he first mystery in Kino's Journey is Kino's gender. Story hints and developments directly suggest that Kino is female, and the Japanese and English actors providing Kino's voice are both women. But supplementary materials, including a short poem/story on the DVD insert and a director's commentary on the series' Web site, indicate that Kino is male. For the purposes of the story itself? The issue doesn't even come up until the final episode on the initial DVD, and given the series' tone, it hardly seems to matter. As Kino personally reiterates, the important part is being a traveler.
But Kino's sex is far from the last mystery the series presents. As Kino's Journey opens, Kino is in the desert with a "motorrad" named Hermes, a talking motorcycle with a friendly, inquisitive but slightly childlike personality that complements Kino's withdrawn quaintness. Together, the two of them travel from country to country, never staying more than three days in any one place, observing the bizarre behavior of the generally friendly natives. In Kino's world, "traveler" seems to be a respected, rare profession; in each new country, Kino and Hermes are required to stop and register or announce themselves, but they're greeted with reactions ranging from polite courtesy to genuine excitement.
In the opening episode, Kino and Hermes enter a country where robots run everything, and the people live alone, each individual isolated in a separate house. When Kino approaches people, they flee. Eventually, one young man volunteers the country's story: Thinking that perfect communication would end conflict, his people developed a synthetic liquid that granted telepathy, and everyone in the country drank it. "Perfect communication" became dangerously revealing, and now everyone lives apart.
These discoveries become par for the course on Kino and Hermes' travels, as they explore a resigned country ruled by a misinterpreted prophecy, and a melancholy country where a single sorrowful, 10-year-long poem is constantly being recited. Worst of all, Kino's Journey explores a country where every 12-year-old has childhood surgically removed and becomes a "perfect adult," inhumanly content even in the most hateful job.
Deep and deeply idiosyncratic
Based on a series of popular novels and helmed by Serial Experiments Lain director Ryutaro Nakamura, Kino's Journey has a great deal of Lain's detached, hypnotic air without its cyberpunk edge or surreal quality. Kino is a subdued, consciously measured character, and the series has a similar tone. That comes across most clearly in the second episode, when Kino meets three men stranded and starving in a blizzard, and hunts and cooks and cares for them without quite committing to caring about them. As they recover, Kino spends more time thinking about the rabbits that die to nourish the men than thinking about the men themselves. That moral egalitarianism and refusal to weigh any one aspect of a situation as more important than another extend to other episodes, as Kino evaluates each new country in turn without mocking or judging, but also without undue enthusiasm or emotional involvement.
The result is a hushed, thoughtful series with few highs or lows and little action. The first disc's episodes proceed placidly without climax or denouement, though each one has its own plot twist. Nakamura intersperses story segments with symbols and text swimming against an abstract background, echoing the characters' questions ("Have you ever felt jealous of birds?") or commentary. ("The world is not beautiful, and that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty.") These tend to be more distracting than anything else, and given that Nakamura used the exact same device in Lain, they come across as more imitative than unique.
Like most deeply idiosyncratic series, Kino's Journey is a specialized taste, and likely to be an acquired one as well. The slow pace will put some viewers off, and the extremely simple character design may distract others. The backgrounds of Kino's Journey are typically lush, but the rounded, big-eyed characters look like something from a young children's series, a look that's strongly at odds with the stories' adult tone. But strange mysteries, odd artistic choices, and repetitive concepts aside, Kino's Journey is involving and touching, and it's crafted around thoughtful moral dilemmas and speculative societies in the best science-fiction tradition.
What particularly lingers with me is the image of the three rabbit skins hanging from the tree in episode two, and the multiple implied moral messages there. Brrr. Like Now And Then, Here And There, Kino's Journey definitely has a few aspects that aren't for kids layered in among the kid-friendly visuals.
— Tasha
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