To Your Eternity First Impressions

“In the beginning, it was an orb. Not just any orb. It was an orb that captured the reflections of many things and changed in response.”

To Your Eternity’s premiere might just be one of the best single episodes of anime I’ve watched. I don’t mean to overhype it, but even if you choose not to follow the show, this first episode is worth watching on its own merits. It succeeds as a piece of contained storytelling as well as a cornerstone upon which to build the rest of the series. In recent weeks, I’ve found myself harping on questionable pacing a lot with my anime reviews to the point that I was wondering if the problem was on my end, but To Your Eternity seems to employ every single minute of its premiere in the most effective way possible. This is a gorgeous episode that left me emotionally spent, and was engaging from start to finish. It’s possible that To Your Eternity may fail to live up to the promise of this introduction, but there is a strong argument for this first episode alone cementing it as a classic. Do not miss out on this one.

I’m wary of discussing too many details of the plot, as this is worth experiencing firsthand, but To Your Eternity follows a strange entity that reflects the world around it and changes its appearance to match its surroundings. This entity initially takes the form of a perfect sphere before taking on that of a stone. Eventually a wolf collapses against the stone and dies, and the entity takes on the form of the wolf. The entity eventually finds the wolf’s owner, a boy living alone in isolation in the north. Frankly, that’s about all I’m willing to share regarding the premise. As a set up for a series, it’s striking in its uniqueness, and towards the beginning I had a degree of skepticism regarding whether this bizarre premise would work. However, once the parts are in motion, the episode plays like a short film, telling a story that is complete unto itself. The odd thing is, much of the episode is predictable, but it’s pulled off in such a deft manner that seeing what was coming did nothing to blunt the impact or investment. I’m curious what format future episodes will follow, as there are a few ways that I could see this show constructing its narrative, but when it comes to that aspect, only time will tell.

Brain’s Base is behind the production of this one, and if I had to search for an issue I have with this show, it would be that the visuals are occasionally distractingly simplistic. Brain’s Base was never my favorite animation studio, but they had their fair number of hits back in the day. They were the ones responsible for the first 4 seasons of Natsume Yuujinchou after all. After some of their staff left to create Shuka back in 2013, the quality of their titles seemed to take something of a nosedive. Most recently, I watched their adaptation of In/Spectre last year, and I can’t say they did much to prove to me that the studio was back to its pre-2013 self. However, for all that criticism, while the visuals of this episode occasionally detract from the proceedings, the show still flourishes in spite of that. The music is appropriately atmospheric, but we don’t get an OP or ED in this first episode. Hopefully, this will be a return to form for a once accomplished studio, but that’s the one aspect where the show may not yet have my full confidence.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• Since the studio’s split with Shuka, the only Brain’s Base shows that I watched any substantial amount of were Kiss Him, Not Me back in 2016 and In/Spectre last year. I only finished the latter, and I’d go so far as to say the last show from them that I thought was particularly good was My Little Monster all the way back in 2012.
• Impressively, there are really only two speakers in this first episode. There is the boy who owns the wolf, and there is the nameless narrator who created the orb.