English Dub Review: YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World “The Bond Between Parent And Child”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When this week’s episode of YU-NO begins, it’s been about a year since Takuya arrived in Dela Grante. A lot has changed. Takuya and Sayless have a daughter, for one thing. It’s a happy life with the three of them (and a pet/friend they adopt), until one day Takuya notices a group of riders harnessed at their house. He runs back to find them about to seemingly rape Sayless.

Our Take:

The Bond Between Parent And Child is a pretty interesting episode of YU-NO. It takes place in Dela Grante, the land that Kanna came from and the place where Takuya’s father may have supposedly visited. It’s a wondrous area filled with strange, bulbous plants that fart rainbows and impassible deserts to hot to survive. But Takuya isn’t really concerned about sightseeing or appreciating the strangeness of it all. No, he’s got something new to occupy his time: a kid.

That’s right, not only does Takuya have a cute little cottage now, but he also has a tiny tyke. I guess since he and Sayless can’t have long conversations, they had to resort to, er, other means of bonding. Their child is named Yu-No (hmm…), and she grows at abnormally fast speeds, speaking and running around at six months of age. After four years, Takuya tells us that she seems to be about sixteen in normal, Earth-scale developmental years. I don’t really like her character so far, mainly because she doesn’t have any. She’s just there to provide a new, naive viewpoint and for the camera to ogle. (And ogle it does, to an uncomfortable extent, especially considering she’s technically only four years old.) When Yu-No asks him why he will no longer bathe with her, I was beginning to worry where this conversation was going. Indeed, there are definitely weird, almost-incestuous vibes going on between Yu-No and her dad.

This episode wasn’t much for comedy, but there were a few parts that may or may not have been intended to make me laugh that I laughed at anyway. The dragon monster lady having boobs and painted nails cracked me up. Then when Takuya mortally wounds the dragon lady, and she tells him the lizard is her child, the look he gives her lasts just long enough and his eyebrows raise just high enough that it’s hilarious. Finally, I found a lot of humor (and sadness) in the fact that it seems like Sayless literally never leaves their home. While Takuya and Yu-No play outside, she smiles sadly as they close the door on her.

The dub this week was solid, though Eric Vale pretty much stole the show as there aren’t many other characters around to speak to. “Hey, I’m home from work! I’m starting to sound like my dad.” Dad Takuya is pretty funny to me. “Me and a woman all alone? Of course, it’s gonna happen.” At least he’s self-aware that he’s a womanizer with no self-control? And of course he hates babies: “I never realized before how much babies cry.”  Especially when Sayless *gasp* nurses the baby: “Stop hogging the boobs, I like them too!” I thought Yu-No did have one funny line, where she wonders about the true meaning of friendship: “What is a friend? Can you eat it?” 

I enjoyed The Bond Between Parent And Child a lot more than I thought I would, mostly just because of Dela Grante. The backgrounds have a nice, magical quality to them that was absent in earlier episodes, I feel like. Even if the plot was weird or boring, it was calming to look at. Of course, as soon as I heard Takuya tell his lover that he’d always be around to keep her safe, I knew they were in for trouble. Dela Grante may be quite lovely, but ugliness lives there alongside the beauty.