Haibane Renmei E1: "Cocoon — Dream of Falling from the Sky — Old Home"

This review was commissioned by @tzar1990 and fast-tracked by Aris Katsaris.


Haibane Renmei, or "Charcoal Feather Federation," started in the late nineties as a comic by Yoshitoshi Abe. I don't think I've seen anything that Abe wrote for until now, but he was one of the main visual artists for Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze. Both series that I found visually appealing, so without knowing anything about Abe's writing ability this is a good sign so far.

Anyway, something to do with black wings and federalism. Let's check it out.


Open on a girl who looks quite a bit like Lain falling from the sky. She seems to be asleep at first, but after descending for a little while she wakes up and proceeds to be unnervingly nonchalant about her predicament. She knows that she SHOULD be panicking, and marvels that she isn't. Without getting any more worked up for having addressed it.

Dream, maybe? It feels like a dream sequence. But honestly, I'm kind of hoping that it isn't, just for the WTF factor that this would start the show off with.

A raven is keeping pace with her as she falls. As she wakes up and muses about why she might be falling from the sky, she nonchalantly cradles the raven against her chest, and it doesn't resist. Like a longtime pet.

She muses aloud that while she still isn't afraid, her "heart is cold." In response to this, her raven takes flight again and grabs onto the hem of her gown, flapping furiously to try to stop her fall. She thanks it for trying to help, but sadly tells it that it won't be able to make a difference. The bird reluctantly lets go and flies off, letting her fall onward alone.

As the wistful piano music gets louder, the morning sun brightens the sky, and the falling girl suddenly seems to snap fully awake; the sounds of the wind whistling around her come into existence, and she start panicking. Clawing at the air and shrieking as you would expect. We see a rural farmland area below, growing larger and larger.

Before we can see her hit the ground though, the title card drops, and afterward we're in a monastery-like building. Another girl is carrying some equipment through the hall. Unremarkable save for her halo and wings.

I do not know where this story is going, but it's definitely going somewhere.

She brings the stuff into a storeroom, only for the cigarette to fall out of her mouth when she opens the door to find an enormous, coccoon-like mass rooted to the walls of the room. Practically filling the entire space.

It looks like equal parts spider egg-sack, and slime mold. In any case, it's got scifi horror red flags plastered all over it, and the angel girl wisely drops what she's carrying and runs the hell away to get help dealing with whatever the fuck this thing is.

Jump to a couple of other angel-like people cheerfully arriving at the compound by bicycle-ish thing. These ones have more modern looking clothes. Also, there's a noticeboard outside with what look like mundane smalltown events tacked up on it. I'm getting the impression that this isn't an active monastery; seems like it's being used as just a community center nowadays, regardless of what it may have originally been.

One of the entrances has "keep out" tape hung across it, but nobody seems to be panicking. Rather, this appears to be an exciting, joyous occasion, with the tape being to keep over-exuberant locals (especially children, who are crowding around in great numbers) from getting in the way rather than to protect them. The cigarette-smoking angel lady who found the fucked up cocoon thing is irritably keeping the kids back, with the air of a longsuffering schoolmarm.

The pair of newcomers help her chase the kids off, one of them admonishing her for being too soft on them. They also both assure the smoker lady, now named as Reki, that they'll be able to take some time off from work to help her deal with the hatching, though unfortunately not more than a few days. Uh...huh. So these giant hideous cocoons aren't something to be afraid of at all, then. They're just something that happens sometimes. Okay.

Was the girl falling at the beginning like...a prenatal dream of the entity inside the cocoon? A depiction of its soul descending to their world to be born in giant insectoid form? The falling raven girl notably lacked the halo and wings that everyone else seems to possess. Does that signify anything, or is it just down to it being a dream?

They chat about how this cocoon started out the size of a mere dandelion puff...and also imply that it used to be mobile until very recently. The reason Reki panicked upon discovering it in the storeroom wasn't because of its existence, but because it has grown much larger since the last time she saw it and rooted itself in place. Signs that it will be hatching within the day. She was panicking to get everything ready for this, that's all.

For now, she asks the others to help her clean and organize the storeroom. It wouldn't be nice for the creature to hatch in such a dusty, depressing-looking room, after all.

As they work, they also casually mention that this cocoon is unusually large; bigger than the ones these three gestated in themselves.

So...people hatch out of these. Like, normal angel-people in this world. They have a holometabolous life cycle with nonsentient puffball larvae, giant Cronenberg cocoon-pod pupae, and angel imagoes.

...

...is this weirder than Chainsaw Man? I think this might actually be weirder than Chainsaw Man.

It's like one of those really weird dreams that you wake up from immediately wanting to tell people about, but then within seconds realize that it's too nonsensical to even communicate to someone. But somehow works anyway, at least so far.

...

On the subject of this cocoon being unusually large though...we've seen children just a second ago. This cocoon is at least ten times too big for one of those kids. It's oversized even if it's meant to have an adult-sized angelperson in it. Huh. How much bigger than usual IS this one?

As if to put my thoughts to words, a couple of those kids sneak back up to the door and start excitedly declaring the cocoon to be a "monster egg." Implying that this ISN'T just a normal cocoon like you'd expect a normal kid to chew their way out of. Hmm. Then, the adults realize that the cocoon is about to hatch, and quickly get in position to help the teneral emerge.

Then we're inside the cocoon, where the falling-out-of-the-sky girl is floating in an oversized cavity full of fluid. She looks exactly like she did in the intro. Same size. Same lack of halo and wings. As she swims around blindly inside her overly large chrysalis, she tries to decide if she's still dreaming or not (WAS the fall from the sky a dream?) and marvels at her own apparent liquid breathing ability.

...also, she's wearing the same gown from her dream. So, if this is a birth or metamorphosis, her clothes seem to be biogenic.

At this point I'm not sure if I should even be questioning details like this.

She claws at the side of the cavity, and thinks she can hear voices from behind it. Whether she can understand the language that the angelpeople are speaking remains to be seen, though. The lack of wings and halo are making me think that this girl might not be in the right place.

Outside, the others have finished cleaning the room and are all standing idly by and waiting for the hatching. Someone suggests just chipping the thing open themselves already if they're really sure it's ready to hatch, but is quickly shut down. There are cultural protocols here that seem to be taking precedence over medical science. Including some...questionable...ones.

Erm. I guess enjoy your eugenics, angel peeps.

Finally, the wingless girl manages to chip and tear away at enough cocoon wall to crack through the surface. Apparently they weren't expecting nearly this much fluid to be packed in there, because everyone panics and sputters as the small storeroom with its closed door fills almost chest-deep with the amniotic slime. Funny and disturbing in equal measures.

Next thing we know, the wingless girl is waking up in a spacious, well-furnished bedroom. She still isn't sure if she's dreaming or not, but notes that her bedsheets feel solid, and that the new clothes she's apparently been put in are much thicker and scratchier than her old shift. She also is distracted by intermittent sharp pains in her shoulders. Is that her wings growing in? Or, perhaps, residual pain from losing them?

After a few minutes, the people come home and start scolding each other for not having someone stay behind in case she woke up. The group has gotten bigger since the hatching scene, also. There are at least five or six of them. All female, which is odd, because the children we saw earlier appeared to include both sexes. Maybe the adults are segregated by sex or something. Or maybe I was actually right about this being a monastery, with "looking after children of either sex" being part of the nuns' duties.

Also, speaking of children, nobody seems to be weirded out by the teneral's apparent physical age. Are they normally child-sized when they come out of those cocoons? Or...do they just have multiple reproductive methods? No clue.

For now, they aren't really treating her like a newborn child so much as a new student or team member. They can communicate freely, and her general knowledge and cognition seem to be up to adult par even if she doesn't know who or where she is.

Her lack of wings and halo also don't seem to be getting any attention or concern. I guess she gets those later? Or there's a segment of the population that just never gets them, who mostly live elsewhere? Maybe?

Anyway. They clarify that this is Reki's room. Technically it's meant as a guest room, but Reki most often crashes in it, so for the time being giving it to the newborn made the most sense. With the newborn's permission, Reki then lights up a cigarette and asks her how much she remembers about the dream she must have had during her journey through "the ocean." Recalling the details of this dream is important, because tradition dictates that every adult haibane be named after an element from their birth-dream.

So these people are called haibanes, or "charcoal feathers," despite their feathers being distinctly NOT charcoal-colored. Hmm, okay then. On further thoughts, this could be the name of the entire species, or just the local organization/culture/country.

Hmm. There's also another possibility, come to think of it. The wings and halos might just be taking aesthetic inspiration from pop culture western depictions of angels in heaven, but this could also...hmm. Let's see.

The newborn tells them that she dreamed she was falling through the sky, and that she saw *something* near herself during the fall, but can't remember what. Apparently most of these birth-dreams have a sort of acrophobic element to them. One of the other haibanes present dreamed of being surrounded in a cloud of flickering lights, another of floating down along a bottomless river, etc. The names that they were given include Hikari ("light"), Kana ("river fish"), etc. I tried to look up Reki's name, but without knowing the way it's meant to be spelled in Japanese there are too many possibilities.

The newborn protests that she already has a name, but can't remember what it is. Reki replies that her old name isn't worth worrying about, because no one will ever know what it used to be anyway.

Looks like my suspicion was probably correct. These are dead people in an afterlife world.

So...hmm. Were the kids people who died as children? Or can haibanes still reproduce sexually to create more haibanes on top of having their numbers boosted by the souls of the dead?

And...I guess the cocoon is needed to create a new "body" for the arriving soul to inhabit? They said it grew from some kind of a larva, though, so...how does that work exactly?

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree with the afterlife thing after all. It SEEMS like it fits, especially given the wings and halos and diaphanous gowns, but there are enough incongruous details that I should probably wait before making declarations. This show has already turned everything on its head at least three times in just the first twelve minutes, so there's probably more recontextualizing rug-pulls still to come.

Whatever she used to be called, the new arrival is named Rakka, or "falling." I thought she would end up remembering the raven friend from her dream and be called something like "blackbird" to echo the title, but I guess not.


Yeah, okay, cutting it here. I'm a little more than halfway through, but I have a feeling I'm going to have multiple thousands of words worth of speculations and stupefied reactions more to get through before the end credits role. And probably at least as many screenshots as I've already included. The second half will still count as part of January's fast lane post, and be in addition to my usual weekly output.