I miss episodic television. Stuff like The X-Files, Psych and Star Trek may have had their bits of continuity, but instead of trying to tell one large story like most shows do nowadays, they tried to utilize the medium to tell a bunch of different stories and make every single episode stand on its own merits as a piece of art, even if the quality varied a bit. Now everything has to be serialized extended movies or else face the dreaded "filler" moniker. Kino's Journey only solidified my feelings on the matter, it's an anime where every single episode is standalone, with only the main protagonists and general theming connecting them all. And unlike most shows I've seen, it feels like every single episode had weight.
Kino's Journey is an anime about the titular Kino and their talking motorcycle Hermes traveling the world and visiting its different villages. There's no real overarching story or end goal here, as the title suggests, this anime is solely about the journey rather than the destination. Each episode is its own story, usually about one of Kino's encounters with a town or group of people on their journey. The show feels like a series of fables, with each town lending its own unique commentary that can apply to our world, and each episode having some sort of message. There's a great variety in locations, storylines, and messages, But what really makes these stories so fascinating is just how ambiguous they are. Kino is a fairly impartial character, rarely getting involved in the conflicts of the towns they visit unless their life depends on it. The show usually just shows you the town, lets you take it in, and leaves you to make your own verdict. Most episodes even end with Hermes asking Kino some question about what they just saw, and they never have a concrete answer. Every single episode of Kino's Journey is thought-provoking and leaves you to come up with your own conclusion, and which made it so that every single episode left an impact on me in their own ways.
Though that's not to say Kino isn't an interesting or fleshed-out character because that's absolutely not the case. Kino may be impartial, but they're also introspective, curious, and complex. They're inherently fun and compelling to watch, partially because of their charmingly dry banter with Hermes, and partially because the moments they do break character and get involved are all the more striking, leaving you wondering what had changed. And of course, if you know me, you know I can't go without mentioning Kino's gender, or lack thereof. While I'm aware some translations (usually the English ones because of course they do) use "she/her" pronouns, I think it's pretty obvious that Kino's some degree of gender-nonconforming considering the fact that they explicitly dislike being gendered to begin with. Either way, I think Kino's one of the best GNC characters in a TV show period. They're an interesting character on their own merits, though several storylines also deal with the topic of their identity and ultimately make them even more fleshed out. Their backstory episode was a great example of that, entirely being about Kino running away from their conformist home and changing their name (which I ended up finding even more impactful when you notice the parallels to a trans person coming out).
Kino's Journey is also fantastic on a presentation level. The animation is soft and visually-pleasing, and the few fight scenes the anime has are impressively fluid. The cinematography is also striking, there's a lot of memorable shots and a great usage of shadows. There are even plenty of moments that completely shift animation style like a flashback in Episode 3 that's pretty much all shadows, and it looks fantastic. Probably my favorite thing about Kino's Journey is the muted sepia filter that's put over it, along with jagged lines that give off the impression of watching it on a CRT TV. It really gives the anime a vintage timeless feel that I absolutely adored. The voice acting is also pretty good, especially for Kino and Hermes. I don't think the anime would work as well if those two weren't as blunt as they are. As far as music goes, there isn't much of it, though that once again means the moments where there is music are all the more impactful. On the other hand, though, I adored the OP and ED themes. They're calming, beautiful, and perfectly for reflecting on what you had just watched.
Highlights:
A Tale Of Feeding Off Others: This entire episode is essentially a complex moral dilemma, and like much of the series, it leaves you to come to your own conclusions. Kino tries to help some stranded people by hunting and killing rabbits for them, only to learn that they happen to be human traffickers in a pretty dark twist (though Kino's first fight scene was cool). The episode deals with the moral weight between humans and animals, as Kino wonders if she should have spared the rabbits and left the traffickers to die, especially since by the end of the episode, pretty much everyone is dead.
Land Of Adults: As mentioned above, I thought Kino's backstory was fantastic and one of the best episodes of the series. It fleshed out Kino a lot as a character by really illustrating their struggle with identity, and despite it being a flashback, Kino's hometown fits in with all of the other weird locations in the anime, and its enforced adult surgery allows for a fascinating message about childhood and growing up. The "real" Kino is also a great character and his death hit really hard, and that scene where Kino drives away from their town on Hermes was incredibly well-executed.
Coliseum: Even Kino's Journey has a tournament arc. These two episodes were just a really fun time mostly because the anime has really great fight scenes, and a lot of the one-off characters like Shizu and the King were very memorable. But biggest of all was Kino actually interfering in a town by killing its king and creating a law so that the first-class citizens have to battle rather than the second-class ones. Once again, the anime leaves it ambiguous as to why Kino broke their code this one time, which makes it all the more interesting. Was it because they were forced to fight and were protecting themselves? Did they do it for every other traveler that would come to visit the town? Or did they do it because they genuinely cared for the town and its citizens?
A Peaceful Land: Damn, this episode was fascinating. A Peaceful Land is about Kino visiting two "peaceful countries" that achieved their peace by attacking a third country, justifying it with the claim that war is an inevitable fact of life and that humans have an insatiable craving for it. It's like The Purge but on a city-wide scale... and also actually good (I will never stop trashing that movie). A Peaceful Land was a chilling and very effective anti-war story, easily one of the bleakest episodes of Kino's Journey.
A Kind Land: Having Kino's Journey end on a story about Kino breaking their rule and getting attached to a town they visit seems pretty much perfect since their brief moments of bias throughout the anime was one of the most fascinating parts. I'm sure plenty of people have already talked about that gut-punching volcano twist, so I'm gonna talk about the small subtle elements that really made A Kind Land one of the best episodes of the anime. Stuff like the implication that Kino's birth (or dead) name was Sakura, the little bits of foreshadowing throughout the episode, it not being clear if Sakura knew about the volcano or not, and probably biggest of all, that micro twist about Kino's second gun. Where you may initially think A Kind Land took place after all of Kino's Journey, the reveal that Sakura gave them their second gun (as seen in Coliseum) implies that A Kind Land is actually a backstory, transforming the episode from a seeming inevitable to the event that was likely responsible for Kino's more morally gray impartiality in episodes such as Land Of Prophecies and A Peaceful Land.
Overall, Kino's Journey is one of those shows that just clicked with me. I immediately understood what it was going for and was perfectly content to go along with it. The episodic fable-like structure made for a show where every episode felt like a memorable story with its own ambiguous message, but the consistent tone and aesthetic as well as the fantastic main duo helped things remain cohesive.
5/5 Stars
Here's my ranking of its episodes:
- Land Of Adults (S1.04)
- A Kind Land (S1.11)
- Coliseum: Part 2 (S1.07)
- A Peaceful Land (S1.12)
- A Tale Of Feeding Off Others (S1.02)
- Coliseum: Part 1 (S1.06)
- Land Of Wizards (S1.08)
- Land Of Mechanical Dolls (S1.10)
- Land Of Books (S1.09)
- Land Of Prophecies (S1.03)
- Land Of Visible Pain (S1.01)
- Three Men Along The Rails (S1.05)
- Her Journey (S1.11)
No comments:
Post a Comment