English Dub Review: APPARE-RANMAN! “In The Dark”

Overview:

Appare and Kosame review their options.

Our Take:

Appare and Kosame are stranded in America, with the ship that took them there headed south, and them needing money to charter a ship back. Appare himself is fine, since he doesn’t have many attachments and only cares about machines, but Kosame has a family and wants to get back. Their variety of tricks (street fighting) does give them some levity, but it’s still not enough to accomplish what Kosame wants. As the ship captain says, he’d have to work for ten years to charter a ship back home.

There is one spot of hope: the Trans-American race, which crosses the whole country. Appare has the mechanical knowledge to make a car, even repair an existing one to be better than ever before, and Kosame has the fighting ability to keep them safe. It’s a potential option!

We also meet Xialian, who is an aide in car racing, but isn’t allowed to get behind the wheel herself. Women can’t drive, especially not race cars, so it’s automatically believed she’d just be there for repair work instead. She of course has so much talent, and is able to drive a car just as well as her peers, but she isn’t given a chance. She’s already accepted this assessment, but Appare giving her hope just might change her mind. I hope she does– she has a lot of good energy and talent to boot. She deserves more!

I wasn’t expecting this show to tackle heavier topics, but I’m honestly kind of glad that they are. The little boy, who’s clearly Native American, is just going around asking for help, but he is mistreated and ganged up on at the end because he’s a ‘savage’ and needs to be put in his place. One of the white men say that he doesn’t deserve to be there. Then there is Xialian, who is not allowed to be a racer because she is a woman (although that she is a specifically a Chinese woman no doubt has some part in that too). Racism and sexism are issues that were very prevalent back then, are still prevalent, and a lot of people like to pretend that they aren’t. It’s still early to tell just how deep they’re going to go into these issues, but that they are being tackled at all is pretty good, and I’m pleasantly surprised.

This is a good show! The animation is lovely, the story seems deeper than expected, and I liked all the characters. Xialian herself is standout to me, I really like her and I hope she gets a good spotlight in the upcoming episodes.