5/5 Epic Tales of Swords, Sorcery, Monsters, and Intrigue
  by Midland (The Midwest)
The Twelve Kingdoms is a well-written, magnificently drawn high fantasy adventure series, if one not necessarily to the taste of all anime fans. It stands well off to the "naturalistic" side of anime, where the women have normal bosoms, where the warriors fight without taking timeouts for bombast, and where the female lead doesn't spend any time pining after that cute local lord with the big sword and the brooding angst. There is, instead, an abundance of drama, beauty, thought, and humor, all painted on a wondrously enchanted canvas.

The series is based on the best-selling novels of Fuyumi Ono. Forty-five episodes on ten disks provide plenty of room for monsters, swordfights, battles, murder, and intrigue, neatly interwoven with Fuyumi's meditations on character and leadership. The gorgeous backdrops and naturalistic character designs can be stiff or enchanting, depending on your tastes. The musical score ranges from haunting Chinese traditional to thrilling modern classical themes. I found myself listening to the opening credits at each episode on the disk, just to get back into the mystical atmosphere of the story.

The four stories told in the series combine personal journeys with tales of war and political intrigue, a kaleidoscope of characters and creatures, battle scenes that do not flinch from showing the ravages and random violence of war, and a number of asides to educate the viewer about the language and laws governing the Twelve Kingdoms.


"Shadow of the Moon, Sea of the Shadow" (Episodes 1-13)

The series begins, as apparently all great anime adventures must, in a Japanese high school. Youko Nakajima, an attractive, popular girl, is president of her class, but is nonetheless plagued by self-doubt. When an exotic looking man called Keiki--actually a kirin, an Asian unicorn of immense spiritual power---suddenly appears in her classroom, she is both baffled by his offer of eternal fealty and frantic about the gossipy comments from her classmates. Youma, demonic monsters in the shape of luridly transformed animals, attack the school and attempt to kill Youko. She agrees to accept Keiki's offer and his servant youma carry her and two companions off to the world of the Twelve Kingdoms. There, she learns Keiki has chosen her as queen of one of the twelve realms. Pursued by assassins and youma, she must try to survive and understand what has happened to her.

As events separate Youko from the kirin, she finds herself stalked by monsters, a turncoat companion, a taunting nightmare being, and a mad king. While Youko cries a bit more than the average anime heroine, she has plenty of reason to do so. Her upbringing has left her ill equipped, physically or emotionally, for this violent, hardscrabble world. This is a tale where the goal is less the throne of a kingdom than it is Youko's attempt to recreate herself and become worthy of it. The story follows her as she desperately fights to stay alive, to adapt, and to keep her sanity. If she cannot learn to tell friend from enemy, to believe in her own strength and judgment, she will perish and everyone she meets on her journeys will suffer for her failure.


"Sea of the Wind, Shore of the Labyrinth" (Episodes 15-20)

Tentei, the creator god of the Twelve Kingdoms, provides each realm with a guardian kirin, a powerful spirit being, wise, pure of heart, and endlessly compassionate. However, ruling a country is a complex matter, requiring knowledge of both good and evil and the ability to make harsh decisions at need. Consequently, the rule of the kingdom is given to a human, a man or woman selected by the kirin through its semi-divine intuition and rendered immortal as long as he or she rules in a way that does not poison the kirin's compassionate spirit. This arrangement, even though divinely ordained, often fails to produce peace and just rule. Such is human nature and folly, and such is the limit of even a kirin's wisdom.
In the Twelve Kingdoms, humans and kirin are not born of the body, but from ranka, the fruit of sacred trees. Parents wishing to raise children gain them by praying at a holy site. Kirin are born of a tree on the sacred Mount Hou, where they are tended by priestesses and guarded by lesser gods. A shoku can carry off fruit from a sacred tree to Hourai (Japan). That child, called a taika, is born to parents in our world in the usual fashion. In the stories, Youko is a taika, as are Shoryu, the King of En, Rokuta, the Kirin of En, and the black Kirin called Taiki.
In the story arc, the tale of Taiki is related to Youko as she meets with Rokuta and Shoryu on Mount Hou. Taiki, like Youko, was brought up in Tokyo and was carried off to Mount Hou as a young boy, ignorant of his true nature. The Sea of Wind, the Shore of the Maze is more a character study than the other story arcs. As Rokuta and the priestesses narrate the tale, we learn how a child from Japan came to terms with the powers, the dangers, and the responsibility of a semi-divine destiny. We also learn how he fulfilled the duty of judging someone fit to rule the kingdom of Kei.

Sadly, this story arc could easily have been subtitled "First of Two Parts," as a mystery is revealed in parallel with the main story. Sugimoto, who traveled to the Twelve Kingdoms with Youko and returned to Japan battered but wiser, realizes that a strange boy in her neighborhood is more than he seems. She suspects, and we know, that this is Taiki, somehow exiled again to Hourai, his memories lost, sickened and alone. His kirin nature makes it difficult for him to pass as a normal boy. Worse, he is guarded in his exile by youma, and people who threaten him are mysteriously injured or killed. The story of how the young black kirin and the ruler he chose were driven from the Kingdom of Tai was left unfinished by production problems with the series.


"A Thousand Miles of Wind, The Sky of Dawn" (Episodes 23-39)

The third story arc of The Twelve Kingdoms is a grand, complex adventure. We begin with the three young women in three different kingdoms fighting to gain control of their lives and destinies. Their stories are interwoven with a sophisticated tale of political intrigue, brutal oppression, and rebellion in a province of the Kingdom of Kei.

Youko, the newly enthroned Queen of Kei, is profoundly aware of how little she knows of her land and her duties. She flees her palace, leaving the realm in the hands of contemptuous ministers while she tries to learn how to lead and rule. In the Kingdom of Hou, Shoukei, a tyrant's daughter who lived through his reign as an ornament in the royal palace, is cast out of the palace after outraged lords rise up against her father and kill him before her eyes. Too consumed by self-pity to be of use anywhere in her homeland, she decides on a whim to go to Kei to meet and overthrow the girl queen who has all the wealth and respect she has lost. Finally, in the Kingdom of Sai, a serving girl named Suzu also hears of the new queen of Kei. Suzu is also Japanese, carried off to Sai by a shoku a hundred years ago. She escapes from the abusive priestess who has been tormenting her for so many years and flees to Kei, hoping that Youko will free her and take her in.

The mix of secondary characters in "A Thousand Miles of Wind, The Sky of Dawn" is dazzling. The story involves conspiring court officials, monarchs both good and evil, corrupt governors and generals, a psychotic town boss, cut-throat soldiers and kindly mercenaries, shape-changers, rebels, and many common folk just trying to survive hard times. Trickery and maneuvering by all the characters and factions bring them together to fight for control of a province of Kei and the attention of Kei's ruler. Even as they do so, Youko hides among them seeking to gain control of her throne and bring peace and justice to her realm. The result is a rousing double ending to the story arc and a profound change in the lives of all involved.

"Sea God of the East, Azure Sea of the West" (Episodes 41-45)

Five centuries ago, soon after the kirin Rokuta brought the new king Shoryu from Japan to take up the throne of En, the new king faced a possible civil war. The chaos caused by the death of the last king had left En, a devastated and impoverished country. Shoryu's opponent, Atsuyu, was young, popular, and just and wise in the arts of war and governance. He held the respect and loyalty of much of the kingdom, while Shoryu's intentions and worth were suspect. The last completed story arc of The Twelve Kingdoms is the tale of this conflict, related by Shoryu to Youko as a parable. Was there any great difference between the two men, the one who succeeded, and the one who failed? Who would truly have made the better king?

Amid the tangled intrigues and plotting, we learn more of the centuries-spanning big brother-little brother friendship of Rokuta and Shoryu. Both man and kirin were born and lived amid the savage wars of feudal Japan. Rokuta, now the embodiment of the Kingdom of En's spirit and conscience distrusted kings and hated violence. Shoryu, a stranger to the land in that time as Youko is in her time, needed to win the kirin's trust as well as the kingdom's. As the tale of Shoryu's duel of wits with Atsuyu unfolds, we side with the king, but we come back again to the grave Shoryu visits at the beginning of the story, wondering, as he does, if there can be any final judgment.

Episodes 14, 21, 22, 31, and 40 of the series all either review the past story arcs or fill in details about the personalities, people and culture of the land. People who enjoyed the series regret not just the two dozen or so planned episodes that were never finished, but many more stories that could have been told from Fuyumi Ono's published works. Even a casual viewing of the series suggests many more tales to be told. What of the other kingdoms, the ones described only in passing? What of their monarchs, their kirin, their cultures, and their traditions and artifacts, of which we learn so little? What purpose do the lesser gods of Mount Hou serve in the world the Tentei has created?

There are far less colorful and intricate worlds than this that have run on to series after series in the history of Japanese animation. Possibly this one will find a creative team with the means to build on what has already been done. For those who have already felt the wonder of Fuyumi's creation, it would be wonderful to get lost amid The Twelve Kingdoms once again.


5/5 Amazing Epic Fantasy Series!! A Definite Classic!
  by C. Bender (Seattle, WA USA)
At first, the set-up for Twelve Kingdoms is very similar to Fushigi Yuugi: A rather annoying whiny schoolgirl and her friend get sucked into another world similar to ancient China, can't get back home, get separated and have a feud and have lots of adventures. But fortunately for us, the resemblance ends there.

While Fushigi Yuugi's charm is fueled by the characters' relationships, the Twelve Kingdoms is far more layered and focuses more on individual character development. The main character Youko Nakajima develops from a very insecure and self concious high school girl to an introspective and self-aware young monarch of the Kingdom of Kei.

I admit that Youko's initial whiny and weepy personality was very annoying to watch. And there is some violence and depictions of cruelty, so this series is not meant for the younger "Pokemon" audience.

But the payoff for watching this beautifully drawn and splendidly imagined series is enormous. Twelve Kingdoms is a complex, deeply layered fantasy world whose scope rivals that of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. The soundtrack is beautiful and the introductory music is unforgetable. The best thing about this anime are the life lessons it teaches. The characters learn that despite terrible adversity, one should never give up!

Twelve Kingdoms is definitely my all time favorite anime! So to all anime fans out there, I'll use a line often used at the end of the episodes, "You won't want to miss it!"


5/5 An anime for both genders.
  by B. Ezawa (Clinton, NJ USA)
From the cover you may think it is an anime for girls, but it is for both, girls may enjoy it, boys probably will enjoy it. It is a slightly morbid story with a relatively slow and unstable start. But it gets its story going in the second half of the first eppisode. I would recamend this anime to anyone who likes a bit of blood and a fantastic morbid story. I would recamand if you like this anime to try "Wolf's Rain".

4/5 LET'S GO TO ANOTHER WORLD!
  by Sesho (Pasadena, TX USA)
If you're familiar at all with Japanese anime or manga you'll find that the story of a young boy or girl being thrown into another dimension and spending the whole series figuring out why they're there is nothing new. But like any good myth, the story is familiar but its the METHOD and SKILL of the storytelling that distracts from the cliches. Twelve Kingdoms is done on a more epic and yet more personal scale than most anime of this type, with the exception of Escaflowne.

High school class president Youko Nakajima is a good girl and liked by everybody and the hardest thing she has to face is her parents telling her to dye her flaming red hair. That is until a mysteriously clad young man named Keiki shows up at her school telling her she has to leave with him because it's the only way he will be able to protect her from her enemies. He doesn't mean a class bully, he means a giant roc-like bird whose attack on Youko endangers the lives of her classmates. He gives her a sword only she can wield to fight against the awesome forces arrayed against her, for reasons she has no clue about. Keiki takes Youko and two of her classmates to another world, a world of magic and 12 kingdoms and spirits that take the shape of animals and humans. Along with Youko is Sugimoto, the class loner who Youko pities, and whose delusional visions and readings of Japanese legends makes the new world her dream come true. And then there's Asano, who both Youko and Sugimoto like. In the land of the Twelve Kingdoms, anyone who comes from our world is hunted down and killed because their appearances coincide with disastrous events.

This first volume started off a little confusing but once you get into the groove, it gets better. There are lots of deep issues here, including the loss of innocence, the desire to belong versus your individuality, and the gaining of spiritual strength. The animation was great and some of the best quality I have seen. The story is epic. I did get sick of Youko at times. She seems to be maturing but she spends a lot of time here crying and having hissy-fits. She's getting stronger though. Seek this out.

5/5 Beautiful, mysterious and colorful
  by Henrik (in the Anime aisle)
I won't get into the plot of this series, because that's already been done by others. What I will say is, I love this first volume because it draws you in by combining excellent writing with very good pacing (unlike a lot of other "adventure anime" which compensates for lack of plot by racing through what plot there is). I also like the non-human characters, who all have motives of their own.
There are elements of stories like Lord of the Rings, Neverending Story, and others, but the way in which this is told is probably best with a "Japanese accent".