few remaining wolves have disguised themselves as people and moved into the decaying cities to survive amidst the humans. In one city (unnamed but all signs and labels are in Russian/Cyrillic), the lone wolf Kiba comes, attracted by the scent of lunar flowers, which the legends say are a clue to Paradise.

He meets three more wolves: Tsume, the cynically embittered leader of a human street gang; Hige, a wise-guy punk; and Toboe, a naïve adolescent. Tsume and Hige don’t believe in the legend, but they know where the flower scent is coming from: the city’s huge prison-laboratory where experiments are being performed on Cheza, an enigmatic, beautifully inhuman “Flower Maiden”. Other major characters introduced in the first two episodes are Quent Yaiden, a small-town official fanatically obsessed with killing all supposedly-extinct wolves; Cher Degré, the chief scientist examining Cheza, who does not believe in wolves at first; Hubb Lebowski, a leading detective and Cher’s ex-husband; and Lord Darcia, one of the decadent Nobles who still possess technology which gives them almost god-like powers.

Tsume and Hige consider themselves too sophisticated to believe in fairy tales, but they are tired of living alone in hiding, and they are aware that the city is dying around them; so they allow themselves to be convinced by the angrily messianic Kiba to join his quest for Paradise. (Toboe is just pathetically eager to join any other wolves.) Their quest takes them out of the city into what looks like it may have been a strip-mined landscape centuries ago but has been reclaimed by nature: an untamed northern forest (Siberia in summer?) dotted with small communities of humans living in ancient ruins.

Actually, as producer Masahiko Minami points out in a DVD extra, Wolf’s Rain is a fantasy. They are careful to never say it is set in the future, or even on Earth at all. Although he does not name comparisons, it is poetically literary “science fiction” similar to Ray Bradbury’s early stories or Jack Vance’s Dying Earth fantasies. No attempt is made to explain how wolves have gained the ability to convince humans that they are also human, or how they can leap from streets to the tops of buildings like superheroes. Wolf’s Rain‘s attraction is in its somber, apparently hopeless quest by four despairing youths; its beautiful character design (Toshihiro Kawamoto); its excellent music (Yohko Kanno); and a story that, as Director Okamura says on the DVD extra, “will change completely in the span of an episode.” Friends become enemies; enemies become reluctant allies and sometimes friends. There are a couple of one-dimensional villains, but most of the antagonists are “tragic adversaries” doing what they believe is right. The premise may be fantastic, but the characters act intelligently and the story never lets your attention wander. Wolf’s Rain, 26 episodes created by Studio BONES and broadcast from January 7 to July 29, 2003 on the Fuji TV network, was a major anime hit in Japan; and on The Cartoon Network here with four additional episodes from April 24 to October 17, 2004.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).