After spending 10 years fighting and defeating a demon king, elf magician Frieren and humans Eisen, Himmel and Heiter return back to a city that hired them. Frieren, who has a much longer lifespan and is a thousand years old, leaves to collect books with magic spells. Returning after 50 years, Frieren meets the old Himmel, who dies. Saddened that she never got to know him, Frieren goes to visit Heiter, who also dies, but leaves an adopted girl, Fern, to be her apprentice. Frieren and Fern travel across the land, and meet Stark, a clumsy dragon slayer. They also get another companion, Sein. They go to a city in the north to a tournament where Frieren wants to obtain the certificate of a magician of the first order from Serie, an elf with blond hair who is still angry that Frieren's mentor, the late Flamme, gave the knowledge of magic to humans.
Anime "Frieren" is a gentle meditation on the passage of time and how the deceased can live on in memory of people whose lives they affected, just told in a fantasy setting. A big problem is that the authors keep changing the direction of the story three times, which makes its tonal shift a little bit inconsistent—it starts out as a meditative, quiet contemplation on transience; then switches to a road movie where Frieren and her three companions travel from town to town and meet people; and then, suddenly, almost as if the authors got scared this will not be able to keep the attention of the viewers, they changed it to an action-battle subplot, with even some bloody moments. "Frieren" starts out there where "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" ends, by presenting Frieren returning to a city with her three human companions Eisen, Himmel and Heiter after defeating a demon king in a campaign, which is only mentioned off screen. The mood, the patient character development and stunning animation give an outline of this anime, which is continued later on. Frieren, an elf with huge longevity, is even depicted as somewhat arrogant towards humans who live much shorter lives, obvious in episode #4, where Eisen has this exchange with her: "Don’t you want to take an apprentice with you?" - "That would be a waste of time. As soon as I would have tought him something, he would have already died." - "That’s not the point of a journey". - "It is for me. My time with you wasn’t even a hundredth of my lifespan". Later on, though, she develops more compassion and starts living in the moment by living with humans.
Some inserted bits of humor are refreshing. For instance, in episode #5, "dragon slayer" Stark is introduced, standing still, seemingly to confront a dragon attacking a village. The villagers celebrate him as a defiant hero who confronted the beast. But then he admits to Frieren he was just too petrified to move at that moment, while the dragon was cutting rooftops, until it got bored a flew away. Episode #12 introduces Frieren's magic potion that dissolves women's clothes and which Frieren wanted to give to Stark as a birthday present, but Fern pours it on Frieren herself and it dissolves her clothes and leaves her naked, so she puts a blanket on. Episodes #8 and #9 are the first to offer a strange action de-tour, where demons Lugner and his assistant Linie use own spilled blood as solidified spears. This leads to one genius moment in episode #10: demon Aura has a "scale of obedience", which causes the person with stronger magic powers to control the weaker one, but Frieren suppresses her own magic powers to trick Aura into thinking she is stronger, but then the scale starts tipping in Frieren’s favor—and thus Frieren unleashes her true capacity and simply orders Aura to kill herself with a sword. After that, there is another bland road movie subplot, until the exciting finale with the tournament battle. This leads to two more brilliant moments: one is in episode #21, where Kanne cannot fight the powerful mage Richter because she depends on water for magic powers, so Frieren breaks the giant dome barrier above them, rain starts pouring down all over, and thus Kanne now has a trump card and uses this as a catalyst to defeat Richter in a giant magic water bubble. The other one is in episode #26, where Ubel outfoxed a magician with an invincible magic cape and a hood by simply cutting his cloth with scissors and then killing him from the inside with her magic powers. A undefeated clay clone uses her long hair to create spikes that pierce participants, but Ubel simply cuts the clone’s hair and thus finishes her off, Samson-style. Sadly, Frieren's two companions are absent from this finale. "Frieren" is composed out of three substories, but only the one featuring action and battle sequence truly rise to the occasion with ingenuity and inspiration, and thus it would have been better if the meditation and road movie substories had been cut way shorter than the undue weight they got.
Grade:++
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