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tomorrowandstilltomorrow · 2 years

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My Complicated Relationship with Violet Evergarden: The Movie

Something that you should know about me is that I am not good at picking a favorite thing, especially when it comes to things I’m most passionate about. Favorite book? Depends on a lot of things. Favorite tea? Couldn’t tell you. Favorite song? Changes by the minute. So when I say that something is my absolute favorite piece of {x} thing, you can assume that it is extremely special to me, and that there is something about that thing that holds it miles above any other piece of {x} thing. Enter the star of this post, my absolute favorite anime of all time, Violet Evergarden.

I actually don’t entirely remember how I found VE initially. My best guess is that it was a Christmas or some sort of holiday up to my grandmother’s house, and I needed to download something from Netflix onto my iPad, so I just chose a random anime I thought looked vaguely interesting and downloaded it. Lo and behold, when I started watching it, I absolutely fell in love.

For those that are unaware of Violet Evergarden, which, if I have a good understanding of the wider anime community, is a good chunk of you, the basic gist of the show goes like this: the show takes place in a fantasy/steampunk world that’s really vaguely defined and thus hard to describe, more specifically in the nation of Leidenschaftlich, which is undergoing a civil war. Violet, an orphan, is found by the Leiden army, and they find that she is anime-protagonist levels of good at combat, and turn her into an emotionless, obedient weapon for the war. She falls under the command of Gilbert Bougenvilla, the brother of the man who discovered her, Dietfried Bougenvilla.

Gilbert gives Violet her first name (the surname comes later), teaches her how to read and write, instructs her to write regular reports to him, and, most importantly, gets her to work with the army, killing many, many people. It isn’t until an extremely risky and dangerous raid on a hilltop fort goes unsurprisingly awry, and Gilbert get brutally and fatally injured (as well as Violet, with her losing both of her arms in an extremely gruesome scene, like genuinely this scene is on Evangelion levels of uncomfortable) that the horrors of war are truly revealed to Violet. While Gilbert is dying on the concrete, with the war raging on around them elsewhere in the fort, Gilbert tells Violet “I love you,” words that she does not understand, as she was raised without the capacity to understand most emotions.

The seizing of the fort practically won the war for Leidenschaftlich. The costal city of Leiden became the capital of the nation, and people are now free from the ravages of war. Violet wakes up in a hospital, both of her arms gone, with bionic replacements in their stead, and we finally start the show. Yeah, that’s all the stuff that happens before the first scene in the show. This first scene we see is Violet waking up in the hospital.

The show itself follows Violet, who is taken under the wing of the Evergarden family, hence the full name, as she get a job at a postal company in Leiden, CH Postal, as she works as a ghost writer for the population which largely does not know how to read and write. Through this job, she slowly learns how to feel emotions, in her quest to understand what “I love you” means.

Okay so that’s the basic gist of the show, so why am I writing about it, and why is this post as long as it is? Well, that’s because this show has a little bit more to it than just the show itself. On top of the original thirteen episode run, there is a fourteenth OVA special, a spinoff movie called Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Automemory Doll, and, most recently Violet Evergarden: The Movie. The Violet Evergarden special is a wonderful little extension of the show, exploring a job that is important in Violet’s long list of works and for showing how far she’s grown, and the spinoff movie is a super sweet look at what would happen if you took Violet Evergarden and added a sprinkle of slow-burn homoeroticism. But the official movie, that’s something else entirely, and the official movie is the main topic of this post, because I have a lot of thoughts about the movie.

The show is very episodic in nature. There are some overarching threads, most notably Violet’s development as a character, but each adventure she goes on is pretty much contained to its own episode, and each episode has its own moral. And that episodic nature mixed with an overarching character development is one of the reasons the show works so well, because while each story and commission that Violet gets is different, and each person that Violet works with is their own person and tell their own stories, Violet is the same person, learning how to be like the emotional, warm, and just indisputably human characters that she comes across. Each episode, after meeting a new person, she learns something new about what feelings are and what they mean, but the way she processes that information is extremely unique, as she processes it through her trauma, and always ties what she learns back to Gilbert. And the reason she can do this, and the reason the show can do this so well, is because Violet refuses to believe that Gilbert is dead.

This is easily one of my favorite things that the show in its original thirteen episode run does; the show keeps the question of “is Gilbert really dead?” completely vague and without concrete answers, but it keeps bringing it up. Violet asks time and time again “is he alive?” and the audience questions their answer to that question every single time she does. And it can do this because it sets up Gilbert’s death in a way that allows both Violet and the viewer to feel uncomfortable with making the assumption one way or the other. At the end of the war, Gilbert’s body was not found, nor were his ID tags, but Gilbert is established as this person that wouldn’t leave the people he loved behind, and the army is pretty confident in considering him dead, even though they never found his body. So the show presents you with two ways of going about Gilbert’s death: the route his family takes, accepting his death, and the route Violet takes, refusing that he died, and holding out hope that he really is still out there, and the show asks you, as the viewer, to pick which you believe is the case. This is asked of the viewer because the very last scene of the show shows Violet getting one more commission from somebody living in a little cottage on the coast, but away from the city of Leiden, and after she does her whole introduction spiel, but before she actually states her name, she looks up at the person behind the door (who we do not see) and pauses, before saying her name with an uncharacteristic shake in her voice. This, combined with the fact that this commission is apparently “urgent” makes for two interpretations: either this is a commission for somebody who Violet is happy to see, maybe somebody sick but still joyful, or somebody she has seen before, or somebody beautiful, but unrelated to her distant past, or it’s somebody she has wished to be alive all along: Gilbert. This open-ended final scene is a perfect ending for this show, because it asks the viewer what they believe, and it’s a result of how they react when it comes to Violet’s journey.

I thought that the series would forever sit on this ending, because everything that was released after this, the OVA episode fourteen, and the spinoff movie, never mentioned where they sat in the timeline, because there is an arguably indistinct amount of time between the resolution of the conflict in episode thirteen and that final scene which both the OVA and the spinoff could take place, but with the official movie, that is not the case. It cannot be the case. Violet Evergarden: The Movie must come last, and that causes a problem: it removes literally any and all emotional impact of the last scene of the show.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie is part recap movie, part ending to Violet’s story. In it, Violet, and the rest of the CH Postal company, find out that Gilbert is alive.

Yeah.

You know the whole thing that made the show so effective? The thing that Violet struggled with over 13 episodes, only to accept at the very end the thing she didn’t want to accept? Yeah, that thing? The movie decided to just erase all of that and tell the audience “eh, whatever your headcanon was, it doesn’t matter, because he is alive, deal with it.”

And that made me mad when I saw the trailers for the movie. I wanted the show to forever stay ambiguous on the matter, because that made the work more meaningful and beautiful as a whole. I didn’t need to know that Gilbert was alive or dead, because by the end of the show, I had finally accepted that he probably was dead, and that there was no bringing him back, just like Violet had. This made me so mad that I actively refused to watch the show for two years, until reluctantly I decided to give it an honest-to-god shot during a nine hour plane ride, and coming out of the movie, I am glad I watched it. It was a phenomenal movie. It was honestly the best animation I’ve ever seen. Eye candy from start to finish, as is a standard for this franchise, but the movie did it better than usual. The story was great too, and the emotional moments almost made me cry, which is saying a lot because “almost crying” for me is the same as “rolling on the floor incomprehensibly babbling through sobs heavier than an anvil” for others. Violet trying so hard to say anything to Gilbert at the very end, but only managing to say “Major,” over and over again through her sobs was so good, and I think the only reason I didn’t actually cry was because I was on a plane and I was holding myself back. There were moments like that aplenty, and it was amazing to watch in the moment, but after that, I got to thinking about how I really felt about the movie, and it just felt so strange to think that Gilbert was alive and well, and that Violet just quit her job and lived on some random ass island for the rest of her life, when in the show she was shown to have made a name and a life for herself that she had become happy with.

And therein lies the problem I have with this movie: it conflicts so heavily with what the show had to say. The movie, by itself, in a vacuum, is absolutely wonderful, but when you take the things that the movie does, and compare it to the show, which you have to do because the movie is a dependent extension of the show, the movie stands at odds with the thing it’s supposed to be the final chapter to, which makes it kind of not good at closing out the franchise. Because of that, my brain has to do these mental gymnastics to try and rationalize why the movie isn’t a part of the series cannon and is it’s own thing, and I think that’s what I have just had to accept. The movie is just kind of its own thing, and I think it helps that it feels like its own thing. The movie is both its own original story, as well as a recap movie of sorts, a la Evangelion and Madoka Magica’s two recap movies, but this time around, instead of recapping the movie beat by beat, it recaps it in a way that reconstructs the show to fit what the movie wanted to do. The only scenes in the movie that are ripped from the show directly are the scenes from the war itself, from when Violet was younger, and still a weapon of war. Everything else is reframed as history, as the retelling of the legendary doll Violet Evergarden, the person who wrote a love letter for a princess, the person who wrote a song for an opera singer, the person who wrote a play for a famous playwright.

I think my brain has kind of settled on the VE Movie being in this nebulous space between cannon and fan fiction, where it doesn’t feel like it’s so derivative and outlandish to be considered fanfiction, and still definitely being canon, but still not being so in line with the canon established by the show that I’d be happy considering it canon. So it’s not canon in my mind, but it’s also not non-canon, if that makes any sense.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie is a wonderful piece of art, a movie that I think more people should watch, and one of my favorite movies of all time now, but I still and will probably forever have a complicated relationship with it purely because it is that good, and because it tackles the only thing that was really left in the franchise to tackle. It is a phenomenal ending to the series, but I still will forever be salty about the way it closed things out. I will say, however, that I’m glad that the movie did not tie off every loose ribbon, and left some room for the audience to interpret. My personal favorite was the fact that they did not do fan service, and show an old Violet, or an old Gilbert, or whatever. All they did was imply that Violet moved to the island that Gilbert had run off to, and that she lived a long and happy life away from CH postal on that island. It’s not quite the open-ended bookend that was the last scene of the thirteen episode run that I had loved so much, but it was a neat touch onto an already wonderful movie.

#anime #violet evergarden #violet evergarden: the movie

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