English Dub Review: Sakura Quest “The Marionette’s Banquet”

“Truth in Television” is an oxymoron.

Spoilers Below

The Founding Festival is set for a real boom. It’s the night before, and the Kingdom of Chupakabura already has a bunch of tents outside, campers waiting for the festivities to begin! Even the bus driver needs backup, driving the droves of people from the train station and airport to Sakura Pond. As the festival opens, the stalls and lawn are full of people, over six thousand! That’s the Kingdom’s yearly visitor goal for the year in a single day! Some of the vendors are providing boxes printed with tourist maps, a concept that Ririko came up with. With so many sales for the vendors and so many visitors to the kingdom, everything seems to be coming up roses! Now all that’s left is the main event that Yoshino planned: The Manoyamania Trivia Quiz! With the cordoned off area packed to the gills with people, it looks as if it’s a total hit! Every one of them took a flyer with 500 yen worth of coupons.

But then, disaster hits. You see, Ptolemaios, the band hired by Northern Living TV to play on the other side of the pond, had been having technical difficulties. The show they were going to play kept getting pushed back later and later. Just as the first question gets read off, an announcement is made: the show is starting now! Suddenly, a swarm of tourists leaves the cordon, and head across the way to hear the band. Then, Ptolemaios and their fans get so loud, that nobody can hear to quiz questions! They manage to struggle through it. In the end, however, not much changed for the town. Only twenty of the one thousand coupons handed out were used, most often by the people of the town. The festival and its incentives didn’t bring anybody back to the town. Worse yet, the television show completely misrepresented the event. It played the whole thing off as if it were just a concert, and really made the town itself look bad. Yoshino realizes that despite the number of people that came, her work as the Queen for the last six months hasn’t helped anybody in Manoyama, and certainly hasn’t revitalized the town. She boards the bus, headed for the train station… and home.

Anybody else feels like this whole thing wouldn’t work out? Sure, you can get a bunch of people into the town with a concert, but are you able to get them to come back? I liked seeing the producer, Amamiya’s, reaction to how his show got edited by the station. He wanted to show the town as it really was, and what those girls were doing. The station, desperate for ratings, cut out all the real stuff. He was furious and heartbroken. It’s nice to see he cared that much. It seems like Mrs. Oribe predicted this outcome, however, as she was blase about the whole thing as it started up. Then, in a rare moment of warmth, chose not to chew Yoshino out for the failure when she saw evidence of it. She just let the girl have what she thought was a victory. Perhaps she sees that Yoshi has developed a heart for the town, and this isn’t just a job for her anymore. That makes her failure only that much more hurtful. I like how this episode used the station’s own self-interest, putting it at odds with the intended purpose of the event in insidious if unintentional, ways. It was true to life and how these things end up happening.

The animation in this episode was well executed. I paid close attention to the scenes where we saw Ptolemaios performing, and they did a good job at least having character hand movements time with the music being played. Most anime wouldn’t even care about that. I can’t speak to how their hand positioning is to actually play those notes, but it looked about right. Maybe the animators studied footage of the band that actually played the music. I’d be very pleased if that were true, but even as much as they did made the scene feel right. Characters were expressive throughout, and there weren’t any errors that I could see. Voice acting was… not bad. I really couldn’t feel one way or the other here. Yoshino (Alexis Tipton) was the most expressive here, but I didn’t feel like that amounted to much. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by too many anime with good voice acting. Oh, well. I give this episode eight train tickets home out of ten.