The (After)Life of Haibane Renmei

Part 1: The View from the West

Haibane was my favourite anime as teen, a trait I am definitely not alone on, for how it showed up at the right time. I was young and introverted (still the latter, not the former...) but while I knew how to socialize I kind of didn’t know...why? I was late to figuring out how to care about people, and I only really started to figure that out in my teens. Haibane came along right at the height of that struggle, being released in 2002 and growing into prominence in the western anime fandom in 2003. I was 16 I think when I saw it, and it was hugely inspirational for me. First anime I showed my high school girlfriend when we weren’t even dating yet, Jesus she definitely liked me if she put up with that (the wisdom of hindsight); “It’s...slow?” “Yeah but give it 5 more episodes, trust me”.

Why I am not alone on torturing prospective partners with Haibane comes from the way what the show hit the expectations & desires of the early 2000’s weeb space. It was a fantasy series, sure, but the most grounded fantasy series you could imagine. The stakes are entirely personal and emotional, the episodes focused on first Rakka’s, then Reki’s, internal struggle to justify living with and depending on others. The fantasy setting is built up, but only incidentally - instead it serves to isolate the characters, to render Reki & Rakka unable to connect to outsiders in a way far more powerful than the modern world can provide. Rakka’s “plot beats” are things like burying a dead bird in the bottom of the well and listening to riddles on the Circle of Sin from monks and just thinking about them, and the climax of the series is portrayed with full magical realism but in actually is just Reki having a panic attack in her room - throwing dramatic paint on the walls doesn’t actually change that. You get all that edgy cred - oh all the Haibane are suicide victims getting a do-over and their names & dreams are derived from their suicide method of choice? Fucking metal - but it is mostly off screen, the average Haibane is living a happy life. The show is so grounded, hell even down to the color scheme; sepia-toned in an era of hyper-bright digipaint anime.

Full kino - Lo-fi edition.

Digging even deeper into the themes, I think Haibane, for western audiences, was ahead of the curve in its level of internality. Haibane is a hyper-deep dive into the question of how to relate to others, “the struggle of being known” and how wounded people build healthy relationships. The finale is just all lines like this:

Vintage depression-core I know, but it works for the show. The duo’s angst is resolved simply through coming to terms with it, not through overcoming it. Reki's fears don’t go away at the end, Rakka simply accepts them as part of Reki, which is what she needed to start accepting them herself.

There were very few western TV shows on air with this focus on interiority at the time. Shows about social relationships often premise their drama on big events and external occurrences (and are normally romances). More exciting...but less relatable. *Certainly* for the emo kids, who were burdened by existence, not specific events, in a way that never seemed solvable. And while there was maybe a few similar western media properties around, in the early 2000′s you couldn’t think of *anime* like that that western audiences were watching. The earlier eras of anime we got were heavily biased towards action shows, with a dash of comedies or romance. And for a certain kind of nerdy online type it being anime was critical; we liked anime, we liked its design sensibilities, its beauty & idealism, its easy flirtations with fantasy and the unreal. A show like say MTV’s Daria, with all its ugly cynicism, is great but it's not filling the same role. Haibane in particular was realistic enough to be a mature story, not a “friendship, yay!” tale, but still have anime’s Romantic touch. The Haibane are just us... but they have wings and a halo, ‘cause they are just a little more magical than us. Relatable and aspirational, at the same time, the magic combination that lets one sink their identity into a character on a screen. Haibane helped a class of people be seen.

All this leads to Haibane having the ultimate rep of being “not like other anime”. Trust me, you heard this alllll the tiiiime on the anime forum/blogosphere. It is so meditative! It doesn’t have any fighting! No fanservice! If you liked anime’s aesthetics, but hated a lot of the baggage that the genre came with in the form of its tropes, Haibane had you covered. It was the most unique show you could find on air that was still comprehensible, grounded the way the “mindfuck” pantheon (Eva, Lain, FLCL, etc) could never be. It was the mature, hipster pick for those of us sneering at the shlock of Elfen Lied and co that the other half of the emo teens demo was embracing at the time.

For all of these reasons, I loved it, it was my favourite show of all time. It was a love letter to the depressed internet teens we all were, and no one else was writing with the same pen for that target audience. It was the only show in town.

Or so we thought in, ya know, 2003.

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Part 2: Anime In the New Millennium

The last time I watched it was around say 2018, and time & experience has changed a lot of that perspective. None of it for the worse, strictly, with maybe one exception I’ll get out of the way. When something is directly assaulting your dopamine receptors, particularly when you are young, you don’t give a shit about the ‘craft’ going into that. But now, as someone far more knowledgeable about the industry and art of animation, Haibane Renmei was a *very* low budget affair; it was the indie of indie, and it shows on the visuals.

At its best Haibane Renmei looks amazing; it has ABe’s gorgeous character designs and it also has a commitment to “auteur” directing at key moments that really elevate the work. This scene, of Rakka’s corrupted wings being discovered by a passerby as her wingslip falls off, was eye-opening to young me - my first use of the distortion + greyscale combo shift to indicate the surreal:

Once you have watched enough shows, though, this isn’t like, special - it's a tool from the animation toolbox. And it doesn’t always execute those tools well; the consistency between the animation is often quite slipshod, with small off-model drifts and choppy cuts. This is a product of that budget - different animators work on different episodes, the team was very rushed with episode scripts being revised right alongside their production, so the fact that people were struggling to check for consistency between episodes isn’t surprising. But still you you get model shifts like this a lot:

Notice the wider defined curve of Rakka’s face in Episode 1 on the left, versus the longer, smoother curve of Episode 8 on the right, and the less pronounced and differently-placed eyes. Other issues crop up of course, like scenes that are panning shots because we have some ~sakuga~ later and we don’t have the budget for two of those an episode. The people making the show are immensely talented, but you know, as an adult viewer, that this isn’t their best work, and that does affect you.

But let's put a pin in that for now, because for western audiences at the time polish paled in comparison to the ‘uniqueness’ I mentioned. That uniqueness ages...not great. A big part of that concept was born out of the fact that, in say 2003, not many people in the west were talking about the Slice Of Life genre, we just weren’t exposed to it. And it’s a wide genre, well beyond the K-On’s you might think of. 

I’ll name Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō/Yokohama Shopping Log as an example work? Published in 1994, it's about a post-apocalyptic Japan and a cyborg who runs a cafe amoung the peacefully declining ruins of civilization. The work is calm and meditative, detailing outsider girls with vespas just looking out at the fantastical countryside:

It's way more upbeat than Haibane is, but its genre - iyashikei, “healing” anime, is pretty adjacent and describes the first half of Haibane very well. Slice of life, but for (young) adults, about adults just ~living~ with more adult problems. Except in 2002 no one in America had fucking heard of it! It got like, an OVA, but it was primarily a manga, and it wasn’t that big. The whole genre wasn’t that big even in Japan yet (it would boom in the latter 2000’s), so in the west all you got was trickles. Haibane was related to weirdly-sleeper hit Serial Experiments Lain, and Yoshitoshi ABe’s character designs and concept art absolutely slap, so it got traction.

Also some of its ‘anime-ness’ is just more masked; like this is our core cast right?

From left to right:

Kuu: Blond genki moe girl who literally runs with the airplane arms thing

Rakka: Uwu clumsy everygirl who is the audience-insert fish-out-of-water

Hikari: Glasses-wearing smartie w/ a mischievous streak

Kana: Brash tomboy mechanic who can’t express emotion but cares deep down y’all

Nemu: Sleeeeeeps older sister

Reki: Kuudere/Tsundere with a dramatic emo backstory

Everyone is living in a found family - oh wait it is 2002, “nakama” - little kids run around being cute/annoying, people bake shit and serve tea. It's all girls! Cute Girls, Doing Cute Things! Like I could have been describing the cast of Lucky Star and I would have gotten you in the first half at least. Haibane Renmei is a unique anime, but it IS anime, and a bunch of that hipster cred was undeserved.

Some of that cred came from its connection to Serial Experiments Lain - Lain is batshit. It does have some Anime Tropes in it (the government agents, the cute outfits, the Akira nods), but all of them are funhouse mirror’d and put into a blender of esotericism and Japanese horror cinema tropes. It’s absolutely its own thing. And Haibane Renmei creator Yoshitoshi ABe worked on it, right? So Haibane will be weird too? 

He did work on Lain - but as the character designer & concept artist. That is an important role, but like, Lain’s character designs are not the avant-garde part of Lain! Look at this:

This fucks, I love him to death, but its a 13 year old anime girl in a school uniform. He isn’t responsible for the weirdness of Lain; Chiaki J Kanaka is, anime’s resident drug-addled hippie and series composition & script writer for the show. But Haibane in western eyes became weird through association - it's still a bit weird on its own terms, don’t get me wrong, but it's not that similar to Lain. You still see in articles about ABe things like “Yoshitsoshi Abe (Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei)” in western press like the roles he served on those are comparable, when they just aren’t.

All of this is to say that Haibane does not stand out from the anime tide the way we thought it did on the 2003 internet. Instead, in small ways it was racing ahead of the tide - one that dabbled in iyashikei, early users of digital effects tools, pushing grounded (vs epic) fantasy. But it couldn’t race that far ahead, it’s connected to the wider trends in anime at the time.

And as we turn to Haibane’s greatest claim to fame, its themes, those connections are gonna really start to hammer down...

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Part 3: Sekaikei Boomtown

Sekaikei is a term with a vague definition, but generally refers to anime that has, as its core plot, the idea of apocalyptic stakes being placed on the resolution of the protagonist's inner emotional struggles. The fate of the universe, resting on if Hiro-kun can overcome his emotional demons or not. It's always existed in anime to some extent, but in 1995 a show called Neon Genesis Evangelion committed harder to the concept than anyone dared to dream was possible, and through its success paved the way for the “Sekaikei boom” of the late 90’s & early 2000’s. Tons of anime started to be made in some way, shape or form building on its themes and capitalizing on its zeitgeist.

The way Evangelion changed anime, or tried to at least, is a topic for its own time, but its not context most viewers in the west had watching Haibane frikkin Renmei. After all, it was the anti-anime! Evangelion has mechas and boobs, what do you mean they are related?? But Haibane Renmei owes its existence to Evangelion, as does Serial Experiments Lain for that matter - Evangelion’s success convinced funders to give weird indie projects much more of a shot. Lain & Haibane producer Yasayuki Ueda had the job of putting together projects, and talks in interviews how he wanted to do something special since the early 90’s, but it only happened for Lain in 1997 - when an neophyte 29 year old producer was suddenly given reigns to put together a team of untested-in-anime misfits to make a horror show about cyber-utopianism. The reason he went from Hyper Doll to Lain is that Evangelion came out right in-between, in case my point isn’t clear. The money was chasing Gainax’s fumes.

Haibane follows that path, and not just financially - Haibane Renmei is a sekaikei. It's a little tough to glean at first - after all the entire point of Haibane is that the stakes couldn’t be *smaller*, the world of the Haibane can only ever affect themselves by design. But within that tiny world, whenever a character completes their emotional journey, they disappear beyond the Wall in a sprinkle of light, never to be seen again - and those who never figure out their shit, who are Sin-bound and unable to escape, wither into dust. It's the same *technique*, externalizing the emotional stakes of the arc into totalizing, death-or-salvation outcomes. It’s what Evangelion perfected and its what anime loves to do - primarily because the externalization lets you flex your animation skills to visually communicate the emotional struggle in cool ways. Haibane is a personalized spin on that classic structure.

And it goes deeper than the structure, too, into the themes themselves - you don’t just ~sekaikei~ any themes, something that is often lost in its simplistic definition. At some point most every sekaikei collapses back into the struggle of introverted people to figure out how to connect to others & wider society- how to admit to intimacy, express vulnerability, and find value in others as the means of realizing your own happiness. 

That is Reki’s big arc, after all - she hates herself, but still engages with and cares for other people and through living with the world & connecting with others those connections can transform her. Or, ya know:

Its the same theme, guys. Its a universal theme, sure, but in anime’s case inflected with Japanese cultural norms around ‘otaku’ discourse - seeing Japan as a highly socialized, intensely conforming culture for which otaku are deviants and outsiders. The temptation to withdraw is high, and these works are addressing those desires & fears and focus on the interiority of that experience as the audience would see it. Haibane Renmei is, again, a part of the conversation media was having in 90’s/2000’s Japan. Adjacent to sekaikei is the rise of more existential seinen manga, dealing at the same time with these same themes, in much more grounded ways. Not a lot of anime adaptations of the more existential seinen properties, like River’s Edge (1994) or Solanin (2005), were being made in this era. For a Japanese audience that is no big deal, you just read the manga. But for a western audience in the early 2000’s these properties are the wind, invisible to us but moving Haibane’s script along all the same.

Hell, a common thematic influence on Haibane is often cited to be Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And it's totally true! That is a really cool, hip influence, right? What other anime are inspired by literary novels? Says the teen, not knowing that not only is that ludicrously common, but that there are multiple anime - from Angel Beats to the works of director Makoto Shinkai - that not only have cited Murakami, but have explicitly also cited Hard Boiled Wonderland! Murakami was just really influential in Japanese media at the time, and Hard Boiled Wonderland has a lot of fantasy and philosophical elements that slot neatly into anime sensibilities. Haibane was made in that milieu, that's why it has the influence that it does.

Which, to make clear here, is a great thing! A lot of this may have come off as criticism, but it isn’t, instead its contextualization. It's way more interesting now to realize that Haibane is not saying something into the void, but instead in dialogue with other works; people would watch Haibane and see it as a piece of a wider whole. That is part of consuming media as you grow up - it is no longer a thematic tabula rasa delivered from a philosophical orient into our torrent seeds. Its impact is smaller from this, Haibane is now an anime of a time and a place - sekaikei’s era has largely passed, for example - but it's also way richer, all these themes have implications now. They are responses to how people in the 2000’s were dealing with societal shifts, growing isolation, how media was being seen and what it was for. The answers are more complex from the context, and given how useless simple answers are that is a very important thing to have. These are insights lost on the young watchers of 2003, but Haibane has them in spades - when you know where to look.

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Part 4: Life & Afterlife

All of this leaks back into my ultimate question: why was Haibane Renmei so much more successful in the west than in Japan in regards to our cultural imagination?. Because it absolutely was - the presence of Haibane in the Japanese consciousness is extremely minimal today. I search Haibane Renmei on Pixiv and I get 33 works; Serial Experiments Lain gets thousands. Meanwhile on the western site DeviantArt Haibane Renmei gets me 9k (Lain gets me 10k). It's like a craft brewery version of FLCL or Elfen Lied over here, while in Japan it's pretty much decommissioned. Hopefully now the purpose for all of that contextualization locks into place; for Japanese audiences, Haibane doesn’t stand out. Oh it's referencing Murakami? Wow, really, the most popular adult fiction author in the entire nation, amazing. It's about the meaning of relationships set against a fantastical backdro- oh yeah, sekaikei, I get it. The themes don’t carry it the way they do in the west.

Partially because the themes are contextualized against a more expansive and known backdrop as discussed, and partially because the Japanese anime community just values different things, Haibane couldn’t be sold solely on its premise. Which is why I mentioned the animation all the way back in the beginning - yep, time for that pin to pay off. With the wider context the originality of the themes fades in importance, and as such the polish and quality with which those themes are delivered rises; and Haibane just ain’t got it where it counts. They did an amazing job with what they had, but this isn’t Evangelion, this isn’t Cowboy Bebop, the ~*sakuga*~ shots are few and far between. And that is what Japanese audiences value in a more adult production like Haibane - or at least one that isn’t compensating for its lack of visual polish with a harem of fetishes.

But to again rein this in from becoming a criticism, it's more of just a reality; Haibane lacked the qualities and circumstances to impact Japanese audiences. And yet, it could impact western audiences, and not just because of our ‘ignorance’. Haibane ‘not being anime’ is silly in hindsight; but the *ways* in which it stood out, while minor in Japan, were everything in the west. Japan rolls with fanservice in a way western audiences, especially at the time, could not; Haibane’s refusal to even touch sexuality were make-or-break to western audiences who were tired of it, especially female audiences (for whom Haibane was very popular). You find this specific point everywhere in old forum posts of the time by the way:

(My gods this is from 2011, getting late in the game there bud to be saying “people who hate Haibane Renmei have short attention spans” but the old ways die hard I guess...)

Japan is also filled with anime and manga at the time that have similar themes - but it's either much more fantastical a la Evangelion, or extremely grounded in contemporary Japanese life a la seinen manga. Neither of those are quite so relatable to a 2003 teen in the US, they weren’t gonna grock with a protagonist complaining about say Japan’s suffocating corporate culture; but Haibane, with its European provincialism, its Christian-inflected aesthetics, and just-fantastical-enough worldbuilding, successfully rode the line. Hell, it was an anime, in a time where manga was much more inaccessible. It arrived right as western media itself was turning more introspective, socially critical, as the exuberant 90’s curdled into the existential and frightening 2000’s. It turned out to be made for the west; and while I have never seen interview commentaries suggesting so, given Lain’s international success preceding it I wonder if perhaps Yoshitoshi ABe had just an inkling of that in mind making it.

Haibane Renmei has thus earned an afterlife of sorts in the western anime consciousness, a genre first for a certain generation. It's only on analysis that you appreciate how finely it threaded the needle to achieve that, how barely it got over the wall of its own industry & context to reach us. It's that precarity that makes it special to me now, its something of a miracle I ever saw it when I did. Hopefully this writing, if I did anything, helped you see that specialness too.

...But its no longer my favourite anime. Which took some time to admit, and its still in my top 5, absolutely recommended. Haibane is my starter pack anime, tipping me into the entire genre of weird avant depression-core animation, a role it served due as much to its limitations as to its strengths. However, it's not 2003; I don’t need those limitations anymore, I know enough now to look for different things. And I think most audiences are with me on that; which is why Haibane will always be a work of its time, preserving, for me at least, in story form, what we then needed it to be. I don’t need it to be more.