English Dub Review: Kakuriyo-Bed and Breakfast for Spirits- “I Should Not Forget My Promise to the Ayakashi.”

This week: plenty of flashbacks and a sassy spider spirit.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This week on Kakuriyo, Aoi spends some quality time with Akatsuki and his sister, Suzuran. As she tries to nurse Akatsuki back to his full spirit, Suzuran shares the history of her and her brother’s relationship with Aoi’s grandfather. From her stories, Aoi finds a closeness with who her grandfather was, and the life he lived taking care of Ayakashi in the spirit world.

Our Take:

This week’s rendition of Kakuriyo showcases some of the show’s biggest strengths and weaknesses. Aoi’s time with Suzuran is certainly the highlight of the episode, displaying some pretty good writing and dialogue scenes that are genuinely enjoyable and warmhearted. The story is really starting to take shape as Aoi starts to find her story following in the footsteps of her grandfather’s, which works as a pretty nice framing device for the show to hopefully continue with. It’s taken its time to get here, but Aoi’s connection with her grandfather and the inherited connection she feels with the Ayakashi therein is a nice payoff of character growth to a character that has felt somewhat bland so far.

While this creates some comfy viewing, I can’t say its anything particularly notable compared to other anime. You won’t find anything creatively interesting here, as the many dialogue scenes are shown in a simple, vanilla fashion that gets old pretty quick. Not to mention, the voice performances are still not where they need to be to get me immersed in a series like this; one can really feel that the voice actors don’t have their hearts in it, compared to something like My Hero Academia, where each performance is dripping with energy and emotion. This stiffness is further emphasized by a physical stiffness of the animation. So many scenes are completely still saved for the barest of mouth movement, and that’s the sort of thing that takes me right out of the story. The final “action” scene that finishes off the episode doesn’t exactly hit the mark when it comes to animation either, feeling like more of an afterthought than anything else.

I will give out some bonus points for the music I’ve heard so far, however. The gentle piano score threaded throughout the emotional scenes between Aoi and Suzuran serves the show very well and keeps my heart in the right place.

If I was to put into a sentence, it would be that the story of this episode of Kakuriyo is actually pretty solid, but its the pitiable execution of that story that really holds this show back. I can see what they were going for, I can know consciously that this is supposed to be an episode with lots of emotional impacts, but the artistic foundation that is supposed to make me feel the said impact is simply not there. A show cannot get by on soft piano and cherry blossoms alone.