I continue my trilogy of reviews covering legitimately great anime to celebrate 300 reviews here on MAL. Kino's Journey is a 2003 anime directed by the late great Ryutaro Nakamura. It was adapted from a series of light novels written by a guy who uses the pen name "Sigsawa". Everyone get your groans out of the way now. At first this seems like an odd pairing because Nakamura was a super artsy dude. Kind of like a Woody Allen...without the alleged pedophilia. On the other hand, "Sigsawa" is a man absolutely obsessed with guns, hunting, motorcycles, American muscle cars, and all things MANLY. Sigsawa's favorite anime is Sword Art Online and he's far more likely to be out blasting squirrels with a shotgun than attending a modern art exhibition. Somehow, this odd couple worked really well and Kino's Journey turned out a very unique and fun experience.
Background:
Kino's Journey is an episodic travel series in which the plot and characters aren't really the primary focus. What makes the series great is the themes and philosophical questions raised by each unique country that Kino visits on her journey. It's basically like an anime version of the Twilight Zone and I love that! These questions typically end with the viewer being left to decide for themselves. Nakamura strongly believed that it was the duty of the author to raise important questions, not provide easy answers.
Story:
A young girl is raised in a horrible future dystopia where teens are implanted with special microchips to help them achieve "adulthood". Being an adult is defined as completely lacking the desire for entertainment, adventure, and learning. Adults are those who work miserable and meaningless jobs 16 hours a day and do so with an empty smile on their faces. While Nakamura likely meant this as a satire of Japanese society, it's very close to Western portrayal of North Korea. A traveling man on a motorcycle named Kino arrives in this land and quickly ends up befriending this nameless girl. Kino is a wandering vagabond that wishes to visit every country in this bizarre future. The young girl has second thoughts about getting the chip implant, so her own parents decide to try stab her to death for disappointing Dear Leader. They do so with creepy smiles on their faces the entire time, which makes this a particularly chilling scene. Kino is murdered defending the girl, but she escapes on the motorcycle and starts calling herself Kino. Several years pass and Kino is now a badass, revolver wielding killer who makes for a truly unusual heroine.
So why is Kino so odd for a main protagonist? Kino is extremely cold, calculating, and rarely shows real emotion. She will sometimes help others, but is pretty morally ambiguous and will also kill without hesitation. She has traits more often seen in supporting cast anti-heroes or sympathetic villains. In one episode, a family of androids decide they've become obsolete after their master dies and kill themselves. Kino just watches and gives zero fucks. In another episode, Kino visits a society where the upper class are lazy hedonists and everyone else lives in misery as slaves. Kino willingly enters this country's gladiator match to have any one wish fulfilled. She ends up winning, killing the leader of that nation, and having her wish be that the upper class all kill each other so the lower classes can be liberated. Kino takes a HARD approach towards tyrannical regimes and apparently doesn't care how many people she needs to kill in order to take them down. What's interesting about Kino is that her cold exterior isn't just an act and she's really warm and sweet on the inside. If you penetrate past her icy exterior, you just hit a core of solid steel. Having such an odd heroine gives this series a unique feel, but also serves a functional purpose. It helps keep the philosophy front and center. If you don't like Kino as a character and think she's a heartless bitch, that's perfectly fine. She's just there to serve as our guide through these wild countries.
I don't want to spoil all the episodes obviously, so I'll just give a basic example. There is one episode that spoofs religious extremism. Kino enters a country where everyone is so obsessed with a doomsday prophesy that they quit their jobs and give away goods and services for free. When the Apocalypse doesn't happen, the first priest apologizes for miscalculating and a second priest assures the gullible audience that he has figured out the REAL date. This hit home for me as someone who grew up in the southern US. Back in 4th grade, my redneck art teacher read the Left Behind books and became SO convinced that the year 2000 would be the Apocalypse, she decided to quit her job and told us all to say our prayers or we were going to Hell! When Judgement Day didn't happen, she tried to beg for her job back and the school turned her down. I live in the city were the infamous Estus Pirkle Trilogy of religious scare films were made!
Art:
The art for Kino's Journey was handled by AC-GT. They're best known for making all the Initial D series. The art is pretty solid to be honest. It isn't the greatest art I've ever seen in anime, but it has held up very nicely since 2003. It's a series that new viewers can watch in 2019 without being visually assaulted by horribly aged CGI. There is something nice about that.
Music:
The music was done by a guy named Ryou Sakai that honestly hasn't done anything else of note that I'm aware of. The soundtrack serves its purpose admirably, but isn't really the big takeaway from Kino's Journey. Unlike AC-GT's other anime where ALL people talk about is the Europop soundtrack! You don't even watch Initial D, you listen to it.
Overall:
Kino's Journey is able to be both thought provoking and entertaining without ever having to sacrifice one for the other. It's also a widely accessible series that's just solid all around. Kino narrowly misses getting on my personal top 10, but my top 10 is largely subjective and filled by anime that had the largest impact on me personally. I can't imagine anyone hating Kino's Journey. If I needed to recommend an anime to somebody who's never seen an anime before, Kino would be one of my top choices. When most non-anime fans think of anime, they're thinking of tentacle hentai, battle shonen, giant robots, and occasionally an impermeable clusterfuck of an art snob movie. Kino's Journey shows that there are high quality anime out there that anyone can pick up and enjoy! If you haven't seen Kino yet, I highly recommend it.
PS: I would recommend the sub over the English dub because it's ADV and those guys were honestly only a good fit for comedies. Due to their highly uneven cast of actors and penchant for changing the script and adding dated pop culture references, I would simply avoid yourself the headache. Unless you REALLY want to hear Kino drop a line like "I Must, I Must, I Must Increase my Bust!"
