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I love Kino's Journey. Yet, what is that worth?

I would like nothing more than to go off on a fanboy's monologue on how Kino's Journey changed my life and whatnot, but that only says stuff about me, not the series itself. In the world of anime, every show is someone's favorite, so saying that I love Kino's Journey is rather meaningless. They are just words and ideas after all. Just a bunch of flowery dialogue and sweet-scented nostalgia that are weightless to anyone not me. Perhaps even non-existent. I can brag about my love for this show all I like, but that wouldn't mean squat.



And that leads me to my love of Kino's Journey: an exploration of ideas that may be weightless on their own, but with the introduction of personal experience and knowledge, we, the viewers, flesh out the world and give it meaning. These interpretations may be arbitrary and based on narrow viewpoints, but that gives way to discussion and the slow development of one's own world. Through these ideas, we aren't told what to think, but are instead given scenarios from an observer's point of view, and we are made to interpret what we see based on what we know. So, with that, let's dive into Kino's Journey, unabridged and unplugged.










The core engagement of Kino's Journey is self-reflection. As far as I can reason, the purpose of this show's existence is to present stories for people to reflect upon. The show doesn't give explicit answers to any of its questions, it doesn't explore characters, and its presentation and execution are both minimalistic and bare, leaving very little to distract from the message of each episode.



Kino's Journey itself is not an analysis of humanity, nor is it a source of explicit discussion about various issues surrounding modern day society. Instead, it only brings up the topics, including the logical extents of democracy, the breakdown of reality and fiction, the want to survive, what it means to be an adult, the consequences of removing the barriers to interpersonal communication, and so on for 16 light novel volumes...Or 13 episodes for us normal folk.

Pretty much, it presents ideas, scrapes past their main points, and moves on without ever explaining anything into detail. It's the same as Kino's way of traveling: staying in any country for no longer than 3 days, just long enough to understand the people there before moving on. In part, it's to fit in many countries and avoid having to get stuck in one place for too long. It's also a great way to sidestep the issue of fleshing characters and worlds out, focusing specifically on the many ideas presented. That, with the episodic nature of the show, makes it easy to introduce anyone to the show without any background information.



Kino's Journey in a nutshell:

"Kino is a traveler. Kino travels. Hermes is Kino's motorcycle. Hermes can talk. Go nuts."










There's an underlying element that anime is starved for: subtlety.


It is the symbolic imagery in Death Note of L washing Light's feet in reference to Jesus Christ washing the feet of Judas Iscariot. It is the sin each Haibane must recognize and forgive in parallel to the cycle of depression. It is Goethe's Faust continuously featured in the backgrounds of Madoka Magica.

Strangely though, it's here that Kino's Journey both excels and struggles with. The nature of Kino's Journey is to imply questions. It doesn't give straight answers, nor does it even give straight questions. This is done on purpose, as seen by the scenarios the show sets up in parallel to real life issues. If it were done explicitly, we would get something like the ending of Dantalian no Shoka, forcefully introducing questions of self-awareness. If it were done without commitment, we would have a case like Koi Kaze, where it tries to address incest seriously but falls back at the very end. Instead, Kino's Journey commits to giving a source of discussion to issues using subtle clues in each story. Well, at least it tries to do so consistently.



Understandably, the author, Keiichi Sigasawa, must also want to have fun with the series. It's the reason why he'd very much like to turn Hermes into a space ship and have Kino travel the galaxy, or why Gakuen Kino even exists. Kino's a great character, but that in of itself is the bullet that Kino's Journey shoots itself in the foot with. When recommending this show to people, I'll warn them that it gets dangerously pretentious at times. Seeing as how that word has lost all meaning in recent years, let me elaborate.

A symptom of this "pretentiousness" are the screen texts. The show is at its best when it presents scenes for us, the viewers, to interpret. When it outright tells us what we should be paying attention to, especially when accompanied by a chime and Kino's echoing voice, it goes past distracting and becomes obstructive. Many other shows monologue details about a scene, but seldom does a show outright stop the show in order to highlight a key point that any normal viewer could had picked up. Despite the screen texts showing up in less frequency later on, Kino never stopped acting as the wandering warrior poet. While I love me some flowery prose, here's the biggest problem with the show: Kino is flawless.



I've always thought that episode 2, "A Tale of Feeding off of Others," was one of the greatest stand-alone anime episodes I've seen. Here, Kino was shown to be just as much as a creature wanting to survive as any other. It leaves viewers questioning who was right or wrong, or if perhaps such moral questions should be tossed aside at the face of life-or-death situations. It places us in the twilight, where an observer can easily make arbitrary judgements, yet easily revert to our primitive instincts when we must survive. Great stuff.

Then...Comes the coliseum episodes and Kino ramping up the badassness. And the episode where Kino accidentally helps to invent flight. And all the times when Kino speaks with a the tongue of a philosopher and the wisdom of a sage.

Again, it's tough to maintain an interesting main character while keeping the episode's message the main focus. I once challenged myself to write a story with no characters, and I couldn't figure it out. A story needs to be told through the eyes of a narrator, an actor, or an observer. The very usage of words imply that an author was there. I've pretty much given up, so if anyone wants to give this a try, I'd be interested in any potential character-less stories.


Elaborating further with the screen texts, the first thing I usually think of in comparison is Studio Shaft's Bakemonogatari, where they're used nonstop in the strangest ways, possibly for reasons of budget since they didn't have to animate anything during the screen text frames, but most likely because Akiyuki Shinbou specializes in avant-garde craziness. The usage of screen texts in Bakemonogatari and Kino's Journey are different, but while Bakemonogatari had consistency with them, Kino's Journey drops them as the anime went on. I didn't see it as a problem with the presentation's consistency, but as a problem of being a distraction. The focus should be on either Kino or the scenario being presented, but with the screen texts, there's a break in the storytelling and it forces viewers to think a certain way, depending on what's being said. Rather than letting people think on their own, the screen texts tells people what to look for or what to pay attention to, and that goes against the neutral observational stance that Kino's Journey is going for.



Also, my problem with Kino goes a bit deeper. The tagline of the show is about the ugliness of the world lending it a sort ironic beauty, but I don't see that with Kino. Instead, I see an outright flawlessness. Had Kino been less of an invincible traveling warrior poet, this would completely add to the show's awesomeness. It's why I really loved A Tale of Feeding off Others -I Want to Live-, where Kino is shown to be simply another human who wishes to survive, even at the cost of killing others. It's why I really loved A Peaceful Land -Mother's Love-, where Kino couldn't understand the disposition of a mother who lost her family, looked disapprovingly of killing the tribesmen, but could neither find an alternative to war nor a way to avoid shooting at the tribesmen.

Both these episodes had Kino survive without a scratch, but left her shaken. It shows that even while standing in the twilight as a neutral party, you're always subject to the limitations of being human, and there's only so much one can do before they run into an issue that hits too close to home. But again, Kino's great and the fact that she performed strong and intelligently in the coliseum episodes adds to her awesomeness, but I still say that the show tries too hard. Lemme use the coliseum episodes as an example again.

Passive aggressive pacifism in life-or-death duels, the monarch in power being a raging lunatic, Shizu cutting bullets down in mid-flight, Kino shooting Shizu's sword out of his hands by intercepting his blade with her gun and shooting at point blank, Shizu dodging Kino's fireball blast and Kino killing the lunatic king - these kinds of things are completely out of place in this kind of show. While we got to see Kino in action, including that great moment where Kino essentially tells the audience to go kill themselves, it doesn't stop the episodes from going against the underplayed, toned-down nature of the show.

The strength of the show is how it sets up scenarios for the viewers to try and find the questions being asked, then to find the answers from within themselves. When we're being told outright what to think or are shown that as observers, we can enter any issue and leave without being affected, that's not right. No normal person is so flawless that we can maintain a flawless and absolutely neutral stance, and Kino should be no exception, especially within the context of a show about the flaws of humanity being something to be appreciated. My favorite parts of the show are when Kino enters countries knowing nothing, being only told things through what she sees and experiences, and has those experiences be reflected upon herself. I wish the show was all about that, but I dunno, what we got was already great, and I'd be afraid of messing up the original formula.

Perhaps I'm being too critical in nitpicking small things that I, personally, didn't like about Kino's Journey, but I really love the show, and since I'd defend it in a heartbeat, I'd also like to know its problems so I may address them if the situation were to ever come.



To sum this part up, the show tries too hard to make itself sound smart when it's already smart. It just goes full circle and makes it seem like it's flaunting its awesomeness in our faces, and that sucks. Yes, Kino's Journey is awesome, and yes, Kino is one of my favorite characters of all time, but no, we don't need to be told that over and over.










Anyways, let's talk about Kino herself. And by the way, I've avoided using any gender pronouns up until now. Gold star if you noticed. Moving on, I've seen complaints about her never getting developed. I call that madness because, well, what development would we need? Rather, I'd prefer just the development we have: Kino's childhood episode, the training she underwent in the movie, and the reasoning behind the 3-day rule. The nature of Kino's Journey isn't to explicitly explain. Through observing various countries, Kino has herself reflected by the people she meets, and from there, we learn more about her, the country she's in, the issue that's being discussed, and our own thoughts on the issue at hand.

The ambiguous nature of the show is its selling point. Kino's ambiguous gender, mysterious history, and neutral disposition further compliment the ambiguity. I've seen arguments saying that any characterization is better than no characterization, but it's too easy to pick apart that argument. I can just simply point towards Black Rock Shooter's television series, where the formula of "girls beating the crap out of each other" was made overly complicated by haphazardly handled characterization and drawn out explanations.

Really though, there's not much to talk about Kino. She's s a traveler, and travelers travel. Any analysis into her thoughts would only reflect my own. She's not a complete blank slate character, but since she never outright explains what she feels, our interpretations of her actions also reflect how we might respond in her position, or perhaps how we wouldn't respond if we disagree with the presentation of a given scenario.



For example, with the democracy bit in episode 5, some people might agree that democracy would vote itself into ruin. I can interpret Kino's response being apathy, as if the great experiment of democracy was doomed to fail, and it was only to be expected. Other people, however, might think that it's an extreme situation that would only happen in fiction. I can say that the situation was overplayed and the situation of a majority vote to kill off the minority would only happen in the most extreme of circumstances, perhaps akin to totalitarianism. Still, most of us would probably fall somewhere in the middle though since there's no real answer, if the tens of possible forms of government wasn't a clue to that. In interpreting what I really think Kino might had felt by the end, I would think that she felt pity for the ends of democracy, but continued on her way. I would think that if democracy were to end, it wouldn't be a tearful farewell, but a passive movement onto whatever's next, whether if it's the next form of government or self-destruction.

These interpretations didn't come from thin air. They came from my own mind. Whether or not I believe in democracy, I acknowledge that different opinions exist, and that all adds to my interpretation of the issue, as well as my response to the scenario presented. It's almost scary, actually. I don't even know what being an anarchist even is, but I recognize the stance of "it doesn't matter what government's controlling us, we're screwed sideways regardless." Never thought about that before, and that's what a smart episode can do.







If there were an anime I would use as the basis for an academic research paper, Kino's Journey would come to mind. If I ever needed to defend anime as being a medium capable of presenting intelligent, mature, and dignified messages to an audience unfamiliar with anime, Kino's Journey would come to mind. If I ever had to come up with an example of a badass, intelligent, and complex female lead, Ghost in the Shell comes to mind...But seeing as how I haven't watched that yet, Kino's Journey would win by default.

It has influenced the way I view the world, passively accepting everything as the way things are, as it always has been and always will be. The series was the concept for the library design that got me into upper division architectural studies in my university. I own the DVD and the only novel released by Tokyopop in English. So, I think I can say that I love Kino's Journey.







tl;dr - I love Kino's Journey, but it's because I love it that I gotta point out its flaws. It's something that naturally happens when you really dig into anything, but if you really love it, it's flaws really won't matter at the end, as it doesn't for me.