Some stories linger for years after you experience them, floating within your mind like glittering snowflakes, touching your thoughts and actions in ways you can’t quite see. And yet you sense something has tinted your life’s painting more vivid where desaturated pigments once dominated, creating a more vibrant glaze that hints at how your mind has changed. These stories leave you feeling a little more aware of the effervescent, of the fleeting fizz of moments as they sparkle like a nightflower alighting the night sky. These stories come in many forms, from the inked page preserving the thoughts of someone centuries gone to the gift of how our eyes and minds can perceive still pictures shown in sequence as something moving and alive.
Violet Evergarden lingers and has lingered for years within me as one of these stories.
Violet Evergarden holds love aloft, allowing a gentle promenade of light to caress each sharp facet: the reticent reds of young romantic love, the sorrowful blacks of a father’s love for his deceased daughter, the pure pinks of a dying mother’s love for her daughter, the crystal browns of love expressed too late, the bruised blues of an elder brother’s love for his younger brother, and, shimmering in the center of the gem, an ever present, absent emerald love that changed Violet. Each turn of the jewel teaches Violet a little more about her question: “what does ‘I love you’ mean?” Each turn shows mellifluous love and the loss that balances. The two are inexorably connected and reinforcing. The honey leads to pain, realizing that pain leads to the honey of love, impossibly bound in contradiction with words failing to express the confounding experience. Only once Violet comes to terms with this inherent contradiction, realizing that lost love is found everlastingly within the soul, can she understand what words point toward but cannot express.
Violet is a war orphan, trained to be a child soldier and ruthless killer, in a desperate newly mechanized war. She is given to Major Gilbert by Gilbert’s elder brother, Dietfried, in an act of love. Dietfried believes Violet, as a tool of war, might help Gilbert survive. Gilbert, however, refuses to treat Violet as merely a tool. He teaches Violet how to read and write. He treats her as a person in the hopes that she will learn to be one and live on after the war’s end. All the while, the guilt of how he makes her kill and the killing he also does, sets his soul ablaze. During one of the final battles of the war, Gilbert leads Violet and a squad against the enemy headquarters. The battle leads to an end to the war, but it costs Violet both her arms, costs Gilbert an arm and an eye, and separates them. Gilbert disappears in the final shelling of the complex, officially labeled as missing in action. Violet is granted a pair of mechanical prosthetic arms. Gilbert’s friend, Claudia, takes in Violet and gives her a job as an Auto Memory Doll, a professional ghostwriter for people who want to write letters but lack the ability.
During the war, Violet had snuffed out the lives of countless soldiers, severing their connections with their loved ones, with her warm, human hands. Using her artificial, cold metal hands, she writes letters that establish and deepen the connections she once severed in war. Her soul, as Claudia and others understands, burns as she comes to understand the gem she studies, as she realizes her role in the mechanized slaughter of the war. That same mechanization behind the slaughter gifts her arms and hands and offers a path for absolution, not of forgetting for that would devalue the jewels she had shattered, but of healing for others. Throughout the story, Violet takes in the pain of others, flagellating her soul for its sins without realizing she she holds the whip. Only later, once the typing is finished, the connections established, and, too often, the life has passed to the unknown, does Violet’s tears soothe her burning soul.
Violet Evergarden flows with tears and emotional tears at the audience. The tenth facet haunts with its terrible beauty and ties into the movie’s finishing of the series. Some may find the open emotions uncomfortable and too much. Each facet slices the heart in different ways, which allows the story to linger and surface in unexpected ways. Although the stories remain the same, we do not. I revisited Violet Evergarden over the Christmas season, watching the capstone movie on Christmas night. The story brought me to tears several times, hitting on the connections that have been severed–though not lost–by death and circumstances within my own life. The gem of love we all hold shares similar, sharp edges to what Violet examines. I also had a better appreciation for Kyoto Animation’s work, noticing small details, like how the reflected light on the characters shifted according to the dominate color of the background–the mustard yellow of wallpaper, the green gleam of Violet’s brooch reflecting on her chin and jaw, the hint of her red ribbons reflected on her blonde hair. The way they animated the folds in fabrics, blowing in the wind or against the bodies of the characters, adds weight and points at the vulnerability beneath the uniforms. Clothes show stains and scuffs. The details mesmerized me as much as the story.
As I watched, I found myself comparing Violet Evergarden to Frieren. Both examine love but in different ways. Frieren looks at love long since lost to time, focusing on the fading connections. The emotions roil under the surface, much like Violet’s emotions roil during the first half of her story. Where Violet’s emotions break the ice with their hot sadness, molten guilt, and broiling loneliness, Frieren’s emotions remain taunt. They appear like boiling geysers on what appears to be a frozen moon, moments that reveal what is underneath and are gone again. Once Violet’s ice breaks, the warm oceans take over. Both ways of examining the jewel matter. Both approaches will appeal to different types of people at different stages of their lives. Frieren and Violet Evergarden don’t look away from how love’s physical connections must be severed by time, yet that inevitability makes the ephemeral thread all the more precious. Violet and Frieren lean into the pain after learning how running away creates a different, worse inner hell. Violet pushes through her pain, her boots sounding like a clock’s cadence, as she moves forward regardless of the cost tying the thread together demands. She connects the thread for others as part of her role as an Auto Memory Doll, and those connections reach across time in ways she will never see.
Violet Evergarden reveals the heights anime can reach as a storytelling medium and as a beautiful work of art. Just as Violet cannot know the way the threads she wove with her letters intertwine lives across time with their gossamer, warm, and gentle touch, I wonder if Kana Akatsuki, Akiko Takase, Kyoto Animation, and other hidden people behind the story realize how many they’ve touched and changed. The story has sold well and won many awards, but those metrics don’t reveal the tears people shed with Violet or the letters inspired. The truth cannot be answered, but the existence of Violet Evergarden has made humanity a little better, a little more connected. Now, if only we could move away from digitally messaging and back toward the slower, more human, practice of letter writing. But even Violet’s world eventually left letter writing behind, perhaps to its deficit too.
The story is not without its faults. No story is. However, if you haven’t seen Violet Evergarden, or if its been years since you have, the story is worth visiting.
