English Dub Review: Kakuriyo -Bed & Breakfast for Spirits- “A Black Ship Has Arrived from the Southern Land”

This week: Tenjin-Ya gets invaded by bad CGI.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Tenjin-Ya is visisited by a spirit who looks like a young girl, accompanied with her giant CGI boat and staff from Orio-ya, which she i the owner of. Turns out, this spirit is actually more powerful than the master of Tenjin-Ya too, since she is the founder of both of these inns and has power over both of them.

She decides to recall the two spirits who were staying here, as well as order Ginji to come back to Orio-ya with her. Naturally, this upsets Aoi, who isn’t happy to see her friend be spirited away after all they’ve been through. In a desperate gambit, Aoi summons Nobunaga, the dog mascot of Orio-ya to her side to try and bargain for Ginji’s return. This is a futile move, however, as Aoi is quickly spirited into a trance state, where she recaps everything that has happened to her at Tenjin-ya so far.

When she awakes, she’s on the boat along with Ginji. As she looks out over the flying boat to her destination below, she stares into the belly of the beast: Orio-ya, Tenjin-ya’s greatest rival.

Our Take:

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s an ugly CGI boat! Here to deliver the long-awaited payoff to the many little mysterious peppered along Aoi’s journey through Tenjin-Ya. Except, not really. This week offers little in terms of story content, rather it embraces that most hated sins of the anime world: the dreaded recap episode.

Things begin well enough, with the founder of Tenjin-Ya doing nothing short of kidnapping Genji to go work at her other inn. For all the crap I give this show, I have to acknowledge when it does some decent storytelling. The loss of Ginji actually draws some emotion out of Aoi and, I imagine if you’re a fan of this show, the viewer. Even more, Aoi actually exercises some agency over the story by kidnapping Nobunaga the dog as payback for losing her friend. A turn of fortune is something this show has been desperately needing, and it almost looks like the episode is going to go somewhere interesting.

That is, until, at the 12 minute mark, the episode takes a twist for the lazy. Aoi decides to recap the entire series thus far in a voiceover monologue, focusing on the people she’s met and the things she’s learned. The questionable thing about this is not just that its a recap episode, but the fact that the recap occurs in the middle of an otherwise decent entry into the story. Typically, a recap episode is used to bring new viewers up to speed in a long-running series where going over all the “required viewing” isn’t convenient. But in a show like this, doing a recap in the middle of an episode only pisses off long-time viewers, while not doing anything for new viewers, who wouldn’t watch halfway through the episode to get to the recap, rendering it pointless.

If I had to speculate, it probably comes down to production problems. Perhaps in an effort to buy time to make more episodes, the animators have phoned it in with a recap episode to push their deadline another week. Its not at all unheard of, but nothing people like to see.

I’ll concede that the music combined with the editing makes a nice little montage to tug at the ol’ heartstrings, if you’re into this sort of thing. Perhaps next week will bring a satisfying conclusion to this new twist in the story.