If you’re a fan of exceptional animes that focus on telling an immersive story bordering on slipstream, you’ve probably heard of Wolf’s Rain. This magnificent and exemplary specimen of what quality entertainment should be like.

It’s no surprise that this show had a stellar crew behind the production, gathering together people from noteworthy projects such as Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop. But what really drew me to this series was the fact that Yoko Kanno had a hand - a really big hand - in the production.

I’ve always been a huge Yoko Kanno fan since I first heard her work with the Seatbelts for Cowboy Bebop, and I’ve been hooked. But Kanno’s work in Bebop was different from her work in Wolf’s Rain (by a mile, at least). While Bebop’s scoring tended to focus on the active strains of blues and bebop jazz, Wolf’s Rain focused more on real compositions that told stories within themselves, stories of love and hate and despair and melancholy. It was deeper, darker, and that added to the steampunk-gaslamp gothic appeal that Wolf’s Rain had.

Here’s the show’s opening sequence:

If you can get past the facts that it sounds like something you’d expect to hear from an 80’s industrial rock group (or that Steve Conte, the man in charge of the vocals, sounds a bit like Sting), Stray emanates a dualistic vibe of melancholy and a little bit of hope, fitting perfectly with the show’s near-apocalyptic theme.

Now, this show is something of an acquired taste. Some of the later episodes, admittedly, get boring, and if you have trouble accepting some of the realities presented in the story at face value, you’ll have a hard time accepting this series. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t good; in fact, the storytelling is so good that it’ll surprise you out of your shoes.

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