Hilda

“The Fairy Isle”, Season 3 Episode 8

What do I know about this series going into it?

Never heard of it.

Recap

We start with the opening credits. A blue-haired girl (I assume the titular Hilda) and a white-furred pet dog or squirrel run through a series of adventure-themed backgrounds with strange creatures, then climb a hill overlooking a city.

The episode proper begins. Hilda, the dog, and two friends get off a train in Tofoten. One friend, David, wants to stop by Hilda’s aunt Astrid, but they’re not going to because Astrid will stop them from going on their latest adventure.

Meanwhile, an old woman (Astrid?) opens her front door to find the Greendale Human Being. He wants to borrow a set of clothes.

That’s just disturbing.

Meanwhile, a younger woman in a different house makes a phone call but there’s no answer. Whoever she wanted to contact, she’s going to go find in person instead. She tells a tiny flying elf and a hairball with a giant nose that they’ll have to stay home and “think about what you’ve done”.

Back to the kids. They’re in a forest outside the city. Hilda is going to have to go “into” something that David is too scared to even approach. It is a giant mound. There used to be holes in the ground here, Hilda says, but someone must have filled them back in. There are sticks poking out of the ground; Hilda pulls one out, which makes the older and younger woman across town gasp without knowing why.

Having pulled up all of the sticks, Hilda is satisfied. She’ll be okay when she “goes in”, protected by a charm that Astrid gave her. She climbs up the mound and down the other side. What did this accomplish? Nothing. But now she walks around the mound and finds herself in a misty, twilight parallel world. David doesn’t want to accidentally wander into said world, so he uses a rope to tie himself to a tree stump.

Meanwhile, the young woman’s car dies, so she continues on foot.

Hilda is wandering aimlessly through the mist, but she can’t find what she’s trying to find. It must be the charm, protecting her too much. So she breaks it, causing more pain to both women back in town. Suddenly, the mist opens before Hilda, leading her to a shore. A boat with a guidelight approaches by itself, and Hilda gets in; the young woman, walking through the forest, can briefly see the guidelight too.

The boat gets caught in a net, after which a skull attached to a rope comes flying out of nowhere, bites onto the side of the boat, and begins reeling the boat in. The dog (named Twig) bites the rope in half to stop this, and falls overboard due to the sudden stop. Twig is rescued by “Victoria Van Gale”; the skull is working with or for her, and she is working with Hilda’s father, Anders.

You gotta have blue hair.

Turns out the reason Hilda came here was to rescue her father. He and Victoria are experts on this netherworld, but not enough to know there was a way in through the fairy mound in Tofoten. They’ve built a fortress to protect themselves from floating spy-jellyfish that summon “the others” if they spot intruders. How did Anders get into the netherworld? He was attacked by a troll, and got yanked into the netherworld just before he was going to die (someone trying to save him, I assume). He and Victoria built a sort of radio to contact the outside world, and Hilda heard the broadcast, which is why she’s here.

Hilda stops him there and we are spared the cliched conversation. There is a God!

Hilda thanks Victoria and apologizes for being the reason the latter is in the netherworld, but Victoria isn’t upset; she loves the fact that she’s got a mysterious new world to explore. Inside her fortress is a giant ancient tower that acts as a sort of “receiver”, but they don’t understand how to work it. Hilda says this is Fairy Country, but Victoria wants to name the netherworld “Van Galea”.

While Hilda and Victoria are talking, Anders goes to repair the capsized boat. But when he rights it, a floating jellyfish was hiding underneath. It leaps upward and glows, summoning the “others”. Hilda and Anders run for the boat, but Victoria decides to stay behind with the skull.

Hilda’s mother, identified in captions as Johanna, arrives at the fairy mound to find Frida and David. She wants to dig Hilda out of Fairy Country immediately but the kids stop her.

Meanwhile, Anders and Hilda are rowing their boat frantically across the ocean, chased by two dementors.

When we later find out what these are, this will no longer make sense.

Hilda recognize them from her dreams. “Who are you? Are you fairies? Is anyone in there or are you just empty cloaks?” They reach the shore, close enough for her walkie-talkie to contact her friends. “Dig us out now!” she cries, but as soon as David and Frida’s shovels touch ground they get thrown backwards. Frida chooses a different method: she makes up a magic spell on the spot, apparently a dangerous thing to do, and casts it at the Fairy Mound to create a portal.

But whatever the “others” are, they’ve summoned a gale-force wind to prevent Hilda from getting anywhere near the portal. David, attached to his rope, comes through the portal and catches Hilda’s arm just as she’s about to get blown away. Hilda, Anders, and Twig make it back to the real world.

But where’s Johanna? When the kids wouldn’t let her dig, she went into the fairy world herself to retrieve Hilda. Hilda won’t accept that; she goes back into the portal to rescue Johanna, just before it closes. Anders starts digging but the fairy mound collapses from residual portal energy. Frida collapses too; there’s now no way into Fairy Country from here.

Meanwhile, in Fairy Country, Hilda climbs a staircase cut into a mountain and finds herself in the Mushroom Kingdom.

The flower in the bottom left makes you shoot fireballs.

Back in the real world, David and Anders arrive at Aunt Astrid’s, who is indeed the old woman (who looks more like Johanna’s mother than her sister). Astrid gives David the ingredients to a potion that will help revive Frida, then walks out the door and vanishes – presumably into Fairy Country.

Meanwhile, in the Mushroom Kingdom, Hilda hears a crying voice under a mushroom. It’s a child, who’s looking for her parents; her mother had sneaked off into the Fairy Kingdom and abandoned her. Based on the voice, however, I suspect this might actually *be* Hilda’s mother, somehow made younger. Especially as the child seems to know a lot about this area: “The island went into decline” and “All magical creatures came from here originally, but the fairies drove them away.”

“How do you know so much about this place?” Hilda asks. “I don’t know,” the child answers, which makes me more confident in my prediction, especially as Hilda never asks the child’s name. They begin running around and skipping and playing and the magic of the area makes Hilda forget about her mother briefly. They encounter fairies singing and dancing. Hilda joins in; the other child doesn’t. Hilda briefly sees the dementors again but they vanish.

Later that night, the two of them fall asleep on a flower that curls up to provide them with a blanket.

Meanwhile, at the fairy mound in the real world, Anders is digging and Twig is howling mournfully. Anders yells at Twig to stop, so the dog runs off to howl near Astrid’s house; this just causes David to yell out the window for him to stop too.

Hilda has a dream in which her mother turns into mushrooms and those mushrooms become wings on Hilda’s back.

Red Bull is made of ground-up mushrooms and ground-up Hilda’s mother.

She wakes up to see something feeding off of the other child. Hilda chases the thing away, but the child recognized it: it was her mother. Aunt Astrid arrives, and tries and fails to stop Hilda from flying away with the child on the back of a white furball-dog to chase down the child’s mother.

Hilda and her friend come upon a cabin. “I know this place”, Hilda says, and a dementor comes out. He removes his hood – it’s the child’s father, followed by the mother. They hug the child. “Johanna,” they call her, and the child turns into Hilda’s mother. I knew it!

They are Hilda’s grandparents, who abandoned Johanna when she was ten to come to fairy country. Aunt Astrid arrives; Johanna angrily accuses her of using fairy magic to make Johanna forget everything about her parents. I suspect Astrid isn’t a literal aunt (I do that a lot).

The grandparents use magic to show them the story. Two blue-haired siblings with pointed ears, Phinium and Astrid, are running through the woods. Phin sees a human girl, Lydia, playing a pipe and is enthralled; she accidentally sees him. They become fast friends, and Phin and Astrid visit the human world frequently – against the rules – to play with her.

Every time we see these flying furballs they’re a different color. Are they different species? Do they have different special abilities?

As they grow older, Astrid visits less and less while Phin stays in the human world to be with Lydia. Astrid tries to convince Phin to return, because the transition between worlds is getting harder, but Lydia is already pregnant with Johanna and Phin wants to stay with her permanently.

But the infant Johanna falls ill, and human medicine isn’t helping – it’s not a “normal” sickness. Phin and Lydia return to Fairy Country to ask a sentient island for help; the island agrees to remove the illness, as long as they give Johanna to the island ten years from now. With no choice, they agree. But ten years later the convince the island to let them go in Johanna’s place, leaving the child in the human world to be raised by Astrid. Astrid made Johanna forget her real parents existed so she wouldn’t come after them or carry the pain of losing them.

In the present, Astrid undoes the forgetfulness spell and Johanna remembers her childhood again. But now that the bargain with the island has been broken, none of them can ever leave.

Back in Astrid’s house, David is bringing Frida her medicine when he notices a photograph of Johanna and her parents on the wall that wasn’t there before.

On the island, Phin is making pancakes. Hilda: “Where do we get the ingredients?” Phin: “The island provides.” But as they’re walking to the picnic, Hilda notices the part of the island that is rotting again. I can already tell this will be the solution: She’ll solve the rot and in return the island will let them go. Hilda walks into the rotting area holding a fruit from the good part of the island, and the fruit immediately rots in her hand. Astrid stops her from going too far in.

All right, which one of you psychos wants to see rot?

The magic of the island makes fairies that live there forget their families and where they came from. But the grandparents know some tricks to keep their memories: There’s a secret place, a watchtower filled with fungus. It’s a signaler, the brother to the receiving tower that Victoria is in, and was used to abduct humans to the island from the mainland. But it doesn’t just pull people from the mainland; they can also spy on the human world. They activate it and see Frida and David looking for Twig. When Hilda first entered the “borderlands”, this attracted the grandparents’ attention, and through her they were finally able to use the tower to see the rest of her family: Johanna, Astrid, and Anders. They were the ones who rescued Anders from the troll, by pulling him into fairyland.

He was going to be eaten by a troll. So we brought him here to be killed by floating jellyfish instead. Much better!

Can they use the tower to go home? No, its only function is to take. Hilda is furious at their complacency: You might all want to stay, but my father and my friends are looking for us and we need to get back to them!

Frida and David finally find Twig. Frida uses magic to communicate something to Twig – they have a plan! Twig climbs on the roof of the house and howls; Frida uses her magic to make him impossibly loud so that Anders, digging at the fairy mound, hears him and comes running. I’m not sure what that accomplished.

Hilda’s going to talk to the island or whoever runs it, to convince it to let them go. The others tell her it’s impossible to reason with but she refuses to listen. “This place is a dream, nothing is ever new here,” she says. Her grandparents haven’t changed or aged since Johanna was ten. “Is that so bad?” Johanna asks. Is it not better to stay in a paradise where nothing changes, rather than live in the human world where you grow old and die?

Suddenly a gem appears in the sky. It’s the “deerfoxes”, some kind of magical creature that can travel between worlds. Hilda realizes: We can piggyback on their travel to go back to the real world!

We learn that Twig did this somehow. Maybe Twig isn’t a dog-squirrel but a deer-fox. That would explain the antlers.

Meanwhile, Victoria, who earlier saw her tower activate in response to the use of Phin and Lydia’s tower, manages to activate her own tower and briefly open a portal.

It took her less than ten minutes to figure this out.

The main characters are running through the mushroom jungle, trying to reach the deerfoxes’ lightbridge. The island keeps growing rotting fungus in their way to stop them; they need to run and stay ahead of it. Astrid stays behind, though; she has a plan. Is she going to trade herself for them?

As Hilda’s family run past, one of the mushrooms turns into one of the signalling flying jellyfish and begins to glow. That’s bad.

Astrid is in the rot cave that she stopped Hilda from entering earlier. She doesn’t request – she demands to exchange herself for Joanna. The island’s avatar does not take this well and does something to her mind.

Hilda’s family are almost at the lightbridge when they are surrounded by floating jellyfish. But the lightbridge finishes opening and dozens of deerfoxes come through, led by Twig. They charge and kick and stomp the jellyfish into submission.

Astrid is unfazed. The island is dying anyway, she says. “You have no need for new blood. Why are you stuck in your ancient bargaining ways of life for life?” But the island refuses to change its mind.

With the jellyfish gone, the island instead opens a fissure that prevents Hilda’s family and the deerfoxes from reaching the lightbridge. The deerfoxes easily jump over it, but Hilda and Johanna fall in. Suddenly they discover they can fly! Their fairy heritage kicked in just in time and they fly to the portal.

Where was my fairy heritage when I needed it half a dozen times over the last three seasons?

But the grandparents stay behind. And so does Astrid. So what exactly did Astrid’s bargain accomplish?

Hilda and Johanna reach the real world. And suddenly Johanna doesn’t feel so well: her old sickness is back. She collapses. And then… gets back up again. Hilda realizes: “Aunty Astrid did it! How do you think she did it?” Then the realization hits: Astrid traded herself for Johanna.

The Greendale Human Being – finally identified as a Pooka – is knocking on Astrid’s door. This time he wants to borrow a big wooden hammer and a pineapple. Hilda gives him the bad news: Astrid is gone. But suddenly the door opens. It’s Astrid! She invites everyone in except the Pooka.

“I tried to trade my life for your freedom,” says Astrid. Flashback: just as the island was about to accept Astrid’s offer, a portal opens and Victoria’s backpack gets tossed through, followed by Victoria. She had figured out how to use her tower to eavesdrop on Astrid and open a more permanent portal. She wants a better place to live than her fortress, and the island will provide investigative fodder for her scientific curiosity. It was Victoria that took Johanna’s place.

A montage. Victoria is on the fairy island with the furrball-with-a-nose we saw at the very beginning. The Pooka brings back all of the stuff that it borrowed from Astrid and in return Astrid willingly gives it a pineapple and a hammer. A series of other mystical animals – presumably ones from earlier in the series, including what I think is a troll – doing various things I don’t understand. There’s a parade, fireworks, a teleporting teenager, a flying talking electro-bird with Hilda riding on its back, a musketeer taking notes (my guess is a perpetually-stymied paranormal investigator), Anders bumping into what looks like his twin from a parallel universe.

There’s something supernatural going on around here, and I’m going to find proof!

Unresolved questions

• Why was the island rotting? Could anything have been done to save it? How long will it be able to maintain its state of unchanging paradise for those who live there before they are thrown back into the cruel outside world?

• How did Victoria use her tower to open a portal, and could Hilda’s family have learned to do the same with theirs? Will Victoria help Hilda’s grandparents escape the netherworld? Do they even want to?

• What exactly was going to attack Victoria and Anders on the mainland? Why were the jellyfish on the mainland if they work for the island? Or do only some jellyfish work for the island?

• How did Hilda’s grandparents chase her across the ocean if they aren’t allowed to leave the island? Did the fact that they can fly mean the island just couldn’t stop them, just as it couldn’t stop them from reaching the Lightbridge? Are they only staying voluntarily because they know Johanna would get sick again if they left? If that’s the case, why didn’t they warn Johanna she would get sick?

• What was happening in the netherworld 30-40 years ago that was making it gradually more and more difficult for Phin and Astrid to return to the human world? Why aren’t Hilda and the others experiencing the same difficulties?

• How does digging somebody out of the netherworld work? Why did it stop working?

• How did young Johanna know so much about the island? She’d never been there. Did she somehow collect information about it from afar? Why didn’t Astrid prevent her from learning about it if it was crucial she never go there?

• How secret is the existence of fairies and magic in the human world? I didn’t see Hilda making any efforts to keep Twig hidden while in town; is this a world where flying furballs and foxdeer are commonplace? If magic is completely unknown, is it a coincidence that Hilda and Johanna became involved with such things, or were they somehow drawn to it by their fairy blood and/or by Astrid’s doings and/or by Johanna subconsciously recalling her childhood?

Ratings

Story: 8/10. The story elements are fairly standard for the genre, but the extended runtime (almost 1:20:00) gave the show the opportunity to bend the arc several times in interesting ways before reaching the end. I did get a bit tired of the repetitive “I’ll take her place” trope and might have reacted violently had it happened so much as one more time.

And then the skull volunteers to replace her. And then Anders volunteers to replace the skull. And then the electrobird volunteers to replace Anders. And then the Pooka volunteers to replace the electrobird. And then the island volunteers to replace the Pooka. Problem solved!

Writing: 6/10. Good writing, but they could’ve done more to avoid telegraphing each twist before it happened (one of which is the fault of the directors, not the writers; see below). The only surprise was Victoria volunteering at the end; when Astrid opened her front door I assumed she had somehow convinced the island to change its ways.

They also could have explored a bit more the question of unchanging safety vs. freedom and adventure. It’s a classic theme in stories going back millennia – arguably to the Garden of Eden – and is only lightly touched on here. Hilda’s rejection of the gilded cage is quickly dismissed by her elders, chalked up to her being 13 years old, but then Johanna comes around to her point of view with almost no convincing. (Though I don’t know how much room there was for depth in this series’s version of the debate, given that in this case the gilded cage was illusory and falling apart.)

Production: 10/10. Beautiful animation, in a beautifully conceived world that is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli. Beautiful beautiful music that elevates and complements the show perfectly (UPDATE: in the week since writing this review I have been humming the track from the ending montage basically non-stop). They could have used voice modulation or something to hide the twist that the child was Hilda’s mother, but that’s not worth docking a point. I really don’t have a bad word to say about this. It was picture-perfect.

Characterization: 5/10. The minimum necessary to keep the plot moving. Hilda is your standard plucky protagonist; David is your standard scaredy-cat sidekick; I didn’t get to know Frida at all. All of Hilda’s family are noble and self-sacrificing. I would’ve liked to learn a bit more about the island’s motivations.

Clarity: 8/10. I was brought up to speed much faster than I expected. There is clearly a lot going on that I don’t know about, especially with the montage at the end, but I understood everything I needed to follow this episode’s plot.

Closure: 8/10. This clearly isn’t the end of Hilda’s adventures. But it’s a good end to a story arc: Hilda learns the secret of her origins and rescues her father; Johanna gets her memory back; Victoria finds a new land to explore. (This might be a good time to remind readers that the Closure rating isn’t a value judgment. Many many television series end with the protagonists setting out to embark on a new adventure, which almost always reduces the Closure rating but isn’t in any way a bad thing.)

Do I want to watch the series now?

I mean, it’s clearly not for me. But I’ll definitely recommend it to my kids, and I won’t say no to watching it with them.