I’ve watched “The Boy and The Beast” and it’s such a cool anime movie! Surprisingly, it was recommended to me by my father, to him, in its turn, it was recommended by his friend. Well, the cartoon is very well drawn – it’s incredibly beautiful – all that backgrounds, character design, all that little details, work with the light are just amazing. The world which is shown there is also very interesting (Spoilers!): it shows two worlds – the usual world of people and the world of beasts – humanlike animals, who live in some idealized version of middle ages and can reincarnate as gods. The main character – a boy, whose mother died, father left and – ran away and accidentally got into the beast world and met an eccentric beast, who wants to become the next lord and has not only to defeat his competitor but also to get himself an apprentice. So, the boy unintentionally becomes the apprentice and after some time starts learning something and then even starts teaching the beast – Kumatetsu. The boy grows up, the master almost becomes a father for him, other beasts start respecting them, the day of the competition is coming. The problem is – some of the beasts believe that humans contain darkness inside then and tend to turn into monsters, so the competitor’s sons – a strange and secretive boy Ichirōhiko hates the main character for being human. Once, when Ren (the main character) runs from the master’s home he gets back to the human world, goes there to the library and realizes that he almost forgot how to read, then he saves a girl from a group of bullies and she offers to teach him reading and just school program in general. He starts sneaking into the human world regularly and even wants to go college, therefore finds his biological father (to get documents). So, when the final fight happens Ren isn’t in the world and Kumatetsu almost loses but then Ren finally comes and encourages and inspires his and the master fairly wins but Ichirōhiko doesn’t think so and uses his telekinesis to deadly injure Kumatetsu with a sword. Ren is in rage and he also uses telekinesis and almost kills Ichirōhiko but in the last moment stops and the guy disappears. Then we find out that Ichirōhiko was a human himself who never really knew who he was. So, Ren goes to the human world to save people and avenge his master. At the very last moment when Ren almost dies, Kimatetsu reincarnates into “the sword in his soul” (another metaphor to the classical “I’m always with you, here *points to the heart*”) and they defeat Ichirōhiko but don’t kill him – just release him of his hatred and explain to him that people do contain darkness but they also contain the power to fight this darkness. The happy end looks like: Ren stays in the human world, lives with his father, goes to the college, is friends with the girl and Kumatetsu is always with him. An awesome anime – totally recommend.
