Violet Evergarden: The Movie Brings Everything to an Emotional Close

The fourteen-episode Violet Evergarden TV series is a visual and emotional masterpiece of animation—and easily the best anime of 2018. The new feature film, Violet Evergarden: The Movie, brings the tale to its final, tear-jerking conclusion.

[Note: this article contains spoilers for both the Violet Evergarden TV series and Violet Evergarden: The Movie]

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Violet Evergarden is the story of a former child soldier learning to understand the last words her commander said to her: “I love you.” By becoming a ghostwriter in a post-war era, Violet has helped numerous people convey their feelings to those they love—and in the process learned what those last words meant. Unfortunately, she’s also come to understand that everyone believes her commander, Gilbert, died in the war, despite no body being found. While this information wounds her deeply, she decides to still hold out hope that this is not the case, even as she lives on without him—helping others through the power of the written word.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie picks up a few years after the events of the series (and after the events of the spin-off film, Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll). Violet has continued to work over the years, easily outshining all her contemporaries. Even now, business for her is booming. However, it’s plain to everyone that their work will soon become little more than a novelty before fading away into memory. With rising literacy rates and the invention of the telephone, ghostwriters like Violet and her companions are simply no longer needed. Sooner or later, they will all need to move on.

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However, that’s something Violet is incapable of. The years have done nothing to lessen her obsession with Gilbert. As he taught her how to be human, it’s impossible for Violet to forget about him—lest she ignores the very core of her being. Worse yet, she is plagued by PTSD—not of her actions on the battlefield but of her time spent with Gilbert and the emotions she was unable to understand at the time.

In a very real way, her entire life is built around maintaining and exploring her connection with him. Every letter she writes for someone else—i.e., everything she learns about love—helps her better understand what she meant to him and what he meant to her. So it’s no surprise Violet is a workaholic and rather antisocial. She works or stays in her room—not usually going out unless invited by one of her coworkers. On her rare days off, she spends them taking on Gilbert’s responsibilities—like visiting his mother’s grave—growing closer to him in that tiny way.

And then comes word that Gilbert is still alive.

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Of course, this sends Violet into a near panic. She has so much she wants to say and so much she wants to know. She is emotionally overwhelmed. But when Violet arrives to meet Gilbert, he turns her away—refusing to even look at her.

While Violet was found by allied soldiers and returned home, Gilbert was taken to a local, formerly “enemy,” hospital and was lost in the system. After adapting to having only one eye and arm, he began helping his fellow patients—never revealing he was on the other side in the war. When that work dried up, he wandered around before eventually settling on an island filled with vineyards where the entire young male population had died in the war. There he became a teacher to the fatherless children and a field hand for the aging population.

Gilbert’s problem is that he was never meant to be a soldier. He regrets everything he did in the war and all the suffering he caused. His life since the war has been his self-imposed atonement. He may have not made these specific children fatherless but he is determined to do what he can to make up for his part in the war.

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Of course, it’s not like he had to fake his death to do this. The reason he chose to never correct the assumption he was dead is entirely because of Violet. In Gilbert’s mind, Violet is his greatest sin. While he claimed she was a normal girl and berated his brother at the idea of using her as the weapon she was made to be, he still had her fight by his side during the war. Even as he worked to teach her to be human—even as he fell in love with her—he nonetheless relied on her to do the killing he could not. This hypocrisy tears at his soul still.

Knowing second hand that Violet has made a life for herself since the war, his conclusion is an understandable one: she is better off without him.

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What he doesn’t understand is that she has grown in his absence—grown enough that while she wants to be with him with every fiber of her being, just him being alive is enough for her. She knows that there is good she can do out there in the world and will continue to do that, no matter if he will meet with her or not.

So she writes a letter to Gilbert, explaining her feelings and the person she has become before leaving to return to her life.

While Gilbert may think what he did to Violet was unforgivable, she doesn’t see it that way. His feelings—the love he showed her when she was incapable of understanding it much less responding to it—laid the foundation for who she has become. But more than that, his words—his confession of his love for her—is the reason she is more than just a mindless soldier. Without his so-called “hypocrisy” she would have lived and died as the tool she was raised to be.

And all this ties back to one of the main themes of the overall story: the power of the written word. A simple letter is able to convey her true feelings in a way she is unable to do in person. Even in the emotional moment when they finally meet face to face. All she can do is cry: she can’t even get out the words “I love you” no matter how she tries. Yet, he knows. She wrote it all down and her feelings have been conveyed.

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The continuing power of words is likewise explored in the film’s framing device, which follows Daisy, the granddaughter of Anne (from episode 10 of the series), in the days after Anne’s death. Finding the 50 years of birthday letters from Anne’s mother before her untimely death, Daisy is overcome by the need to find more about the ghostwriter behind these letters as a way of dealing with her own grief.

Over the course of Daisy’s journey, we see that even decades after the disappearance of ghostwriters, the words Violet wrote continue to help people—even if she as a person is almost entirely forgotten. There is no greater legacy she could hope for.

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