My sister and I were still getting into Naruto when some friends recommended this show. All we knew going in was it had wolves who could appear human and their sole goal is to find Paradise (whatever the heck that is; honestly, after watching it I still don’t know, but we’ll get into that). We’ve always liked the idea of werewolves more than vampires (I could do a whole article on the reasons why and maybe I will but not now). This show doesn’t get into typical horror lore, though, it’s more a standalone unique wolf people approach, very signature to Anime (it makes up its own rules). But, we liked wolves and the animation looked interesting. To say the least, we were curious after hearing our friends talk about it so much. I’ll start with a breakdown of what actually happens in the show as I understand it, then we’ll get into what kept us watching and what didn’t make any sense. DISCLAIMER: This review contains spoilers on Wolf’s Rain so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know how it ends, watch the show before reading this.

ACT I: 

The show starts off in a depraved looking city where some scavengers seem forced to steal in order to survive. We meet Tsume (crop top as our friends called him), the leader of this gang who has a loner attitude. His gang finds an injured white wolf which only Tsume seems to recognize for what it is, since wolves have nearly been extinct. We learn he’s a wolf, surviving by appearing as human. Tsume scuffles with Kiba (the white wolf) who is taken by the government shortly after. 

A group of scientists, led by Cher, who’s ex-husband is a Police Detective (his sole arc is he doesn’t like being divorced and wants his wife back since she left him for no apparent reason), are conducting a study of Cheza (the lunar maiden). Apparently, the smell of lunar flowers and Cheza’s existence are what brought Kiba to the city in the first place. 

Another wolf named Hige, helps Kiba escape and they try to get Cheza but she’s taken by Lord Darcia, a noble. Meanwhile, a boy in Tsume’s gang dies in an attempt to steal food because Tsume fails to save him. Somewhere else in the city, Toboe, the youngest of the wolves, is trying to fit in with humans and befriend a human girl but he accidentally kills her pet bird. Tsume keeps Toboe from exposing himself as a wolf and gives him the “nobody gives a darn about you” pep talk. Tsume doesn’t like humans and is convinced that they’re all alike and prejudice against wolves. Moving on, the wolves end up being chased by the police and one obsessed wolf hunter who blames them for killing his family. With nowhere else to go, Kiba says they should find Paradise (he doesn’t know what that is or explain, but he’s driven to find it and that involves finding Cheza). The rest of the wolves want out of the city so they won’t be running for their lives, and Tsume stubbornly agrees to go along as well. Tsume says my favorite line, “Paradise can kiss my *bleep” and then follows them out of the city and we head into the next act where things start to get more confusing. 

ACT II 

The wolves travel through a wasteland and different cities where wolves are enslaved. As they journey, the unlikely friends become progressively more of a pack that relies on each other. Cher’s ex-husband is chasing after his wife with the wolf hunter since she’s been taken to Lord Darcia to help him find a way to cure his wife who has Paradise sickness. (Listen I just report the facts, I don’t pretend to understand them all.) Apparently, Darcia tried to open Paradise (something only the wolves are supposed to be able to do with the help of Cheza) and his wife fell ill because of it. At least, this is what we are led to believe at this point. 

Cheza gets away from Darcia, who supposedly created her in the first place, as well as other lunar maidens, from the lunar flower. She joins the “take a wolf to Paradise pack” and awakens Blue (the hunter’s dog who is really a wolf). Darcia finds the wolves and kicks all their butts so Cheza voluntarily goes with him to save their lives. Kiba takes off on his own but rejoins the pack later. They make it to Darcia’s keep to rescue Cheza, but she’s kidnapped again by Jaguara, another noble. Jaguara’s troops also take Cher, Blue, and Blue’s owner. 

The wolves and the humans come together in Jaguara’s city where we learn wolves weren’t responsible for killing the hunter’s family–Jaguara’s troops are. Jaguara throws this weird party where people spin in a perpetual circle as she attempts to open paradise using Kiba’s blood and the lunar maiden. Tsume and Toboe get locked up after learning Jaguara has stuffed wolves all over the place; Cher’s ex-husband is behind bars as well. Hige learns Jaguara’s been tracking them through a tracer in his collar and that he’s merely a plant. 

Things get weirder when Darcia shows up to the party and reveals Jaguara to be his sister in law, who poisoned her own sister because she wanted Darcia for herself. He kills her and the wolves get out with Cheza. 

ACT III

 The wolves, Cheza, and the divorced couple, are now being pursued by Darcia who wants to open paradise. The wolves want to open Paradise as well and are going somewhere to do that. The world is collapsing around them and we learn all humans used to be wolves but have forgotten. Blue and her master get separated. Cher dies and so does her husband but they express that they’d like to see each other again in Paradise. Toboe is killed by Darcia, protecting the hunter who dies as well. Tsume, Hige, and Blue are all killed by Darcia as well and Kiba fights him. Darcia reveals he’s part wolf and spits up some orb. They battle over who will open paradise. Darcia dies since he can’t open paradise because he’s not a true wolf. Kiba dies from his wounds but his blood waters the seeds Cheza turns into when she dies. So, presumably paradise is opened and the world starts over. 

The End… 

What the Heck? Am I right? 

The reasons we kept watching until the end: 

1. The character dynamic 

My sister and I really look for strong characters in any plot because they are the lens through which we are supposed to care about what’s going on. If a really garbage person is our lens, I won’t care about the story. Three of our four wolves were intriguing as characters and we cared about how they ended up. 

-Tsume’s relationship with Toboe was the best one in the show. Tsume is jaded and guarded, coming off as the jerk to everyone he meets. The reason for this is not because he thinks he’s too cool for everyone, but the exact opposite. He’s afraid of letting anyone down like he did his old pack, or hurting someone since he couldn’t save the human boy in his gang. Toboe is the puppy of the pack and was used to being around humans as a pet. He wants to be loved and accepted so he’s open to everyone, whereas Tsume is keeping the world at bay. I may have predicted everyone was going to die but when Toboe died, I knew everyone else would follow. If Puppy wasn’t spared, no one would be. Incidentally, Toboe’s death was a really sad scene and a great character moment for Tsume. Tsume hadn’t had an emotional or sentimental scene in the whole show, but in that moment its revealed how much he really cares for Toboe and harbors self-resentment. Tsume spent the whole show trying to not let anyone in but by the end he admits to Toboe being the main reason he stuck around (confessing this only after Toboe’s death) and yet he loses him.

-Kiba and Cheza’s relationship was unclear but definitely didn’t come off as platonic. Wiki may say that their relationship wasn’t a romantic one, but with all the “KIBA!”, “CHEZA!” action going on it’s hard to buy. Kiba is supposedly protective over her as the Alpha wolf and she’s not even human (she’s a plant), but they both look human so the writer’s knew what kind of messages they were sending. Kiba’s personality falls a little flat since he’s just got starry eyes for Paradise and Cheza, but he is the driving force of the pack, otherwise they wouldn’t do much. 

-Hige was kind of ehh. If he was comedic relief he wasn’t that funny and being interested in girls isn’t a character. Yet somehow he ends up with Blue and she’s taken with him almost immediately when literally anyone else is a better choice. The reveal in the end where he was a plant felt random since we hadn’t been given much build up. 

1. It had an end 

-Most Anime takes a long time to end, sometimes 700 episodes and 21 seasons. This show was only 1 season, 30 episodes. About halfway through, even when the plot took a turn and got off topic, we knew we had to power through to see how it ended. Crispin Freeman (the voice of Tsume) agreed with this in an interview–Wolf’s Rain is unique because it ends. Having an ending and seeing how we would arrive at some solutions was a strong motivator to finish the show. The writers clearly had a story to tell and they knew when to conclude it. They weren’t just producing content to fill up time or meet an episode quota.

1. Cool Animation and an intriguing premise 

-The animation on the characters and the wolves is really nice. Our friends who recommended it are artists and they appreciated the way things looked. 

-The premise is an oldy but a goody–trying to find Paradise or the divine and the journey to reach it. What came to my mind after watching the show was Rene Daumal’s allegorical novel, Mount Analogue about a group of people trying to climb a hidden mountain presumed to unite heaven and earth. They also do climb a mountain in Wolf’s Rain, so there you go. The journey up the mountain is symbolic of searching for the true meaning of life or the divine, but the exact way to get there is never quantified or laid out in the novel. The book was published unfinished because the author died, so how the book would have ended is unknown. Kind of like how the wolves open Paradise but how that works and what that means is left a mystery. The symbolism seems to be similar to that in Mount Analogue; because, while the main characters seem to be seeking something divine, its indeterminable, indescribable, and there is no clear way by which to acquire or discover it. Which brings me to my last point. 

Things in the show that didn’t make a lick of sense: 

1. The rules of the world 

-The way the wolves operate physically doesn’t match their human illusions. The wolves are supposed to be animals %100 percent of the time but they can cast a human illusion around themselves to fool humans. This makes sense when Tsume doesn’t want the little boy in the gang to touch him because he might feel fur and discover he’s not really human. It doesn’t make sense, however, to have Tsume driving a jeep. The movements of their wolf also don’t translate well to their human ones. Tsume tries to grab a boy with his hands which translates to his wolf biting him. I agree that the wolf would bite him instead of reaching with a paw but then Tsume’s human illusion should be biting him and not reaching with a hand. Same when Tsume is holding a sandwich with his hands and not in his teeth. Later, when Toboe is licking Tsume’s wounds, it looks strange because they appear human but it makes sense if they are really animals. I know having them appear human is more for the viewer’s benefit, but the wolf/human mechanics still threw me off. 

-Whether or not the wolves are attracted to humans isn’t clear either. Cheza looks human but she’s a flower. Toboe likes a human girl and Kiba chases around a girl lynx in a dream world (that’s never explained as well).

1. Humans being originally wolves 

-We’re not really given anything more than all humans were once wolves but have forgotten. Apparently, only pure wolves can open Paradise but then it’s never really explained if humans can go there. Cher and her husband talk as if they’ll see each other in Paradise but then they’re not shown when the world is reborn. (It’s also never clear as to why Cher divorced her husband in the first place; neither seem to remember and they both still act like they want to be together). 

1. The Nobles 

-We don’t really know much about Lord Darcia, his wife, or his sister in law. Other than being rich, what is a Noble? We don’t know. How does Darcia make lunar maidens (human beings) from flowers? No clue. Cheza claims she’s a flower who only needs water to survive and she speaks in third person (which is really annoying) but then she looks human. When she dies, she turns into seeds so I know she’s not physically human but it never explains how she was made or even what she really is.  

-Jaguara has other nobles at her keep who just spin in circles and have no dialogue which made me wonder if they were even human. My brother thought they were aliens. 

1. Paradise–what the heck is it? 

-Last, but not least, we’ve got to talk about this. The whole show we hear about Paradise and finding it and how only the wolves can open it but in the end–WHAT IS IT AND DO THEY ACTUALLY FIND IT? My sister and our friends had so many theories that I’ll just throw a few at you and we’ll call it a day. 

• First: Paradise is simply hitting the redo button. In other words, what happened has all happened before and is going to happen again. So, by finding Paradise, the wolves simply start things all over again. There is no real Paradise, it’s only an illusion which the wolves are driven by so the world can keep reincarnating everyone over and over and it’s doomed to end the same way every time. 

-This could make sense because the world and everyone does start over again and it’s unclear if they start over as wolves or humans. I thought they were human now because Tsume is seen riding a motorcycle but then he’s driving a jeep earlier as a wolf so that doesn’t mean anything. Kiba also starts running before the show ends as if he’s got somewhere to go and maybe remembers his past life.  

• Second: Kiba opened a tainted form of Paradise because we see some corruption caused by Darcia. So, the world started over and maybe they’re human (though I don’t know why they’d be human since everyone originally was a wolf) but the world is going to end again unless a perfect opening of Paradise can be done. In this version, Kiba wants to basically get the gang back together to do it all again. But Cheza’s reborn as a flower so he looks like a nut holding up a flower to the others and telling them how they need to find Paradise–again. That doesn’t happen at the end of the show but that’s what I was picturing.

• Third: Kiba opened his form of Paradise and everyone’s where they want to be. I’m not sure I buy this, though, because Cheza said she’d see Kiba again and yet in his version of Paradise she’s a flower. So, in this version, Kiba’s a crazy gardener who has Cheza (the lunar flower) in a pot alongside their little flower family. 

The overarching themes of the show seem to be similar to teachings in Eastern Philosophy, which are analogous to Mount Analogue—the novel I referenced earlier. In simple terms, the answers are not as important as the questions. Or rather, living in search of the answers matters more than finding them. Not a single question about paradise, who gets to it, what it is, how you find it, or if it even exists is answered. But characters live and die under the motivation of finding it. I don’t know if the creator and writers of the show have answers to those questions. If I’m right and they don’t, it would just reinforce the theme of “the journey being more important than the destination” in this particular series. All in all, the show was entertaining and very thought provoking to say the least. You’ll spend a good part of the next few years of your life just trying to figure out what the ending meant. I do recommend it, but be ready to put on your Paradise Thinking Cap.