Review for Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee Collection 2

Introduction

Tegami Bachi is the kind of story that you go for if you love world-building. This one has an intricate and imaginative fantasy setting that tantalises and inspires. It’s set in a world of eternal night called Amberground. People have settled there however, living under a small artificial sun. It’s a settlement segregated into three parts, the central elite world directly under the sun is Akatsuki, the middle classes live in Yuusari, the ring outside it, while the downtrodden and poor live in the dismal darkness of the outside ring, Yodaka. You need special permission to travel between these areas, and one group that have that permission are the postmen, the Letter Bees who deliver letters and parcels, forge connections and establish routes between the villages and towns. It’s a difficult job as in the wilderness there are massive insect like beasts, Gaichuu, which can’t be fought with conventional weaponry, and who are attracted to and prey on the human heart. But it’s the human heart that can fight them, energy focused through rare spirit amber, and embedded in special weapons called Shindanjuu, with the aid of Dingoes, partners, usually trained animals.


Tegami Bachi tells the story of Lag Seeing, who as a little boy was abandoned in the furthest rim of Yodaka, his mother forcibly taken to Akatsuki, and he left next to the ruins of his home, with a postage label attached to his arm. The Letter Bee who found him, Gauche Suede, accepted him as his ‘parcel’ and undertook a perilous journey to deliver him to his aunt in Cambel Litus. He made such an impression on Lag that he developed an ambition to become a Letter Bee just like Gauche. Five years later after passing the preliminary exams, Lag makes the difficult journey to Yuusari to finally become a Bee, and on the way he encounters a strange blonde girl who has been left as a lost package in a railway station. He dubs her Niche, and she decides that she will be Lag’s Dingo. But the life of a Letter Bee turns out to be quite different from what Lag imagined.


The next twelve episodes of Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee are presented across three discs from Sentai Filmworks.

Disc 1
14. The Corpse Doctor
15. The Elopement
16. Fan Letter to a Musician
17. Letter Bee and Dingo

Disc 2
18. Letter Pigeon
19. A Sick Letter Bee and the Girls
20. Lost Letter
21. Potpourri of Memories

Disc 3
22. Dream Link Notebook
23. Honey Waters
24. Hearts Recollection, Three
25. One Unable to Become Spirit

Picture

Tegami Bachi gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer. It’s clear and sharp, with adequate detail, and no significant signs of compression. It is however prone to jerkiness in pans and scrolls, something that actually seems worse with progressive playback. However there is no tearing or combing, leading me to believe this is a progressive encode, just not a very good one. Tegami Bachi is an interesting anime, a story set in a twilight world, which in this case demands a lot of blues and purples in its palette. The world design is fairly impressive, offering a historical European vibe for its towns and villages, although one of the more fantastic elements in the story, the giant, insect-like Gaichuu, are rendered with the computer generated plasticity of elements that refuse to blend into the 2D animation. It’s a small niggle in an otherwise impressively put together show, and the more simplistic character designs allow for more fluid animation.

Sound

This is a subtitle only release, with just the Japanese DD 2.0 audio track to appreciate. It’s a fine track, the actors are cast suitably for the characters, while the show gets some great theme songs, and even better incidental music, which can be ethereal and choral at times. The subtitles are timed accurately, but unfortunately aren’t free of a handful of typos. This definitely could have used some proof-reading, but as it was one of Sentai Filmworks’ earlier releases, back when quantity counted over quality, you can understand the lower quality control on this release. We can only be grateful that it wasn’t dubbed back then.

Extras

You get three discs in an Amaray case, two on a central hinged panel. The discs boot to static menus with jacket pictures, and each episode is followed by a translated English credit reel.

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for The Anime Network, and there are further trailers for Listen to Me, Girls! I Am Your Father, Qwaser of Stigmata, Hakuoki: A Memory of Snow Flowers, To Love Ru, Saiyuki Gaiden, and MLODI[at]RETS Xenoglossia.


You get 4 Letter Bee Academy shorts on this disc, running to a total of 12:48. These are little comedy skits with SD versions of the characters in a school setting, hardly the most original of post-credit spin-offs.

Disc 2 offers the next set of textless credits, and 4 more Letter Bee Academy shorts running to 12:44.

Disc 3 has 4 more Letter Bee Academy shorts again running to 12:44.

Conclusion

If one thing becomes clear in Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee Part 2, it’s that the show takes its own sweet time about developing its story. The first part did a great job in world-building, and setting up the characters, getting the narrative in motion, and it brought events to the point where protagonist Lag Seeing had achieved the first part of his dream and become a Letter Bee, started delivering letters through the dangerous, Gaichuu infested land, with the aid of his enigmatic dingo Niche (and her emergency food source Steak). So matters continue through this collection of twelve episodes, waiting only until the last few to actually start telling the overall story.


We have one major character to introduce, that of Dr Thunderland Jr., the scary medical researcher who has a penchant for dissection that everyone is wary of, but who turns out to be not so bad after all, and thereafter follows a series of episodes which follow Lag on his deliveries. It’s practically slice-of-life in a fantasy milieu. We get two sides of romance, in a Western themed adventure with a couple of Spirit Amber thieves with a touch of the Bonny and Clyde about them, and it turns out that this Bonny is actually using her beau, Moss to get across the border. Thing are a little more successful when a fan writes a letter to his idol, but successful in the Cyrano de Bergerac way of things.


There’s a final delivery for an aged dingo, a competition with a rival start-up company to the Letter Bees, Lag having to take a day off for sickness, and suffering the dubious care of Sylvette Suede, and Niche, Zazie getting injured and losing his letters when a Gaichuu attacks, and Lag helping him get them back and so on. Things are all pretty random and stand alone, until episode 21, the first of a two part story. It’s a tale told mostly in flashback, about one of Dr Thunderland’s associates, her work on relaxing scents to restore heart in Letter Bees, and how she had to fight for her work following an accident that left her blind. It seems just as trivial as the other episodes, until we learn that it was Gauche Suede who was instrumental in helping her prove her research had value.


After some fifteen odd episodes, we finally get back to the main story arc of Tegami Bachi, as we’re reminded of the Bee who inspired Lag Seeing five years previously, and who subsequently went missing. This may be a tale from the past, which in itself doesn’t move things on, but it does remind us of Gauche Suede, and how he is a major part of the story, ever since Lag Seeing vowed to find him for his sister Sylvette. The story ends with a clue to Gauche’s whereabouts, with Lag set the mission of delivering a letter to the ‘One Unable to Become Spirit’ in the town of Honey Waters.


This story takes up the last three episodes in this collection, and it’s here that the narrative really starts moving. The town has been cut off from the Letter Bee routes because of anti-government sentiment, and Lag and his friends walk straight into an insurrection, combined with a cult led by a couple of nefarious characters. It’s intimated that the government keeps secrets from the populace, and the Letter Bees as government employees become targets. What’s happening in the town of Honey Waters is a localised uprising stoked for material gain, but it also becomes clear that there really is a larger anti-government sentiment, a group called Reverse. This series ends on a reverse of its own, with a long sought for tearful reunion for Lag, but one that doesn’t go in the way that he’d hoped.


This collection of episodes is pretty much standard for any long-running shonen anime that is spinning its wheels, developing the characters that it has introduced before getting to the meat of the story. It offers the typical antics for the most part, a mix of light comedy and drama with the usual character archetypes, entertaining but mostly unfulfilling. It’s fun to watch, but not too rewarding. Things promise to get a lot more story oriented in the second series though, Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee – Reverse.