Dragon Heart: Adventures Beyond This World

6/7/2025

"It was a mystical summer." Dragon Heart - Adventures Beyond This World, directed by Isamu Imakake is an anime about two teenaged cousins who find themselves in the afterlife after spotting a kappa along the edge of a river, chasing it, & falling in. That first brush with the unknown throws them into the underworld where questionable choices for soundtrack music are made (it suffers from the Toy Story lyrical redundancy) and an abundance of religious propaganda that *presents* as pantheistic. They meet a bunch of gods, get a dragon for a taxi, emotionally grow to fully stand by their convictions, & learn the value of family. Overall the message is wholesome until you get to the part where sex slaves are condemned to hell for feeling tormented about having been sex slaves. That r