Kino's Journey - the Beautiful World-

Episode 4

Another episode of Kino's Journey, another nation destabilized by Kino's recklessness. I wish I were joking, but no – we're on the fourth episode of this remake, and our hero has already caused massive society-changing damage to three different countries. I don't think even Vash the Stampede had that high a ratio at this point in his story. I'm half-expecting countries to start turning Kino away at the door out of fear that their president will be assassinated. Seriously though, this is a problem and I want it to stop. Kino's Journey keeps biting off way more than it can chew with these more civically-minded, high-concept, major-consequence stories. I'd really like to see it return to the intimate philosophical parables that made up most of the first series. That's the scale that this franchise seems comfortable with – these more political stories keep veering into wildly irresponsible messaging that I'm not sure was intended.

So in a change of pace, this episode stars Shizu, the travelling swordsman Kino met in the second episode. His situation is similar to our hero's, except that he's explicitly looking for a place to settle down. Also, instead of a talking motorcycle, he has a talking dog. (This is a solid trade-up considering Hermes' petulant attitude throughout this series.) One day, Shizu decides to board a country that takes the form of a travelling ship. While there, he learns that this country has an oppressive upper class, as well as a long-suffering lower class. The ship also appears to be on the verge of sinking – an issue that some people are aware of, but nobody really wants to deal with. So now it's up to Shizu to get these folks to do something about the fact that their floating city is about to go under for good.

Ship Country's main problem is that it just isn't a very good metaphor for what it wants to discuss. This episode wants to explore the tendency within nations (or groups in general) to refuse to address lingering structural faults until the whole thing collapses and everyone gets screwed over. When the shit finally hits the fan, the nation or group's wealthiest people (such as the leaders) will lean on their material advantages to get the hell out of dodge, leaving the bottom rungs, to try and live with the destruction. Unfortunately, this episode fails as anything more than a basic acknowledgement that this sort of thing happens, because its symbolic depiction of how different social classes act in these situations doesn't seem relatable to real life.

First of all, the common folk don't want to leave the sinking ship. While this point makes some sense in terms of the episode's parable logic, the show then jumps to this weird Hobbesian assumption that the people need an authoritarian upper class to lead them because they can't organize to fix their problems on their own. I don't care for that, but it is still a somewhat mainstream political opinion, so I guess you could express it that way. What comes next is just baffling though – it turns out that the upper class was really a group of ship-driving robots who encountered a group of castaway children and proceeded to adopt/subjugate them for their own good. What? That doesn't make any sense. Failing states aren't led by cabals of benevolent mechanical overseers. And if they were, why would these hyper-logical AIs let the ship get so bad and then just pass the job onto the next person they meet? Either way, you can already see how far we've gotten from the original metaphor by stacking on these additional sci fi hypotheticals.

It's also unfortunate that the episode frames Shizu, an outsider, as the only one who can acknowledge and potentially deal with the immense danger that faces the ship country. For some reason, the people who've spent their entire lives on this thing aren't able to handle themselves on their own, and need to be not only told what to do, but forcefully subjugated to make sure that they don't die. This issue would be mitigated if we saw any diversity of thought on the part of the common folk. I know that when cultures undergo these types of dramatic regime changes, some folks will always prefer the old ways even when they were materially worse for them. But the ship people are homogeneous in their response to a degree where they all just seem like a bunch of idiots. If there were a mix of loyalists and radical agitators, the story would make a lot more sense, reflecting the diversity of thought that actual people tend to possess, even in relatively simple stories and parables. Instead they seem to love and trust their overseers – sometimes. Other times, they're making petitions or worrying about the new traveler who's been sent over to beat them. Over the course of two different scenes, the same character expresses aggravation at how the nobles lord over him alongside unwavering faith in their judgments. There's a disconnect here, and now that I think about it, why do the nobles even recruit travelers to rough up their citizens? They seem to be working just fine without forceful incentive. The story just doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, the real reason the story is framed like this is so Shizu can go tragically unheard when he tells these idiots that they'll die if they go back on the boat. This part of the show is a total fantasy in a few ways. First of all, it's unbelievable that Shizu would be one of such a tiny number of people to figure out that the ship is sinking, when he's only been on it for two weeks and gets led to the damaged locations right away by a small child who's picked up on this. This level of unfamiliarity with their own world takes the ship's people beyond any metaphor for civic disengagement into a level of stupidity that doesn't reflect human nature, even if the populace is entirely babies who were raised by machines. Those babies have grown into otherwise functional facsimiles of adults, so at least some number of them would have explored and questioned their environment to a level where they understand it better than some stranger.

More importantly, this privileged perspective of neutral judgment over countries that Shizu and Kino get from their status as travelers does not exist in real life. The “if only they'd listened to Shizu” ending doesn't work if this scenario is supposed to be a metaphor for actual systems of governance, because national collapses are always understood by some percentage of their denizens long before some hapless outsider stumbles in with anything to say about it. This latter issue would be less of a problem if these stories were more broad philosophical dilemmas than attempts to metaphorize and then propose tidy solutions for real grand-scale social dilemmas. I realize that this is just an anime, but “the common folk are ignorant rabble who must be led by enlightened others or they will DIE” is not a new idea in human history. It has a body count. I'm actually not sure that the people behind the show are even aware that this episode can be interpreted to advocate this sort of message. That's why you have to look twice before jumping into such loaded thematic territory.

Speaking of loading, Kino sure did a lot of that in this episode again. Our regular protagonist literally arrives on the scene guns blazing, ready to pump some rubber into their new hosts on behalf of their old acquaintance. It is seriously strange how unlikable this show has made Kino, and they're only getting worse by the episode. This week, they suffer from being juxtaposed against Shizu, who is kind, engaged, and genuinely concerned with the well-being of the people that he encounters. While Shizu chose to live with the bottom-dwellers, Kino decided to live in the tower and immediately get tasked with shooting people if they get uppity. Just looking out for #1!

At the end of all this, Shizu adopts the little orphan girl who'd been acting as his guide through the episode. In what feels like another off-kilter attempt to morally equalize these two factions, it's revealed that the common folk never accepted her because she was an outsider, while the tower robots were nice and provided for her to live. This doesn't mean anything, but okay. She also tries to commit murder-suicide with Shizu because he was nice to her, but Kino puts a stop to this. Everyone but the ship people (and maybe the machines?) makes it out okay, and I think this girl will be a recurring character now. Yawn.

Overall, this episode suffered from the same bizarre execution problems that plagued the previous one. The direction and storyboarding and tonal management are just bad and make each story tougher to decipher. This adaptation is limp enough that I have no idea which thematic signals the show is sending me on purpose and which are just unfortunate accidents. That's a pretty major problem for a show that's all about puzzling through the implications of fantastical scenarios. However, the show must go on regardless of these glaring issues. Who will live, who will die, and how many major geopolitical incidents will Kino instigate on their trip to the Country of Liars? Kino's Rampage continues next week, their thirst for destruction – like their thirst for travel – neverending.

Grade: B-

Kino's Journey - The Beautiful World is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.