For detailed explanations of my perceived issues with its pacing and character development:
https://anidb.net/anime/4403/review/10727
This was my feeling about it. It\'s very well made and looks great, but once Balsa and Chagum are together it just felt like wheel-spinning. And for all the care put into world-building, there was no tracking of time and space: Balsa would be out beyond the mountains and then back in the capital in the same episode. The two are on a journey, structuring the story around it would give a sense of progress.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
I watched the live action and it pretty much answers every concern I had with the anime and now I finally have an example of how to actually execute this story.
I’m going to go over everything that the live action does better than the anime
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR BOTH THE ANIME AND LIVE ACTION
Balsa’s flashbacks with Jiguro are shown at the very beginning to contextualize her decision to protect Chagum. There’s more adult things in here, but used with restraint, which lends the necessary edge to a story of this scope.
Having live action actors helps a lot. Having nuanced facial expressions, as well as the little things like small physical gestures does wonders to bring these characters to life. The anime characters are wooden in comparison. The tone here is also more natural and small bits of humor sprinkled in here and there enhances the characterization and character interactions. As a result, Balsa is more nuanced and sympathetic, much more than just a badass female character. Chagum comes across with more spunk and much less like a prim and proper goody-two shoes. Tanda is playful and can hold his own in scenes as more than just the male love healer/love interest.
The emperor is an actual villain. In the anime, the scenes with the emperor consisted of him sitting there and doling out orders apathetically, and when he finds out he doesn’t need to kill Chagum, he’s just like, OK. Here, the actor for the emperor brings an intensity to every scene, his eyes constantly wavering between nefarious scheming and straight-up madness. You couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t dispatch someone at the end of any given scene.
The pacing is twice as fast. The entire middle part of the anime, which the creators admitted to dragging out, is cut out entirely and nothing was missed. The large dumps of exposition in the anime are delivered more concisely. As such, everything has more impact, both in terms of plot development and character development. Along the same lines, the subplots were simultaneously condensed and made more interesting. They cut down the screen time for boring Shuga while also giving his plotline more tension by putting him in danger. Meanwhile, they turned the head star reader into a machiavellian court figure whose screen presence was magnetic. Torogai’s whole journey to deliver exposition is cut; Sagum’s plotline is cut, and Touya and Saya’s side stories were also cut.
They pulled off Chagum’s development where the anime couldn’t. The anime had Chagum settle down for a while to learn to be a country kid, only for him to still be a crybaby and receive his major character development later (which I wouldn’t even classify as development) which just makes him look stupid because we spend all that time supposedly seeing him develop, only for it to be a waste of time and in conjunction, that entire plotline was a waste of time. The live action cuts to the chase and lets Chagum know about his cruel fate early on leading to the same emotional scene that many said was the highlight of the anime. Only, in the anime, Chagum runs away because he thinks the palace would better protect him, like a little pussy, only for Balsa to chastise him for running away from those who love him. She tells him to come at her with the spear if he intends to do that. She ends up hugging him and telling her that she will do everything in her power to protect him. So the resolution for this whole thing is that Chagum should slip deeper into Balsa’s care, which makes him a weak character. In the live action, Chagum doesn’t run away to go back to the palace. He goes off to throw a tantrum because the only way he can deal with being utterly helpless in the face of a cruel and uncaring fate is to lash out in anger at fate itself. “Why me?” He keeps asking. I remember doing this exact thing when I was little and was faced with something that seemed unfairly thrown upon me that would cause me great pain and which I was helpless to do anything against. Balsa doesn’t comfort him at first; she just picks him up and carries him away. She tells him to go at her with her spear with the same anger that he showed before, and of course, he fails miserably. She tells him to not be afraid to live, and to affirm his life. Instead of hugging him, she tells him to get up and fight. Chagum cries on the ground, but picks up the spear and goes at her again. This guy is no pussy. He is physically weak, but mentally strong. This is what I’m talking about.
To supplement this, the entire time the live action makes the parallels between Balsa’s story and Chagum’s story a lot clearer. It’s apparent that Balsa also felt the same anger at her unfair circumstances as Chagum did, whereas in the anime was wiped clean of any of Balsa’s negative emotions toward her situation. Now, you can feel the raw emotions of young Balsa as she charges Jiguro with the spear again and again with a bloodied face, which she recalls as Chagum does the same thing in the present; Balsa’s connection to Chagum here is much more powerful. Furthermore, this version of Balsa didn’t just want to learn spear fighting to survive; she wanted to get revenge on the king of Kanbal for killing her father, and this just makes her all the more human and powerful as a character. When she tells her story to Chagum, Chagum decides that he also wants to do more than just survive; he doesn’t care what enemy he is fighting or even if he has an enemy to fight— he decides to be a fighter. This is him deciding that he was not simply going to be a victim of his circumstances, that he was not simply going to sit there and cry about what happened to him, that he was going to take charge of his own life and be a fighter. Compare this to the anime, where after Chagum hears Balsa’s story it’s not entirely clear why he wants to learn spear fighting. The reasoning he gives is that he wants to learn to defend himself, even if it’s only for a little bit, which is obviously a far cry from the fricking WILL TO POWER statement that live action Chagum made. Because the tentacle creatures are established as threats because they actually kill people here, the final battle is more intense.
Maybe the anime actually did this but was just too subtle about it for me to notice, but the live action caps off Chagum’s development beautifully by framing his decision to go back to the palace and assume his role as the crown prince instead of staying with Balsa, as him not running away from what needed to be done— taking the harder path as opposed to the comforting embrace of Balsa. This goes back to the theme of embracing his destiny, even if it’s hard.
In general, comparing the anime to the live action version makes it quite apparent that the creators of the anime went out of their way to tailor the story for kids, making it all prim and proper, and by doing so they held it back. A telling line is during the final episode of the anime when Torogai commends Chagum for finally speaking his mind, whereas in the live action Chagum straight up tells Saya that she’s not pretty in the first episode.
ENDSPOILERS
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Wasted Potential
Story and Characters:
Guardian of the Spirit follows a simple structure: there's this legend that says the prince of a kingdom is going to be the one to bring calamity to the kingdom, so he gets sent off with a bodyguard to go hide from imperial assassins. This structure serves two main purposes: 1) It allows for the development of the spoiled prince, Chagum, out in the real world. 2) It allows the bodyguard, Balsa, to become a mother figure and forge a bond with Chagum. Balsa is the easily likable, strong independent female warrior while Chagum is the INFP child— sensitive, cries easily, obedient, but has a strong heart.
Although the series only has two action sequences, they're two of the best fight scenes put to animation.
Message:
Thematically, the worldbuilding and lore is constructed to explore the importance of traditions (especially oral traditions) and learning to harmonize with nature. Nature manifests as both a destructive force and a neutral force that can be reasoned with if you learn enough about it. On a more personal level, the intertwined journey of Chagum and Balsa simply serves to portray the love between mother and child.
The Big Picture:
Bringing it all together, does it work? That is, does it succeed in entertaining you with the development of the Balsa and Chagum, the forging of their bond, and the presentation of its themes about nature? I would argue no. Initially it does, as the first three episodes or so are extremely engaging and sets up the rest of the journey well. However, as the creators of the show will tell you, they stretched out the middle portion of the novel, which slowed down the pacing too much.
I can easily cast these issues aside as minor gripes because the ceiling of this show is defined by Balsa, Chagum, and their relationship. The issue is that in all three of categories the starting points are already too close to the endpoint, leaving little room for dynamic growth from low to high. Balsa handles her motherhood with ease and Chagum is already an obedient child.
The highlight of the show in the second half, and my favorite part of the show, was Balsa's backstory with Jiguro. It is everything Balsa's journey with Chagum was not— it was fast paced, it was tense, there was a starting gap between father and daughter figures to be bridged, it had subtle affection between the two, and there was room for both of them to grow.
Despite all its flaws, its spirit still bleeds through. In theory, it's a sincere, empowering story that weaves culture, morality, tradition, motherhood, and spirituality into a potent emotional package. Hopefully, the original novel or the live action adaption is able to see this through where the anime failed.