English Dub Season Review: Fena – Pirate Princess Season One

The Adult Swim era of Toonami has shown a pretty remarkable durability against the rapid shift towards streaming, continuing to be a good outlet for many to pick up some of the most popular anime out now and maintaining strong connections with outside animation studios for collaborations, including surprise revivals of fan favorites and innovative new projects. Another of those collabs has resulted in a new Toonami original, Fena: Pirate Princess. Following a seemingly humble girl on a globe spanning treasure hunt with a Japanese pirate crew, the series boasts magnificent animation from Production IG and glorious music from legendary composer Yuki Kajiura. Unfortunately, past the audio and visual components, the show itself ends up being a pretty thin product, with characters and plot seemingly given the bare minimum of thought and effort and nothing past that, leaving what could have lived up to the standards of the “better cartoon show” that Toonami prides itself on, but instead is mainly as hollow as an empty treasure chest.

The term “style over substance” gets thrown around a lot when a product is very flashy and nice to look at but provides little in terms of compelling material. While it is quite the visual spectacle and the music is what you would expect from the same composer for Sword Art Online and Madoka Magica, I would hesitate to say there is much of a discernable style. Rather, Fena seems to prioritize function over form. What I mean by this is that I can point to just about any single component, whether that is a character or location or plot device, and be able to tell you what the writing function of it is and how it serves that, but then see how, more often that not, that function ends up disrupting or even contradicting the form. show needs a plucky protagonist with a great destiny, which is why we have Fena, but then Fena has little to no agency for most of the story. She needs an eccentric supporting cast and a handsome and loyal love interest, but the Goblin Knights who form this never really break out of that to be more. We need an intimidating antagonist with a sympathetic backstory, so we get Abel and his lost love to Fena’s mother, but his goal and actions in relation to the rest of the story only make things more confusion.

Likewise, the plot of the series revolves around finding a mythical land to obtain answers and rewards, which is why Eden exists, but why or how Eden came into being, why or how it has its treasures or its mystical nature, what connection Fena’s mother had to it, and numerous other questions that are never answered. And that’s kind of a problem when the whole of the conflict all leads to this area. This along with the character problems mentioned above, seem to indicate that the story was written with each plot point and character written to fit within a general requirement, but somehow never looking at the whole product once all the pieces and parts were put together. I can only speculate as to why it ended up this way, but doing some cursory research into the show’s creator and director, Kazuto Nakazawa, provide some possible answers. Nakazawa’s background and credited experience shows that he has a primary acumen for character design above all else, which is most certainly shown in Fena where every character is quite easy on the eyes. And that would be perfectly fine if this were just a series of contextless and wordless pictures where we could make our own version of the story in our heads, but it’s not.

I could go more in depth and pick apart the issues of the writing and character development, because there are certainly plenty of those issues, but it honestly just doesn’t feel like it’s worth the energy to do so. What we’ve ended up with is an anime with above average visuals that will keep peoples attention and be easy to watch, but is pretty disposable and forgettable in terms of the story and characters, which is pretty unfortunate, but it happens all the time. I imagine that Fena: Pirate Princess will be remembered well for its animation and designs, but little else. I’m not sure what lessons Adult Swim will be taking away from this or how it will influence the creation of future original shows, but hopefully it’s nothing discouraging. Another original, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, may suffer a similar fate but we won’t know until it’s out. As for Fena, I feel like I’d prefer to take a page out of the finale and just forget it all. And thankfully, that will be incredibly easy to do, which I doubt was by design.