Wolf's Rain

Publisher
Bandai
Director
Tensai Okamura
Production
Bandai, BONES, Fuji TV
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Running time
30 episodes
Year
2003

Wolf's Rain Volume 4

By Joseph (Joe) Wood
17th Feb 06

Wolf’s Rain is certainly a fresh, unpredictable and brilliant idea for a series. Yet the filling in my gut is wither it can hold out to turn into a classic.

Our pack of wolves now have one extra member and the decide to go confront the noble Darcia who has kidnapped the Flower Maiden, Cheza, in order to rescue her (and help them search for paradise). Meanwhile Hubb and Quent continue their journey together just shortly behind our wolves. Hubb, after searching for the past few volumes for his ex-wife Cher finally finds her. By almost coincidently running into her, and not due to any sort of detective work which kind of makes Hubb flashing Cher’s photo around and acting like a good cop rather pointless. Cher too wants to recover Cheza from Darcia’s clutches and her, Hubb and Quent also head for Darcia’s castle. When our two groups arrive at Darcia’s Castle but what revelations will be unveiled there?

Now you may think that the above paragraph applies to all the episodes on the volume, but you would be wrong it only applies to the first two. The remaining two episodes on the disc are in fact recap/review episodes. Wolf’s Rain is not the only series to contain review episodes, they are used in a large number of anime series. It gives the production team behind the anime more time to work on other episodes, it saves money as they can be put together cheaply and gives old viewers and new ones a chance to re-watch past events with new eyes or information.

The show was originally made for Japanese TV, one episode to be shown per week so for the Japanese audience it had been about fifteen weeks since the series began so a refresher can be a good thing, and if another one follows the next week that is not so bad. Unfortunately when it comes to an English DVD release having two review episodes on one disc isn’t good. Its doubtful many people will watch one episode of a DVD per week as the show is made to be viewed as, but rather in one or two sittings. Which makes it really difficult to recommend as paying around the £20 pound mark for a brand spanking new DVD, which only realistically contains two episodes is probably not going to appeal to many people. Add to this that about ninety percent of the footage in episode fifteen is from the first episode and about fifty percent of episode sixteen is also made up from episode one, and that there isn’t a large amount of extras to compensate for this, then it doesn’t really make this DVD volume seem attractive at all.

Yet despite this Wolf’s Rain looks likely to turn out to be a great series overall, and with episode fourteen (the final episode on this disc to actually advance the plot) things are totally turned on their head, in a good way. This is certainly the worst DVD in the series so far due to the review episodes. It might be better to see wither the future volumes more than make up for this one, but if your really enjoying the series so far then you’ll still want this volume review episodes and all.

R2 DVD Notes

Features: Production Sketches, Cast interview part two.

Release information: Publisher: Beez Released: February 16th 2006 Classification: 12 Running Time: 100mins

Notes: The cast interviews do prove intresting but there aren't enough extras to help increase this particular volume.

-- Joseph (Joe) Wood 17th Feb 06

Wolf's Rain Images