Yona of the Dawn

Episodes 1 - 3

Sometimes you can't quite tell what you're getting into from the first half of an episode. Yona of the Dawn, while not achieving Cross Ange levels of second-half turn around, is still a case in point. While we do open with a scene of the titular princess and her band of merry bishounen clearly on the run, we quickly return to happier scenes of a girl about to turn sixteen. (Hint: this is a bad anime season to be a princess turning sixteen.) Yona is the only child of King Il of the Kingdom of Kouka, a vaguely-Korean land that appears to be happy and prosperous. Yona's sixteenth birthday is an important one, but she misses the meeting about it because she is fussing with her robes and hair prior to the arrival of her crush, Soo-Won. Soo-Won is her first cousin and the man she's been in love with most of her life, ever since he comforted her after her mother's death at the hands of insurgents. Her father, however, apparently scarred by his beloved wife's death, won't let her marry Soo-Won. Yona assumes that this is because he doesn't want her loved one to die like his did. The rest of the episode indicates that perhaps there was something else going on in King Il's head. What that might have been becomes all too clear when Yona walks in on her beloved killing her dad.

Soo-Won is the most interesting character at this point, as we can't be sure how much of what he says and does is sincere and how much might come from an outside force. He certainly plans to kill Yona when she discovers his plot, but it's also fairly clear that he doesn't really want to, suggesting that he was put up to this course of action, possibly by his father or the mysterious KYE-Sook. Hak, the other primary male character right now, comes off as much less conflicted, with an episode three flashback to several years before showing us that, unlike Soo-Won, Hak has only chosen to stay at the palace because of Yona. He's the grandson of the leader of the Wind Tribe, and thus fairly high-ranking in his own right. More importantly, he has both the fighting and the survival skills to get Yona away from the palace and to keep her alive, no matter how shell-shocked she is by Soo-Won's betrayal. In fact, apart from the flashbacks and the very beginning of episode one, Yona is pretty much a non-entity in terms of what happens to her. Given that her entire world has basically crumbled around her, that's excusable at this point, and we do know that she's going to pull herself together. Given that the season is listed at 24 episodes, I'm hoping for a somewhat gradual transformation rather than an overnight miracle. That said, these episodes are kind of slow, mixing past, present, and future to try and hook us. (The flash-forwards have a sort of desperate air of, “Look! We promise she's going to kick ass! Really!”)

While Yona of the Dawn does share a lot of trappings with other shoujo fantasies – the setting and cast appears similar to both The Story of Saiunkoku and Fushigi Yugi and Yona's mysterious red hair recalls Dawn of the Arcana – it manages to set itself apart. The pseudo-Korean setting definitely helps, and Yona is thus far much less of an obvious heroine than some other shoujo fantasy princesses. Right now it is difficult to assess her voice, since she's been ranging from “bratty” to “squeaky child” to “traumatized,” but Chiwa Saito does manage to pull off all three, which isn't anything to sneeze at. Both Hak and Soo-Won's voices are also well done, with Yūsuke Kobayashi's Soo-Won sounding smoothly menacing. In the animation, the violence is mostly understated, and we see a lot of scenes played out against static (but beautiful) backgrounds; clearly money has been saved for more exciting fight choreography, which does look pretty good.

We're clearly in a for a longish haul with this series. I can't think that's entirely a bad thing, as seeing Yona go from scared bratty princess to confident warrior will be an interesting journey. That journey needs to step it up, however, and get going in episode four, or attention will start to wane.

Rating: B-

Yona of the Dawn is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.com.

Rebecca Silverman teaching writing and literature and writes ANN's manga review column RTO.