The Gist:
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How to Watch:
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Genres:
Adventure, historical, martial-arts
Studios:
Distribution: Geneon
Animation production: Production I.G
Rating:
Air Dates:
The Review:
Balsa, a female bodyguard and warrior-for-hire with a troubled past, returns to her homeland of Yogo after a long absence. She's been away for a good reason: she has the deaths of seven men hanging over her, and she's resolved to pay back the debt by saving the lives of seven more, no matter what the cost to herself.
She gets that chance when she's able to save the life of Chagum, the second prince of Yogo, from what looks like an accident. Maybe it wasn't an accident -- especially since, as Chagum's mother the Empress tells Balsa, he's the host for the "Water Spirit" -- a deity that appears once a century and can bring renewal to a land that's rapidly becoming blighted. Soon Balsa has a new mission: remove the boy and the spirit from the capitol, and defend him from both the assassins sent to take his life and the supernatural spirits that want the Water Spirit as well.
Balsa's well-equipped to deal with a mission of this scope. She's not just a good fighter and a pragmatic thinker (and she uses the two of them together to get out of more than a few scrapes), but she has a whole network of friends and contacts that she can fall back on scattered throughout the countryside. With their aid she's able to remove Chagum from immediate danger, disguise him as a peasant boy, and learn how best to keep him safe in the long run. But there are also the ghosts of her own past looming -- among them, those seven dead men -- and the machinations of the men in power who want to use Yogo's own history and mythology against the very people who live in it.
What makes Moribito so exceptional is how it comfortably inhabits several different genres without getting lost between any of them. It's a rousing adventure story, with more than a few spectacularly-choreographed fight sequences. (One of the very first involves Balsa trying to fend off an attacker while her weapon of choice, a spear, is falling apart.) It's also a thoughtful epic drama, where the heroine's extended network of acquaintances become a family to Chagum, and where he has to learn about a whole new way of life that he's been scrupulously protected from since birth. And it deals, in a surprisingly adult way, with the concept of mythology -- the stories that a nation or a people tell themselves to sustain them, and how those narratives can be bent, twisted or outright falsified by those using them to maintain power.
Strong, mature heroines in anime are always worth singling out when they appear. Balsa may be among the best, second only to Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This is a worldly, streetwise woman who finds in Chagum a way to earn her own personal redemption, and who can more than hold her own when it seems like the rest of the world is actively conspiring against her. (The connection between the two shows is more than casual: they're both directed by the same man, Production I.G's Kenji Kamiyama.)
