Wakfu S1E1: “The Child from the Mist”

Time to start the series proper. The "Goultard the Barbarian" special made a mostly positive impression on me.

"The Child From the Mist," eh? Oh you young adult fantasy cartoons, always starting out with kids coming from some state of water.~

The intro has a whimsical platform game aesthetic. Since watching the special, I learned that Wakfu is a tie-in for some online video game, but I got the impression it was more World of Warcraft and less Super Mario World. And this intro...well, it's definitely not shy about which game it wants you to think of:

Granted, he also just conjured that portal himself, and while the one he exits out of a moment later isn't orange, he still shot a little bolt out to open it that definitely reminded me of something else.

The rest of the intro consists of this child-hero and a number of companions platforming around on some big clockwork machinery, jumping on monsters' heads, and scrolling past some other characters that include an old man with an emerald tooth and a pair of sexy elf ladies. The song is good. It's French emo music, and I've long had a soft spot for French emo music. At the end of the intro, the animation turns more typically 3d, and the kid launches himself at some giant monster who I assume is a major villain.

I dig it. It's cute, creative, and well animated, and the song is very nice as well.

The episode opens on an idyllic-looking farming village somewhere with lots of greenery. Humans and elf/goblin like things are walking around doing peasant things. Suddenly, a deep mist bank rolls through the streets, and an unnaturally tall, plum-skinned man in strange robes appears, pushing a baby stroller.

The people all whisper and back away as the man pushes the carriage up the main street. They murmur about their hatred for "ogres," and complain about how chaotic and dangerous their land has been getting. So this guy is an ogre, or at least looks like one. Oddly, for a village in such a chaotic and dangerous place, there doesn't seem to be a wall around it. The village in "Goultard" had a wall, but this one doesn't. Maybe most of the monsters in this region can fly or something, so a wall just wouldn't help. The old (ogre?) man pushes the stroller out of the village and into the surrounding wooded meadows.

As they pass a tall tree, a little robotic insect lands on one of its branches and follows them with its Nintendo-esque camera eye.

Somewhere far away, someone watches the footage through a semaphore-like contraption, and cackles to himself. It's not long after this that strollerman comes to a bridge, and while crossing it he is accosted by a trio of small humanoids with horns, hoofs, and obscured faces.

"What have you got in that baby carriage?" one of them taunts as they advance with weapons drawn. Yes, good question little imp thing, what would someone be carrying in a baby carriage? I get that the imp is just mocking their intended victim, but its phrasing kind of made it the butt of its own joke.

Anyway, strollerman the maybe-ogre is surrounded, and the imps are drawing closer. Being on a bridge makes escape with the baby unlikely, assuming he can't do another mist teleport.

He doesn't do another mist teleport. However, he does conjure a mist bank to blind the attackers while he knocks them off the bridge one by one. Guess he can see exceptionally well in the mist, as well as (occasionally?) teleport through it.

Strollerman lets the mist clear and keeps moving across the bridge. The robobug is still tracking him, however, and it's not long before a rather more intimidating voice hails him. It's a one-eyed android with an oversized rice hat for a head and a single camera-like eye just like the bug's blazing out the front. I find myself thinking of Scaramouch, from Samurai Jack. He compliments strollerman on his handy defeat of his "grambos," but tells him that he can't let him keep going. Robot dude has an insatiable appetite for "wakfu," and must consume the wakfu of everyone he can catch. His drones detected a truly massive wakfu signature crossing the bridge, so either strollerman or the baby he's presumably transporting must be good eating.

Meanwhile, the little bug drone sticks an appendage into a nearby tree and causes it to immediately wilt, lose all its leaves, and die. I'm guessing this is a demonstration that one doesn't survive having one's wakfu drained.

Strollerman finally speaks, telling the android soul-eater to back off while it still can. He also seems to know its name, even if it doesn't know his.

Xelor. Well, I guess soul-eating hat robots are attention-getting enough that everyone in the land would hear about them, and if there's only one then its name would be widely known. Or, I suppose Xelor could be the name of a type of creature, rather than this individual in particular.

Xelor (or the Xelor? I'll just assume Xelor is his actual name for now) also demonstrates the ability to teleport when strollerman tries to move on passed him. Or, at least I think it's teleportation. It has this holographic visual effect that makes me think Xelor might not actually be here physically, but just projecting an image of himself. So, either teleportation or telepresence, not yet clear which.

Speaking of names, known or otherwise, the old strollerman identifies himself as one "Grougaloragran." That's a rather Adamsian mouthful. Xelor is taken aback by this name. Not because it's long or silly-sounding, but because it sounds like the sort of name associate with a group of beings who aren't supposed to have existed since ancient times. I'm guessing Grougo isn't just some ogre, then.

Xelor attacks him from behind (guess he is there physically after all, then) with a big bladed staff-thing he summons out of nowhere, but Grougo's reflexes are good, and he turns around, smashes the bridge in half to block Xelor's path, and nails the android with a fire spell he shoots from his hand. Xelor responds by casting za warudo and leaping from one piece of flying debris onto another to get to his target. Ah, okay, that's how he did the teleport/holoflash looking thing before.

Unfortunately for him, Grougo has za warudo too, and suddenly starts moving again amid the time stop to hit Xelor with another, much bigger, fire blast. This one incinerates his cloak and hat, blasts his exposed robotic body fifty feet back across the bridge and down the road, and sears the leaves off half a dozen trees around him.

Grougo continues on his way. Picking himself weakly up out of the ashes, Xelor sees Grougo start to spread the wings he had hidden under his cloak. Just as he suspected from the name and the wakfu concentration, Grougo is a dragon.

Dragons in this show are pretty darned humanoid, then. And they shoot their fire using hand-gestures instead of breath, apparently. Unless Grougo was using some kind of illusion or shapeshifting power, of course. In that case, maybe he just made himself look humanoid, and made his breath look like a spell he was casting. Could be either.

Cut to somewhere else. A pair of bounty hunters are taking a rest stop on the way to bringing a criminal to the prison. A criminal who they arrested for stealing food for his family. Man, these are some down-on-their-luck bounty hunters, if that's the best they can catch.

When he comments on this himself, they tell him that people who start stealing food eventually graduate to more serious crime, so he needs to be put away for the good of society ASAP.

Ah. I guess these are less like traditional bounty hunters, and more like cops who get paid by the arrest to feed a prison industrial complex. Much more modern and civilized than I'd have expected from such an archaic-looking setting.

Being assholes, they also express skepticism in Jean Valjean here having ever married and had kids with "a face like that." Um...he looks pretty normal cartoon man to me? Local beauty standards may differ from ours. Also, his young daughter Mia catches up to them at just that moment and widens her eyes in horrified shock when she sees her dad being arrested. Jean tells her to go home and tell her mother that he's on an errand and will be back soon, but Mia doesn't buy that and isn't willing to pretend to. She starts crying. Seeing this, the younger of the two bounty hunters sighs, lowers his head, and declares that he can't do this anymore. He cuts Jean's restraints, and tells him to go home before he changes his mind. The older bounty hunter gives them both dirty looks, but doesn't intervene.

Grougo comes up the road with his stroller and sees this seen unfold. He stops, and watches from behind some trees that the path bends around.

The older bounty hunter asks the younger if he's really made this decision, then. When he affirms that he has, the two old partners embrace and wish each other well before the older one goes off and leaves the younger sitting on a bench to decide where his life should go next. The fact that the older one doesn't show any interest in chasing the thief that his ex-partner let get away obviously puts the lie to his professed belief in the necessity of what they were doing. At the same time, the fact that he doesn't seem to resent or judge him for quitting in this manner is...well, better than what a lot of real life police departments do.

We cut to Grougo's perspective for a moment. He apparently sees the world in a weird ghostly monochrome, and in his vision the ex-cop has a bright light glowing from within him that the other lacks. Hmm. Goodness of character? High wakfu concentration? Something. Whatever it is, it appears to please him. Grougo telekinetically snatches a bird egg from an overhead nest that seems to be having trouble hatching, magically hatches it in a way that has the ridiculously cute cartoon baby bird come out alive and healthy, and then transforms the shell fragments into a glowing, magical feather. He puts the baby bird and the feather inside the stroller, and then vanishes in a burst of wind and mist.

Excop comes over to investigate the weird mist and wind, and finds the stroller, as well as the baby, the hatchling, and the magic feather inside.

The hatchling can already fly a little bit. Either Grougo accelerated its growth, or this is just a cartoon thing.

After he looks at it for a moment, the feather transforms into a hovering, runic text that flows into excop's eyes. Giving him some sort of information, I assume.

Fastforward a few years. Excop has moved into an abandoned building we saw in the background during the last scene, and renovated it into a cozy tavern that he runs with his adoptive son Yugo. The baby that the dragon left for him has grown into the platformer PC from the intro, and the bird is now...well, I can't tell if it's bigger than before, but it looks more mature if still unnervingly cute. Excop burned the bread he was baking for the customers this morning (a seemingly all-too-common occurrence), so he sends Yugo into the nearby village to buy a few loaves from the baker. The two seem to really love each other, and the bird is too cute for my brain to process, it doesn't even look like a bird so much as some abstract manifestation of kawaii.

So excop didn't have a family of his own before the day of his retirement and adoption of Yugo? Wonder what his backstory is.

Yugo and Bird head off to the baker, being all wholesome and stuff. Then we cut to a really long scene of two other birds (I think? I guess one of them could be Yugo's but I don't think so) fighting over a coin someone dropped.

This goes on for almost a minute. And yeah, those things are actually offputting in just how cute they are.

After an inexplicably long period of this, the older cop from before (who still appears to be a cop, albeit old enough at this point that I doubt he can catch up with many fleeing criminals) shows up and chases the birds away with his polearm-handle to take the coin. This show has a recurring antipathy for wizened old men, unusual for the heroic fantasy genre. As he's putting the coin in his pouch, those two elf girls from the intro show up riding Yoshis and ask him for directions.

Their elfishness and more typically anime waifu looking outfits are hidden under hooded cloaks. I probably would have thought chocobos before yoshis with regards to their mounts, except that reminding me of the Mario-esque OP...look, I don't think I have to explain this.

Officer Crotchety notices the ornate brass buckles and bells of their riding gear, and determines that he should do anything and everything they ask in hope of a gratuity. Unfortunately for him, they aren't interested in tours, or in staying at a nice inn run by an old coworker of his. They get their directions, and take their mounts racing off. Crotchety goes off looking for people to harass fines out of. One of Xelor's bug-drones watches him from hiding.

Either Xelor's been hanging around this area for these ten or so years, or he just recently came back.

Back at the inn, Yugo has returned home with the bread and is helping his father cook for the customers. Some other kids come by and ask Yugo to come out and play with them, and he tells them he'll join them once he's done helping his father for the day. Meanwhile, Officer Crotchety stops by the tavern and orders a meal, while chit-chatting with his old friend and former colleague. I think they said their names before, but this time I was able to catch who's who: crotchety is named Ruel, Yugo's adoptive dad is Alibert. Alibert apparently hasn't made it known that Yugo is adopted, and Ruel has periodically tried prying into who the mother was with no success.

And he takes advantage of his friendship with Alibert to get away with not paying. Of course.

Back in the kitchen, Yugo gets to work on fixing Ruel's meal. When he accidentally knocks over a shelf full of sauces that look like they're about to fall and hurt his too-cute-for-it-or-anyone-else's-own-good bird pet, he reflexively opens a portal for them all to fall into instead. The portal then closes, leaving the condiments trapped in hell or wherever.

The music is great here. Seamlessly turning from idyllic fantasy music to something more mysterious and enchanted without switching melodies.

He tries to figure out how to think in portals again, and after trying a few times he eventually succeeds.

Unfortunately, it seems that hell is a frictionless environment, and regardless of how long the objects have been there they retain their momentum. So, when he manages to open another portal to let them back into the kitchen, they come flying out at the same speed they'd been falling at and end up breaking anyway. Oops.

He hastily cleans everything up, and decides to figure out how (and, more importantly, why) he can think in portals after he's finished his work. Meanwhile, the bird has grown a magic feather similar to the one left in Yugo's stroller.

Another message? Did Grougo leave the babby bird in the stroller knowing that Alibert and Yugo would keep it as a pet for however many years it took Yugo's powers to activate so it could relay another glyph-message? That seems like a big assumption to make. Also, what if something happened to the bird? Maybe he made it super-durable or something.

Yugo comes out with Ruel and a few other patrons' meals, and performs a highly kinetic and mildly life-threatening waiter routine that has...well, mixed successes. Apparently this usually does work though. Then, we cut to some random villager in an outhouse leering over an elf porno mag. He hears loud noises from outside, and looks out through a crack to see a minotaur-like creature leaping from building to building smashing big chunks out of the walls and roofs. The man in the outhouse clutches his elf tiddy mag to his body and farts and shits spastically in fear.

It wouldn't be a French cartoon if there wasn't something pointlessly gross shoehorned in, I guess. :/

Back in the tavern, Ruel is using a combination of flattery and passive aggression to try and keep his tab unpaid, when the noises outside get everyone's attention. A moment later, the rampaging monster comes bursting through the wall, letting us get a good look at it.

A blond minotaur with a synthetic third eye, hair-covered horns, and an artificial third eye, dressed in a crusader-themed sports jersey. Interesting combination of design elements.

As the patrons all stare and gape, the monster moves over to some ornate beer mugs on the wall and starts examining them fondly, as if the sight has calmed it down. Then, a voice from the third eye in its forehead rebukes it, telling it to stop screwing around and get back to the vital work of destruction. The monster reluctantly puts its shiny mug down and turns toward the people again to attack.

Demonic possession of various forms seems to be a major fixture of this setting. Noted.

Yugo comes out and tries to talk it down, without success. He uses the agility he demonstrated during his insane plate-serving routine earlier to just barely escape its wrath. Nice try, kid. Maybe try killing it with portals. That's a better solution for this problem. As it is, he manages to jump up onto the monster's head and bop it once or twice, but that just makes it madder, and it does manage to bat him away with rather alarming force.

For all his many negative characteristics, Ruel demonstrates that he's a much better warrior than he is a law enforcer. He grabs his polearm and, despite his old age, fearlessly charges the possessed monster while the civilians flee and Yugo manages to get out of its reach. And, despite said age, he manages to fend the thing off for an impressively long period while Alibert runs to make sure Yugo is still alive and get a weapon of his own. I guess this is the reason why the villagers have tolerated him all these years.

Unfortunately, even with Alibert's help, he isn't able to hold it off forever.

The monster hesitates for a moment once its knocked both men down, and earns another impatient scolding and urge to kill them from its central eye. The others hear it this time, and Ruel exclaims that the monster is possessed by a "shushu."

The exotic names for everything, even if they're often silly-sounding, really sets this world apart from many otherwise similar fantasy settings and makes it feel distinct.

Yugo, who's managed to somewhat recover with the help of his birdie's desperate chirping at him, throws something at the beast to distract it away from the adults and asks the adults what a shushu is. Ruel explains that shushus are otherworldly spirits trapped inside of artifacts. Sometimes, they manage to possess the people who try to use those artifacts, resulting in rampages like this. I guess this one is in a bindi or something? Or maybe the "minotaur" is actually an ogre wearing a horned helmet that happens to be hair-colored. That would explain the appearance of hair-covered horns. Anyway, the eye on its forehead is a foreign object that can theoretically be removed, and the creature it's attached to may or may not still be dangerous after being freed (though it will definitely be LESS dangerous, going by its dynamic with its controller). The shushu hears Ruel's explanation, and tells its slave to kill Ruel first before he can tell more people about its weaknesses.

Shushus might be singlemindedly destructive, but they're apparently smart enough to understand information control. And seemingly rare enough for not everyone to already know about them. That fits what happened with Goultard in that special, assuming that the thing that possessed him was a type of shushu that managed to get free of its item (or had never been bound to one in the first place, perhaps? More information needed). Yugo acts first though, and opens two interlinked portals that he uses to leap back onto the monster's head.

...

Hmm. Before, we only saw him open one portal at a time, sending things into hammerspace and then letting them out again later. This feels like a little too much of a leap for him to have made in the heat of battle, seemingly with full confidence that it would work. If we'd seen him perform just one more experiment between the kitchen mishap and now that let him know he could make simultaneous portals, that would have solved this.

...

Seeing Yugo think out loud in portals reminds Alibert of the message he received upon adopting Yugo. Flashback to when those feather-glyphs poured themselves into his mind.

The birds are called "tofus." That's somehow perfect for them.

Anyway, the message that the feather gave him was that Yugo and the baby bird are both critically important, and must be taken care of until Yugo manifests magical powers, at which point he will recieve another message like this one telling him where to find his biological family and what he must do to reach them. The fate of the world allegedly hinges on this.

Okay, that explains why Grougo was so confident that he'd keep the bird, that was part of the explicit instructions he left. And the bird has the second message for Yugo ready for him now that his powers have manifested.

Back in the present, Yugo grabs the central eye thingy and tears it out of the monster's forehead. The beast collapses, perhaps dead, and the shushu-eye transforms into a dagger with the eye set in its hilt. I'm guessing someone stabbed this creature in the forehead with a shushu-possessed dagger, and it integrated itself into its new puppet.

After being overjoyed that Yugo is okay and the monster defeated, Alibert and Ruel ask Yugo how he did that portal trick. Yugo has no idea, of course, he just manifested it reflexively less than an hour ago. As they speak, the monster transforms, shrinking into a much smaller, elflike humanoid with no horns. Ah, so that thing was human (or elf? He has elf ears) before the shushu transformed him. He starts to tell them something, but then falls asleep. Can't blame him, he was just possessed and all. Surprised he survived that at all.

Alibert starts to tell Yugo about the circumstances of his adoption and the message that came with it, but then more noises outside get their attention. It turns out this shushu was only the vanguard of a group of monsters attacking the village, and there are others outside turning people into plants now.

Yugo charges up another set of portals to try and deal with these attackers as well. A Xelor bug-drone watches with interest. End episode.


Pretty good pilot! Great music, very good direction, and it has a rare attention to detail that you don't often see. For instance, one little detail that I didn't mention is that the bounty hunters refer to their polearms euphemistically as "shovels," and Ruel was singing a little jingle to himself about "digging up thieves and bandits" on his way to the tavern. The show is just full of little things like that that make this feel like a fully realized world with an intricate culture and history.

Like the Goultard special, this pilot played every single fantasy cliche straight, but did so with enough solid character writing and unique aesthetic and flavor touches that it never once made me roll my eyes at this. That's not to say either were flawless (I think I've done enough pointing out of where they could have been much better), but still, this seems to be a nice show.