English Dub Review: Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan “Episode 4”

Finally, it seems like someone decided to care about this thing.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Ekoda-chan fears dying alone this week. She considers the fact that she feels alone, even when she’s with her boyfriend Maa. This normally doesn’t bother her too much, but she has been watching and reading various forms of media about love and realizes that her current ‘relationship’ definitely leaves something to be desired in the emotional support realm. While she feels as if the sexual portion of her arrangement with Maa is working fine, as of now, she wants a deeper commitment.

Soon after, she learns that Maa has broken up with his long-term girlfriend. Ekoda sees this as her opportunity to move into the position of Maa’s main squeeze, but he disagrees. The two of them get into a fight wherein Maa emotionally manipulates and tricks Ekoda. He refuses to be her boyfriend because she’s also sleeping with other people, but Ekoda is only doing so because Maa refuses to get serious about them. This deeply upsets Ekoda, but Maa claims that she has no right to be upset, as she’s the one who brought up the issue. Ekoda ends up staying with him, her life of (sometimes) quiet desperation becoming a little more desperate.

Our Take

After four episodes, I have determined that the animated portions of Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan episodes take on two forms. They either follow a singular event in Ekoda-chan’s life (usually centering on her relationship with Maa) or they are mile-a-minute bag-of-gags style variety segments. I’ve come to prefer the latter. The show is so short already that I’m desperate for any purchase by which I can actually sink my teeth into some story. Given that criteria, episode four is definitely my favorite so far.

For one thing, the dubbing issues were definitely the least numerous this week. This story doesn’t really rely on any specific cultural knowledge that can be lost in translation. It’s the age-old story of ‘he’s just not that into you’. It’s told with understanding and sympathy for our protagonist, but it remembers to be funny and madcap when it needs to be. This episode seemed like it provided a lot more attention to detail than any of its predecessors.

This was confirmed for me when I reached the interview portion of the episode with director Mochizuki Tomomi and Ekoda-chan voice actor Chiba Chiemi. While the previous three episodes have mainly been about their key talent’s reticence or lackadaisical attitude toward both the source material and the recording process, Tomomi and Chiemi provided detailed descriptions of the joys and challenges that came with working on the project. It was wonderfully refreshing to see someone who actually cared about the art they were working on in this series.

This abrupt change of attitude led me to wonder if the overwhelming disinterest in the interviews caused their packaging to change. The interviews are called ‘naked chats’ (after Ekoda, who is naked in each episode) and are supposed to be unvarnished truth about the recording process. It is very rare to hear filmmakers and actors badmouthing their own projects, so what was it about this forum allows that to happen? And one can only wonder, in a chicken or the egg sort of way, if the naked chats were presented to these filmmakers or if they were only named that after whatever loosening effect Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan had on these men’s tongues was made apparent in post-production. Either way, the excessive disinterest in the show’s short-form animation had grown tiresome and a change of pace was in order.

Tomomoi actually talks about things that he added because the show was so short. He made sure extra care went into the backgrounds and sound effects, in a way that he could never have during a half-hour show. He exemplifies what these shorts could be if approached with the right attitude: a laboratory for experimentation. Whereas usually, I feel as if I’m only getting a phoned-in version of a director’s usual style, with this episode, I felt as if I was watching an artist develop.

That said, Tomomoi is far from perfect. Again, he shows his biases by admitting he doesn’t really understand Ekoda-chan. Did this production company not pick a single female director? Are there just so few in the anime business? Either way, this furthers my suspicion that I am getting the straight man’s take on Ekoda. Cheimi expressed a fondness for Ekoda’s sister, and a good friend of hers was mentioned as well, but these are characters that have had less than a minute of screen time combined. Maa, by contrast, has had two entire five-minute segments about him. While I have no doubt that Maa is an integral part of Ekoda’s universe, I don’t think his prominence is a coincidence.

Cheimi put something else into perspective for me this week. I’m not sure how many of Ekoda-chan’s voice actors really understand her. It’s one thing for Ekoda to live a very different lifestyle than the successful actresses who play her, but every week, the voice actress has admitted to not knowing why Ekoda makes the choices that she does. It really doesn’t end up mattering much, as an American voice actor (whose name I was unable to find on the show’s page or via cursory Google search) dubs all of the lines, but this disconnect probably deeply informs the Japanese performances.

This episode is a challenge, because—barring a female director—is as good as the show is going to get. An engaging short coupled with a director and actor who actually have insightful commentary on the creation of said short. This leaves me with a dilemma. I refuse to reward a five-minute show that contains twenty minutes of filler per episode, but this was an entertaining watch. My split the difference, then, is going to be that I won’t grade this episode as if it were one-third of a typical episode of anime, but I’m not just going to evaluate the animated section. It may be arbitrary, but this is still pretty uncharted waters, in my opinion.