English Dub Review: Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan “Episode 10”

I assure you, they could not have led with this one.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

In what is easily the oddest episode of Rinshi! Ekoda-chan, even the very form of anime is eschewed in favor of a marionette-esque puppet show. After a brief introduction from a blue-skinned Ekoda-chan, she and a number of mystery head-shaped puppets all sing a song while a litany of other puppets is swung in and out of the frame.

Our Take

Rinshi! Ekoda-chan has found itself in a no-win scenario. Up until this point, I thought I had seen it all. Good anime with bad interviews. Bad anime with good interviews. Good anime with good interviews, and most of all, bad anime with bad interviews. None of it was enough to justify the endurance test that is trying to watch an episode of this show start to finish. Nothing makes me happier each week than seeing the artists draw a frame from the anime at the top of the episode because that means that Rinshi! Ekoda-chan is over, and I have six days to collect my thoughts before I have to start again. After multiple months of subjecting myself to this treatment, I thought that I had finally become numb to this intermittent ritual, but I was wrong.

What I saw today was fairly disturbing. Seeing severed heads sing a song while being attacked by puppets will do that to you. While I definitely didn’t think that anything I saw was effective, I was at least roused from my stupor to pay attention to Rinshi! Ekoda-chan this close to the end of the run. For that, they should be applauded. I’m not sure if there is anything else to applaud them for (though I don’t think that’s their fault), a win is a win.

To engineer these puppets, director Nagahama Hiroshi knew that he could not do the job on his own, so he commissioned “modern artist” Sasaoka Yuriko to fashion the puppets and to handle their operation during the episode. Then, Ekoda-chan actor Kobayashi Ai, along with a few other voices handled the singing. I have often complained about this show telling me about a performance that I could not properly evaluate because of Funimation’s English dubbing, but this takes that to an entirely new level. While Funimation is more than adept at translating dialogue from Japanese to English comprehensibly, I don’t believe I can say the same for song lyrics. I can’t say that nearly any of the song made sense to me, but I do admit that this could be more “modern artistry” at work in creating a more abstract song.

I’m also inclined to believe this because of what I was able to glean from the interview. Ai leads with the fact that she’s a diehard fan of Ekoda-chan, and Hiroshi goes deep into series lore to justify some of his choices, teaching me things about Ekoda-chan that I had never heard even whispers of from other directors and actresses. It feels like this was supposed to be a radical and interesting take on the source material from serious and knowledgeable fans of the franchise. It’s a pity then that the translation was so poor. Even the dubbing seemed to agree with this outlook on the project, as none of the words matched up with the mouth movements even a little bit. I assume this was to try to preserve some of the original script’s intent and would allow the dubbers some freedom in their translation, but if this is what they came up with, I can’t say it was for the better.

How many of these must there be before we can call this a failed project? The padding of this half-hour special into a season of content has been a largely useless exercise. This week may be the only time where the interview is justified, as I would not have had a single comprehensible word to say without it to provide some context, but it hardly makes up for the last nine interviews eating up over ninety percent of the show’s runtime. I’m finding it hard not repeating myself, but when they ask nearly identical questions each week, how else can one respond?

Luckily this ordeal is nearly over. Each week, the show tells us about a series of parallel universes which each host a take on Ekoda-chan by one of the series’ directors. There’s a small typo though in one of the intro narration pieces that’s repeated every week. They say the number of episodes twice, once they say there are ten, and once they say there are twelve. I think about this nearly every week. I’m not so hopeful last to think that I have washed my hands of Rinshi! Ekoda-chan. For one thing, ending on a note like this would be possibly the strangest thing in a line of strange things that this show has done, but more practically I saw the “next time on Rinshi! Ekoda-chan” preview. They promise a famous musician and a rambling conversation that even they wonder about the comprehensibility of.

Oh, Joy.