Anime Review: Heaven’s Official Blessing Season One

Heaven’s Official Blessing

Studio: Haoliners Animation League

Genre: Historical, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery

Streaming: Netflix

Heaven Official’s Blessing (known in its original language as Tian Guan Ci Fu), is a donghua or Chinese animation, and one of the first to be added to Netflix’s ever-expanding catalogue. Donghua generally don’t have a huge reputation, often forgotten next to the much more popular Japanese anime shows. I personally have only seen one other so far (Fog Hill of Five Elements, which was my pick for the best-animated show last year) but Heaven Official’s Blessing comes with something of a reputation. The series originally came from a web novel series by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, who also penned the extremely popular series The Untamed (its live-action counterpart is also on Netflix as it happens). Both series are historical fantasies, featuring romances between the two male leads, and whilst I haven’t read or watched The Untamed yet, I know a lot of people who absolutely adore it.

So what is Heaven Official’s Blessing about? The series follows Xie Lan, the former crown prince of Xianle who ascended to heaven after his death. Fast-forward eight hundred years however and his reputation amongst the other heaven officials is rather ruined after his repeated failures in the mortal realm. Returning back down to earth to investigate rumours of a ghost who is kidnapping brides, we follow him as he uncovers the true mystery behind it all and the true identity behind this Ghost King.

The series itself is essentially a mystery with the story being split into arcs where Xie Lan and his companions investigate strange happenings and uncover the truth behind them. There’s also a liberal dash of horror and comedy (the latter sometimes falling a little flat), and the romance between Xie Lan and Hua Cheng is beautifully understated whilst being totally believable. The most I knew about this show coming in was that it was a romance, so I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out it had a really solid story as well, the world building, in particular, being one of the best I’ve seen in a fantasy series in a while. I genuinely cared about the side characters involved in the mysteries and Xie Lan as a protagonist was exceptionally likable with his pleasant demeanour. The series sits at about twelve episodes with a special although the last few episodes do suffer from having a slightly reduced run-time. It was definitely one of those shows that I was sad to see end as I was itching to find out what happened next. Thankfully, it’s already been confirmed to have a second season in the works.

The art and animation in this series too are absolutely spectacular, rivaling heavyweight anime Fate/ Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works with how gorgeous it is. It’s probably one of the best-looking shows I’ve seen all year and the production clearly invested a lot of love into it.  The soundtrack too is stunningly beautiful, as are the camera angles used, which really add a lot to the feeling of the scenes.  The pacing is a little off in the first few episodes initially – the first episode ends rather abruptly for instance, but after a little research I found out that this was actually a Netflix choice to split the first episode into two parts, so the abrupt cut is on the part of the streaming service rather than the original makers. It took me a little while to warm up to the comedy in the show as well – it was a bit ill timed in the first episode for instance, but after a while, the show seemed to find its stride with it and it was balanced better with the dark storylines to add some moments of relief. At times as well, the story can be a little hard to follow I found, mainly when getting into the details of the mysteries – something which I feel was perhaps something that got lost in translation between the novel and the animated series. Overall however though, the mysteries are very intriguing and I was genuinely invested and surprised by a lot of the reveals in them. There was a surprising amount of depth shown regarding the people involved in them, more so than with the main cast at times. Thankfully the characters of Xie Lan and San Lang get their own time to develop more after the first few episodes though I did find that the recurring side characters of Fu Yao and Nan Feng were often easily interchangeable and weren’t able to develop much. The romance in question is definitely more of a slow burn, and I really liked seeing the interactions between the two.

Heaven Official’s Blessing is an engaging beautiful series, steeped in mystery and fantasy – don’t let the romance tag on this put you off as you’ll be missing out on a truly dark and interesting show. I for one am eagerly anticipating the second series of this one and in the meantime… guess I’ll check out The Untamed.