Winter 2019 First Impressions – Grimms Notes: The Animation

Set in a fairy tale world in which everyone receives a book when they are born. These books determine every little detail of that person’s life. Written by the mysterious storyteller, each book traps that individual into a preordained fate. The story, however, stars a hero without a story, someone free to decide his own fate. But since he has only blank pages he can only wander to find his purpose. Our hero travels to lands and meets characters straight out of the pages of some of the most famous fairy tales. He must work together with the characters he meets to fight to get back his story. – Crunchyroll

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Mobile Game

Episode Summary: Every person is born with a book, its pages telling their life’s story and guiding their fate. What of those whose stories aren’t defined? Ex is one such individual, whose fate and destiny have been left blank. He joins a traveling band of individuals whose purpose is to battle “Chaos Tellers,” enemies who re-write reality and corrupt people’s stories until they become twisted and evil. He hopes to discover what his purpose is as he fights alongside his companions.

As Tao, Shane, Reina, and Ex arrive in Little Red Riding Hood’s world, they discover that she’s gone missing. Eventually they learn that her anxiety over her fate to be eaten by the wolf, as well as her apprehension over the prospect of the Woodsman marrying her mother, have left her open to a Chaos Teller’s corrupting influence. It’s up to this band of fighters, along with their magical fairy tale partners, to set this story straight once again.

Impressions: What would you do if you already knew the story arc of your life from the moment of your birth? Would you rely on that knowledge for comfort and reassurance, or would the infallibility of the words start to feel like a prison? This is an interesting question that this series poses somewhat halfheartedly. Though I feel like it’s definitely a question worth pondering, it seems like it might be one that the series itself is ill-equipped to answer.

Unlike many anime, the characters facing these deep moral quandaries aren’t the protagonists of the story, they’re the characters within the storybook worlds that the protagonists visit. In this episode, Little Red Riding Hood, whose fate is to travel to her grandmother’s house, be consumed by the evil wolf, and then be rescued by the heroic woodsman, looks to her fated purpose with fear and anxiety. Honestly, who wouldn’t? Being consumed by a beast is a terrifying prospect, even if the ultimate outcome is positive. It’s her anxiety that leads Red off the proverbial (and literal) path and begins to throw the story into turmoil.

What I find frustrating is that this shunning of predestination is not framed positively, even though it makes a lot of sense – Red is also dealing with her mother’s upcoming remarriage and hasn’t quite decided how she feels about the Woodsman becoming her new father, and this feeling manifests as an anomaly in the familiar story. The protagonists aren’t a conduit through which this newly-aware character can navigate the change in their destiny; their job is to correct the anomaly and make sure the story proceeds as it always has. They battle to defeat the entity that’s helped these changes to occur, and the memories of the story’s inhabitants, including Red, are wiped and set back to square one. The victory exists in the unchanged fairy tale.

As someone who enjoys stories that reexamine concepts like “fate” and which utilize storytelling tropes and cliches in different, unexpected ways, I find the idea of “fixing” a story by setting it back to its default inherently unsatisfying. Watching characters struggle against their destiny just to fall back in line when that fate is clearly unjust is a challenge for me as a viewer. I also feel like the implications of the story characters losing the memory of their struggle is kind of heinous, as if they’re being brainwashed into submission. While I don’t like to make a habit of being disappointed just because a particular anime doesn’t follow my personal concept of an “ideal” story arc, I find this one particularly frustrating due to its blatant emphasis on “falling in line” in order to achieve happiness.

The interesting unanswered question here is where Ex and his companions fit in. Ex, like every other character, has a book which is supposed to lead him through his life’s activities. Unlike the denizens of the story zones, his book is blank; he doesn’t have a predefined fate and isn’t bound by the same rules that dictate others. His quest is to discover his purpose through his work, and perhaps fill in the missing words he longs to see, but is that really necessary? Once again, I appreciate that this series is posing the question, and I certainly know how I’d answer it. And again, I’m not entirely certain that this series is equipped and willing to answer it in a way that I’d find satisfying.

Aside from the episode’s complicated ethical dilemmas, it’s more or less a pretty typical fantasy series. I found the characters’ transformations (using magical bookmarks, no less) to be pretty amusing, and their transformation choices even more so. The anime’s visual interpretations of Alice as an EGL-clad magical girl, and Robin Hood as a hot, near-shirtless bishounen, for example, were silly enough to be entertaining on their own. Cinderella’s impenetrable glass slipper buff is also a fun twist on a classic character. The show is certainly not wanting for visual creativity even though most of the settings and background characters are more standard and unremarkable.

I find that I often demand a lot of my entertainment. It isn’t necessarily because I feel that each production ought to have the loftiest of thematic goals, because sometimes complicated analysis isn’t really what I’m looking for. I do, however, feel that sometimes series stumble onto really intriguing ideas and I absolutely love to see them explored in narrative form. When that exploration is truncated or completely left on the drawing room floor, it’s frustrating; it feels like a missed opportunity. It’s hard to say at this point whether Grimms Notes will reach further and become more ambitious, or remain a fun-but-formulaic excursion into familiar storybook territory. I do feel like it has the potential to be more than its initial episode suggests and I hope that it takes that opportunity.

Pros: The episode poses some interesting questions about fate and destiny. It has a fun visual style for its primary characters.

Cons: The story seems almost unwilling to answer the questions it poses. The resolution of this episode gives the impression that the characters were brainwashed back into line.

Grade: C+