Name: Ookami to Koushinryou
Type: Television Show
Episodes: 25, 1 OVA
Rating: Intellectual
Runtime Per Episode: 24 min
Director: Takahashi Takeo
Produced By the Spice and Wolf Production Committee
Year Produced: 2008
One of... the best animes... EVER!!
The End.
... Okay, I'll write more, I mean, it's not totally fair to let you off so light, no rant even, granted, I have been kind of tired lately.
Craft Lawrence... or Lawrence Craft, I'm actually not totally sure how it's supposed to go, check this out. This guy lives in a medieval time period, consisting of traveling merchants, and the Church on it's rise to power, and thus the abolishment of the old "Pagan" ways.
That being said, is his name Lawrence (First Name, in theory) Craft (Last Name, in theory) because he's not technically living in Japan... actually, decidedly not, unless everyone there went suddenly English.
Or is it Craft Lawrence, since this is a story written by a Japanese guy (in theory)?
Real mind bender, yeah?
Either way, like I said, this guy's a traveling merchant, trying to make enough money to settle down and start up his own shop. He's living in this day and age where the biggest cooperation is the Church... so pretty much any time that the Church existed.
He's made the tour several times, and established a trade route and good relations with the townspeople all over, and has even got an apprentice or two.
That's Chloe... from the village of Pasroe, Lawrence's next stop.
Pasroe is considered to be a pagan village, but nobody actually cares enough to go and burn it down, so they just let it be, I guess.
The reason that they are considered pagan is that they worship their God of Harvest; Horo... the Wise.
A wolf god, Horo is responsible for good harvests and such. There's a bunch of sayings in the village, all of them involving Horo (usually referred to as "The Wolf") and wheat, the village's main source of income.
When Lawrence gets there, the whole village is having their annual harvest festival, full of more obscure games and rituals that probably never had any foundation in reality, but I'll try to break it down for you.
The people cut all the wheat, and the person to cut the last batch of wheat raises it over their head, howling like they also sliced off one of their own fingers.
This year's unlucky citizen is Chloe. Tough luck, honey.
The person then has to flee in terror from their own neighbors, all of whom are armed with sickles and other sharp and curved implements.
Get back here, BITCH!
The townspeople band together, driving the poor soul into a large barn, then lock them inside, despite pitiful and desperate pleas for help, and the frail, weeping resistance put up by the victim.
With nothing to eat except the raw wheat, the accused will be doomed to live out the rest of their unhappy lives locked in that God-forsaken barn.
When they have reached the deepest abyss of Hell (the ring saved specially for pagans), they will sell their soul to the Devil and be returned to the land of the living to exact revenge on all the mortal beings that condemned it to the barn.
Lawrence came back at the wrong time of the year.
The End.
... Actually, it's just a game which is based in the idea that Horo is in that stalk of wheat, and thus must be imprisoned to keep it from escaping. So they lock it, along with the unlucky soul in a barn for a week. Not much better, yeah?
Lawrence finishes up his trading with the town elder or whatever (Chloe's balding father), then heads out again.
He stops by a river for the night, and as he comes back from the riverside, he notices something stirring under the tarp. Now remember that this is the age of devils and possessions. PAGANS, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE (literally).
So Lawrence reaches around and closes his hand around the cool handle of his... what is that, a butter knife?
Why yes it is! Big, bad Lawrence is traveling through a land crawling with the previously stated devils and possessed, God-less souls, not to mention bandits, mercenaries, wild dogs and wolves, and the worst; other merchants, and he's got a 3-inch dagger riding on his ass.
That dude should be packing no less than an 18-inch machete with a serrated edge for close-combat purposes! If I was him, I'd also mount one of those miniguns on the back of my cart. Maybe just upgrade to the Humvee.
When he throws back the tarp, he finds the furs that he had originally, and a little something extra; a woman.
HOLY SHIT!!
"Obviously a ridiculously cute girl with a cosplay fetish", thinks Lawrence.
When the mysterious wolf-girl sits up and lets loose a howl that would kill anyone of uncertain heart condition, Lawrence starts to get a little bit suspicious.
The girl then says this.
... Horo.
... cute name.
... GAYAHHHH!
She tells him that she's the wolf god... dess that is responsible for the harvest in the village of Pasroe. Hot Damn!! That's quite a stroke of luck! Then she says this.
How could you say no?
So Lawrence goes and acts like an asshole, waving his excuse for a knife around and demanding a show like she's some kind of carnival side-show. So she kills him. Well, with his intelligence and sensitivity quotient, she'd probably been better off with someone else.
Turns out she's not lying, and nearly tears his head off when she eats some wheat and her arm practically explodes into a wolf paw. Lawrence totally overreacts to the situation and falls off his cart, and lies in the grass cringing.
When he stands up again, Horo is gone.
Too scared to stay out in the wild any more, Lawrence goes running back to Pasroe's mayor's house... thing, and spends about ten minutes actually there.
During the rest of the night, he is hijacked by Chloe, who's managed to escape from her would-be prison to pick him up for a date, and he is visited by Horo again (still naked, woot!).
Horo presses her original question, and tells Lawrence her final destination; The North. Damn, that's helpful. Actually, she's going to Yoitsu in the North. Practically no better because nobody's ever heard of it.
Thinking, thinking, thinking...
Reject Horo and you...
1. Piss off a God...
2. ... and a cute one at that.
3. Loose any and all benefit her godly powers would bring.
4. Not have the excuse to travel with a cute girl for an unspecified and possibly indefinite period of time.
Accept Horo and you...
1. Get the opposite of everything up there.
2. And a brand new toaster-oven.
... YES, OF COURSE!
What are you, BRAIN DAMAGED?! Say YES!
So Lawrence finally makes the right decision and agrees.
So Lawrence and Horo set off on their difficult and difficult to understand journey. Good luck to them!
Oh, and all the action that Lawrence was probably ever going to get was in the first episode. Naked Horo and inciting Chloe. And this question...
HOLY SHIT, YES!
Once again, both you and I are either reading too much into this question or are just misunderstanding it, but damn!
The plot line was awesome! With one slight problem. It's really fucking difficult to understand. You'll undoubtedly have to pause/rewind several dozen times just get the general idea on a couple of episodes. So the real reason that I'm not going into depth on the plot is because I don't have the energy. I don't think I ever will.
The character development was well rounded, and I didn't feel that I had any question by the time the series was over. As you could probably, I'm a big Horo fan. She's one of my all-time favorite characters.
Horo's got serious insecurity and unloved feelings.
UNTRUE!!
She's all alone since the village has converted to Christianity in return for better harvesting methods. Ha! They can get all the threshers they want, but when nothing grows, you'll just have to shove those new tools, won't ya?!
Lawrence is... pretty much a vaguely good-willed, slightly business-smart... incompetent fool as represented by his only facial expressions.
Slight Worry
Downright Fear
He hardly ever actually looks like he has any kind of plan or direction, let alone a cool side. He needs like... an eyepatch or something to at least give him the "Fuck Off" vibe that he so desperately needs because he's just this side of gutless. But to be fair, he's got strength when he needs it. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the brains to use that strength to save someone else like, I dunno... Horo, when she actually needs it (that's twice that I can recall right now).
The drawing and animation style were seriously different from the manga. I don't quite now how to explain it... the manga was a lot more like... soft and chibi-ish. Since there was no action for a good part of it, the animation frame-rate around the action sequences were good.
Again, stick with the Japanese version. In this case, it's a little less realistic, but hell, have you ever heard of a place called Pasroe, let alone Yaitsu?
The music was better than half of the stuff that I've seen so far. Good intro number, but the outro was sung in English for... bad reasons. I don't know the real reason, but whatever it was, it was a bad reason.
Personally, I think it's a bad idea for anyone whose not a native English speaker to sing a song in English, but it's a strange... I guess obsession with the Japanese. Using English words in situations where a Japanese word would just sound so much better.
Coming up next!
Gankutsuo: The Count of Monte Cristo
