English Dub Review: Kakuriyo -Bed and Breakfast for Spirits- “Taking a Walk with the Master in the Rain”

Taking a walk would be a much better use of time than watching this episode.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Aoi finds that her bed and breakfast, “Moonflower”, is in a bit of financial trouble, and realizes she needs to find a way to meet the costs of running her business. She finds a new opportunity in making bento boxes for a prolific writer staying in the area and finds that her efforts might not be for anything after all.

Our Take:

Kakuriyo as a show has gravitated towards the center of the quality scale for me, existing as a comfy, somewhat lukewarm show that rests at around a 5 with the occasional spike in quality. Unfortunately, this episode, premiering a little over halfway through the show’s first season, is an unabashed disaster. It fails to live up to the level of quality set by the previous episodes, and dives deep to find a new low for the series thus far. Not just bad, but bordering on unfinished.

The plot starts off reasonably enough, with Aoi being in a spot of actual danger with her bed and breakfast not doing well. This conflict kicks off the plot for the rest of the episode, but is soon out of sight and out of mind as Aoi continues going about her meandering kitchen duties. Scenes move in an eclectic fashion, with Aoi seemingly just talking to whomever is nearby to deliver ceaseless amounts of exposition; the bread and butter that allows this episode to its 22-minute mark while being as interesting as a can of room temp Diet Coke. Dialogue is choppy, and deliveries are…weird. Listening to Aoi go on and on with her relentlessly flat voice gives me flashbacks to watching those horrible 4kids dubs that dominated the Saturday morning cartoon fare available at the time. Gnawing, melancholy, and embarrassing to watch; the kind of voice acting that would make anyone in passing wonder why people take this medium with any kind of seriousness. Out of respect for the voice actress, I would chalk this up to more of a dialogue/character/direction problem than anything else. Terrible scripts make terrible performances.

Also of particular note is the 2nd act purgatory that has Aoi and the master engaging with the delightful tedium of eating hard boiled eggs at a hot spring. This scene goes on and on, forcing awkward romantic dialogue that leaves me completely baffled as to how I’m supposed to feel about these two. Is she in love with the master or a captive of circumstance? Furthermore, if she is in love, my reaction to such a development is less “True love finds a way” and a lot more “Stockholm Syndrome.”

All of this is underscored by animation that is not only bad, but practically nonexistent. I think for something to be considered an “anime”, there must be actual movement, but this definition must not have reached the ears of the animators for Kakuriyo, because a good 70% of all the scenes in this episode are nothing more than two motionless stills “Fish mouthing” their lines to each other. Its as if the showrunners took a look at the storyboards they had made for this episode and said, “Let’s just leave it like that”, leaving this episode as little more than a badly dubbed animatic.

This is professional work done by a professional studio, yet I’ve seen Youtube animations, student work and fan work with more heart and effort demonstrated than this milquetoast piece of half-animated porkslop. Go to bed, Kakuriyo. Would you please?