Anime, late 2017
I’m really enjoying the new anime series “Kino’s Journey,” a remake of the 2003 series in which a traveler and a talking motorcycle visit many strange countries, staying exactly three days in each. It’s very Twilight Zone, setting up a strange situation and exploring how characters respond to it (like: what if there were a country where murder was legal?).
I watched the previous series five years ago, and I feel much the same about this remake: the episodes are largely standalone, the protagonist is mostly a blank slate, but the artwork is gorgeous. The theme of the series is “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is beautiful.” I can get behind that.
This evening I watched the episode “Kind Country,” which I remembered from the original as soon as I saw the little girl’s cherry hair-clip. It’s wonderfully bittersweet, as is the episode that’s coming up next week, “Country of Adults.”
I’ve also been watching the series “Recovery of an MMO Junkie,” which is a romance between players of an online videogame in their 30s. The concept is cute and it’s done with a sweetly innocent touch, but I’m disappointed that it seems to have run out of steam and coasted to a halt. Yesterday’s episode (the tenth one) is apparently the final one, aside from an OVA which Crunchyroll is broadcasting next week, if that makes any sense.