English Dub Review: Kino’s Journey -the Beautiful World- “Field of Sheep”

SHEEEEEEEP!

Overview (Spoilers, but not of much)

Kino and Hermes take a drive on a breezy, clear day. Moving on to yet another country. Along the way, they happen upon a herd of sheep. Better steer clear! But, despite their attempts to move on without disturbing the bevy of bovines, the whole herd stampedes! In their flight from the evil sheep, the pair run into another herd. Surprise! They’re also evil! The charging wool factories nearly run Hermes off a cliff and into a ravine, but that gives him an idea. He doubts that these sheep actually want to hurt him, just Kino. If Kino climbs down to the bottom of the ravine, the sheep won’t follow. It’s too steep. Carrying just one suitcase, she descends. Problem is, she doesn’t have enough supplies to wait for the herd to just move on. She continues down the ravine and climbs back up, using her rifle scope to see if everything is clear. It’s quite a ways from the herd and Hermes, but she spots a jeep half stuck in the ravine. The driver hadn’t noticed the gap, got stuck in it, and broke his leg. When he got out, the herd had killed him. Now, he’s just a skeleton. Using the planks attached to the jeep’s sides, she drives it out of the ravine and hatches a plot. A plot of mass caprinecide! That’s killing sheep/goats. It’s a word. I think. It should be a word. Anyways,she plows through the herd, running over as many as she can in the jeep. Then, she uncorks the stopper on the barrel of gasoline in the bed of the truck. Using that, and a well-aimed bullet, she creates a wall of fire to keep the sheep away from Hermes, and goes all Call of Duty on those still inside the wall. She places a few planks, and makes a jump ramp to safety. Once on the other side, they continue to their destination. Turns out, all of the sheep were a part of an unethical sheep-fighting ring. They had been bred and trained to be as big, mean, and aggressive as possible. Then, some animal rights activists shut the practice down, so they just released the sheep on the eastern plains. They hadn’t seen any travelers from that direction in a long time either… why is that?

Courtesy: Funimation

As the episode, and the series comes to a close, Kino lays back in a hammock between two trees on a sunny knoll. She and Hermes wax poetic about the end of a journey, and the starting of a new one. This goes on for about five minutes until Kino finally falls asleep. After the credits, she wakes up, and they ride off again.

Our Take

Well, if you wanted a perfect illustration of how this anime wanted to adapt the source material, look no further than this episode. Despite Kino’s statements of not wanting to kill unnecessarily, when the writers want to demonstrate how cool she is, she flicks the switch and becomes a wanton murder machine. She kills and incites murder and mayhem simply because she doesn’t like the situation. There was a much simpler solution to this whole thing. The ravine didn’t go forever, as we saw later on. They could have very well just gone around the ravine and continued to the town, now with plenty of extra room to really floor it. Instead, they took a silly way around the problem, for the simple purpose of showing Kino as a badass, gunning down sheep with fire in the background. How do we show how much of a hardened killer she is? The entire battle, we color her BLOOD RED. This is not the Kino from the books or other adaptations. This is the new director’s vision of her as a warrior, not a traveler observing the world. The entire thing just jumped the shark along with the ravine.

Once this whole thing is over with, we spend the last chunk of the episode staring at Kino from the same long shot slowly zooming out. They talk and try to be philosophical, but it comes off so hamfisted that they might as well have just had the characters get up in front of the cameras and scream “HEY THE SHOW IS OVER! WE’RE DONE! DO YOU WANT A SEASON TWO! WE’LL DO A SEASON TWO IF YOU WANT! HOW ABOUT WE JUST ACT LIKE YOU SAID YES?” Except, we didn’t. I mean, I certainly didn’t. The writing has no concept of the value of subtlety. Never has. Rather than having Kino walk into a situation, and observe it for a while before it shows the positive and negative aspects of the society, the writers will demonize lines of thought that they don’t like, and later, have Kino find a way to wipe them out. What should be a peaceful show about philosophy, sociology, and government becomes the NRA’s wet dream.

When looking at the animation here, the team over-used CG animation, and lazily let it be obvious they did so. If a sheep did anything other than bleat, it was CG. Never was this more obvious than when Kino was running over them with the truck. They’d impact the front, snap to a standard “death” pose, and bounce off to the side. The jeep didn’t even run over any of them or lose momentum. They just bounced off the grill like we were playing Crazy Taxi on the PlayStation. You know, the original one. Seeing sheep fall off the ravine was similarly underwhelming, as they all had the same animation, just repeated in a different orientation to the camera. Even the traditional animation was lazy once we got past the sheep. The remainder of the show didn’t even give us much movement. Otherwise, it just gave us static shots and long voice-overs. Did they blow all their budget on the army of CG sheep?

The voice acting on this episode was experienced. The actors have a good handle on their characters and know how to make them believable. This also extends to the long voice-over segments at the end, which had a soothing warmth to the sound which almost made me want to fall asleep right along with Kino. If only it hadn’t gone on so long.

Score

Summary

The series goes out on a note that shows where the crew were focused, and it results in a silly farce of horrendous carnage and a pan-out shot you wished had ended long ago. It gets four burning sheep out of ten.

4.0/10