English Dub Review: Kino’s Journey -the Beautiful World- “Various Countries”

A smorgasbord of sojourns and strange people.

Overview (Spoilers)

Tonight’s episode of Kino’s Journey is made up of several small stories. First, a tale of some bandits. One is young, and the other is older and more experienced. The older one is teaching the younger which travelers are good prey and which are bad. First up, Shizu’s party. Meh, it’s a swordsman with a kid and a dog. Can’t stand up to a gun, right? The elder points out that not only are trained swordsmen tougher than they look, but the girl is holding a hand grenade, and the dog will smell them coming a mile away. Fine. Not them. How about Kino? A young boy- strike that, girl the bandit realizes- by herself. What can one girl do against the two of them? The elder points out that if she’s traveling alone, that’s because she CAN travel alone. She’d probably be scary. The elder bandit then tells about the time he learned this lesson the hard way. He and his bandit buddies went after a couple of yellow beetles. The “couple” was Kino’s Master and prior student. The elder bandit was the sole survivor. He still has PTSD and a lazy eye from the incident.

In another country, Kino sits down for tea as an elderly gentleman explains the country’s Virtue Points system. For each good deed you do, you get points. For each crime, you lose them. Go into the negative, and you do time in prison. After hearing all the specifics, Kino and Hermes ask about a glaring problem they see. A person could do a bunch of good deeds and have enough to do something terrible with no consequence. While the man extolls this as a feature of the system, allowing momentary lapses in judgment or singular good deeds to not condemn a person, he reveals his dark secret. He has done a dizzying array of good deeds, all for one purpose: to get enough points to let him kill someone. He had intended to kill Kino, but she proved too wary and had her gun on him the whole time. He leaves, and considers killing a baby, but instead blesses the child and tells it not to grow up to be like him: a man who couldn’t follow through on his dream.

Moving on, we have a brief moment where a group of chefs is looking for a wandering cook to make a signature dish for their country, so they can capitalize on it with travelers. A bum tip leaves them thinking that Kino is the chef. Hermes is surprised they survived her cooking. Fried chicken with equal parts peppers and vinegar. It’s pretty spicy. In the end, another traveler (the real wandering chef) makes an improvement on the recipe, and a mild version is born. Shizu and friends arrive in the town and are concerned when they find the dishes bear Kino’s name. We follow the three of them to the next town, one with giant statues loaded with wishes. Ti makes a wish while Shizu looks into immigration. People marvel at her wish’s generosity: I wish that everyone’s wishes would be granted. While even Riku praises her kindness, she reveals the meaning of what she wrote. She doesn’t believe the statues really grant wishes, and she wished they did. So does Shizu, since the place doesn’t accept immigrants.

For our final town, Kino arrives at a place her Master talked about often, saying she would never forget it. Paradoxically, she never gave any details of what it was like inside. Kino drives into the east gate… and out the west. However, three full days have passed! While she doesn’t remember what happened, Hermes does. The country is very reclusive and doesn’t want others to know what their country is like. However, they aren’t rude and want to give travelers a good time while they are there. As a compromise, they ask the travelers to submit to a drug that wipes their memories of being there. This is why Master never gave any details! No matter how good of a time she had, she couldn’t remember! This thoroughly bothers Kino, but at least Hermes is tickled. As they drive off into the sunset, they comment on the fact that they are driving through notes left by the series’ original author. Drive on to your dreams!

Our Take

This episode was very much in the vein of the series as a whole: a bunch of stories that, had they not had a consistent main character, would have been completely unrelated. This show is not about plot, or even character, development. Though some episodes do contain it, that isn’t what it is about. It has no plot. It is merely a collection of stories. This episode is more of the same, just smaller and more of them. None of them are really enough to sink your teeth into. They’re cute, but don’t touch the heroes in any way. We don’t even have much going on in these stories to discuss the ethical ramifications of what is going on. The closest we get is the virtue points system. Honestly, though, I’ve seen at least two shows recently where that is a thing, and it is a bit played out. Maybe it was a novel thing to talk about in the early 2000’s. It’s also very like this series to overplay its hand to prove its point. Having a guy that has dreamed of killing a person with no consequence since he was a child, who is socially adjusted enough to be loved by the populace and become president. It seems extremely unbelievable to me.

(Looks at recent events on CNN.)

Nevermind. It’s already happening, and there are multiple cases of it. Anyways, these stories, on the whole, have very little in the way of animation. They do have nice background art, though. We are also treated to some dramatic cinematography and art as the psycho president reveals his scheme. He looks really creepy and desperate, which amps up the drama of the scene. It really needed it, since the section was kinda dry. The animators continue to get mileage out of the CG models they made of Kino and Hermes, and we get quite a bit of them in the second half.

On the whole, the voice acting was rather mediocre throughout… until we get to the final story. Hermes was enjoying the sight of Kino losing her cool, and has decided to play around with her about it. Derick Snow worked with this, maximizing the charm, sass, and humor in the motorcycle’s lines.