Lightning bolts routinely threaten to show themselves to each other, which builds the tension of how their new friendship will fall apart. They talk and bond over their many similarities, the darkness hiding their species and the phrasing keeping them from figuring out what the other means by “my favorite meal”. Fast forward to a storm, where Mei takes shelter in the same dark barn as the wolf Gabu.
Mei's mother resists and even tears an ear off one of the wolves, which may be where Mei's strong will and courage comes from, but still it seems like a pretty traumatic experience for a young kid (no pun intended), and while they claim later that Mei had run far enough away to not watch there's still a pretty strong emotional punch there. First is the hunt which kills Mei's mother, a brutal slaughter framed in a dying grassland in a storm. The first three scenes are a pretty clear showcase of this incompatibility, and so right from the twenty-minute mark or so the movie already feels a bit misplaced. For those who'd rather I avoid getting swayed too much by worldy affairs though, I promise the same issues would've bugged me on any other day, because they've set up a fairy tale story for these two, and framing it are a lot of emotions that aren't compatible with their dream world. Add to that the fact that two friends on opposite sides of the Charlottesville conflict need to be having a pretty serious conversation right about now, and the fast friendship/pseudo-romantic bond between Mei the sheep and Gabu the wolf leaves me feeling like there was a step or two missing. After last weekend's fight between white supremacists and antifacists I'm not feeling particularly generous towards looking at both sides of a conflict, and given a story about wolves who eat sheep and sheep who, well, fight and run away from wolves who want to eat them, there's barely a degree of separation for me right off the bat. I'm not sure this is the right time for me to review Arashi no Yoru ni.
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