Anime New Yoshitoshi Abe anime

A new series with Yoshitoshi ABe designs will begin broadcasting in Japan in the next couple of weeks. The new anime is called Haibane Renmei. The official Japanese site is in Pioneer LDC's Rondo Robe label's site: http://www.pldc.co.jp/rondorobe/anime/index.html

It appears to be about a group of angels (the kind with wings and halos), and is apparently based on some manga or artwork that ABe has done. If you go through PLDC's Niea_7 site you'll be able to find a link to ABe's site, where some of the artworks are displayed. They also showed up in the ABe artbook that was published by Fanboy in the US last year. I'm not sure exactly when airing will begin, but I think it's somewhere between the 5th and the 9th of October.

 

The first episode aired October 9th. Here is a review of the first episode, as well as of some other new anime:

http://www.unm.edu/~jasc/

Note: the old link died, and this one doesn't lead directly to the review of the first ep. Just surf about a bit on the site, and you'll find it in the October, 2nd Week summaries.

 

So, anyway, sometime in December when I was too busy to post, I got hold of a rip of cog.00, the preview disc. Very cool. At the same time, I also got to hear Heart of Air's Blue Flow maxi single (Blue Flow is Haibane Renmei ED). Also overpoweringly cool.

Over the holidays I finally got my import of cog.01, the first episode, and the soundtrack. I've enjoyed both immensely.

In case you haven't read any summaries of the first episode, here you go (if you're REALLY high-strung about spoilers, consider this a warning):

It starts with a young woman dreaming of falling endlessly in the sky. As she is falling, she sees what is apparently the city of Glie, where the Haibane live. Haibane are people who generally look like angels, with wings and halos, but they consider their wings too dark to be angels' wings. In the next scene, one of the Haibane, Reki, discovers a massive cocoon in an unused room of the Haibane Old Home. The other Haibane are very excited about the discovery and start preparing for it to open. The young woman in the dream awakens in the cocoon and breaks out of it. After she meets the Haibane, they ask her about her dream, from which they name her Rakka (falling); a Haibane's name comes from the first dream she has in life. Rakka then receives a halo. That night, her wings painfully emerge, and her life as a haibane begins.

I watched it in raw Japanese, no subtitles, but thanks to Newtype USA and some stuff online, it was fairly easy to get the gist of it. It looks to be more solidly plot-oriented than Niea_7, but also benefits from not being as dark as Lain. From what little I've read and seen from cog.00, it seems the series will mostly revolve around Rakka searching for where the Haibane came from and why they exist. The art style is very beautiful, so it was a joy to watch. Pioneer Entertainment USA is reported to already have the license, so I'd expect it to start coming out in the US in September or October.