Short Synopsis: Porfy meets a bunch of idiots and grows as a character.
Highlights: You really don’t suspect this from the WMT!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,75/10
Whoa, Porfy! This isn’t something I saw coming. Bloody hell! With this episode, Porfy no Nagai Tabi really set itself apart from the other World Masterpiece Theatres, or at least the ones I’ve seen. The World Masterpiece Theatre may be an incredibly well written and versatile franchise, there’s one common theme that returns in every one of them I’ve seen so far: no matter how much they try to blend the borders between good and bad, the protagonist is always on the right side of justice. Whatever happens, the protagonist is a character who always tries the most noble of all solutions. And here Porfy comes.

But first a summary of the first half of the episode. Porfy is walking, and he’s getting rather tired. He sees a farm, and decides to stay there. Nobody’s home, but he sees a bed and decides to rest there. He gets woken up by a guy who looks like he’s in his late twenties. Porfy immediately wants to leave, but before he does he asks about Mina, who the guy obviously hasn’t seen. He then notices that the guy’s a painter, who’s much into modern art. Porfy then shows him some of his sketches (apparently, he’s been sketching in his free time), and they’re of course hilariously bad, though they’re getting better.

Porfy then tells the guy that he’s going to France, to search for his sister. It then turns out that the guy has the same plans, and he plans to head to Paris and study there to become a famous painter. Then, however, it seems that there’s more going on, when his angry mother comes to bother him because he didn’t show up for dinner again. He acts really rude against his mother, and claims that he needs to work hard to study for the concourse he’s entering. When the woman leaves, though, he doesn’t go to study, but instead happily chats with Porfy and goes to sleep afterwards.

Porfy is not upset because the guy is a lazy bum, but more because of the way he acts against his mother (having lost his parents, this obviously is understandable). His mother is also really unhappy with him, how he keeps slacking off. The next morning, Porfy prepares to leave because of this, but before he does, the guy’s mother shows up to bother him again, and he again tells her that he doesn’t have the time, and that he plans to leave her. He tells her how he regrets being born from his mother, and how he’d be able to live the easy life if he was born in Paris. He then remembers Porfy again, and invites himself to go with Porfy to Paris. Porfy then loses it and starts yelling at him, how he still has his parents. After that he immediately leaves the house.

Next up, Porfy walks past a suspicious-looking guy, and indeed he invites Porfy to sleep in his car. And indeed, he’s just trying to lead Porfy to a desolate part of the forest to rob him. Porfy however, notices this in time by questioning him about the car he’s in, and asking some smart questions about it. He tries to run away, but gets caught, but in the end he manages to fend off the attacker with a big stick and a lot of effort.

Porfy then sees a vegetable salesman, who is sitting by the road with his goods. The salesman hasn’t seen Mina, since he came from France. He buys one tomato from him, and then gets an interesting idea. He moves a big branch onto the road. When the salesman arrives with his truck, he stops to move the branch and in the meantime Porfy sneaks under some of the bags of what I assume is flower of some sort. The truck then arrives at the border. The guy seems to be familiar at the border, and the border-guards seem to know him. That’s why they don’t make too much effort in checking his load, so Porfy managed to get away undiscovered.

Porfy screws up when he tries to get off the truck, though. The salesman stops for a bit and Porfy tries to sneak off, but he’s too infatuated with the strange substance called “snow” that he forgets that he’s not supposed to be seen. He gets caught and the episode ends.

Really, Porfy has taken some relatively huge gambles in this episode. He could have just asked the guy to hide him, or waited for another car, but instead risked being discovered, and so got the quickest way across the French border. I must say that I like that a lot: Porfy is no longer the goodie two-shoes, and instead is starting to see that there are times when you need to ignore rules. It’s interesting: I always expected Porfy to just grow in a straightforward line: in the beginning, he’d meet guys who were out to get him, which made him stronger and less naive (which he also displayed in this episode). And yet at the same time, he heads into an entirely different but at the same time realistic direction.

This begs the question: what the heck have the creators in store for Mina?

Short Synopsis: Three dead children come back as corpses
Highlights: Male lead takes some getting used to, but is more than just a damsel in distress (or a male version anyways).
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Aaah! Why did this series’ second episode have to air so soon? Basically, at this point I’m still desperately trying to figure out which shows I’m going to blog, and in this case I’m doubting between three series: Shikabane Hime, Kurozuka and Chaos Head, and I’ve got two spots for the three of them. Shikabane Hime has a cast with potential and an excellent soundtrack; Kurozuka has the best production-values of the season but its characters need a bit more work, and Chaos;Head… well I don’t have a freakin’ idea about it yet, but it’s supposed to be mystery and I’m a mystery-fanboy.

So, yeah. For now I’m going to blog this thing, but do expect it to disappear again if I get blown away by Chaos;Head and Kurozuka’s second episode. The thing that especially intrigues me about this series is its director: the director of Gilgamesh. This guy knows his subtlety, and he’s just been assigned to the most un-subtle production-studio you can imagine: Gainax. The result is pretty interesting: quiet moments that take their time in building up, and yet it’s got hitting action-scenes. I’m hoping for this series to take the best of both extremes. And yeah; because of the male lead and this series’ relations to Gilgamesh (and probably also because most people are expecting this to be the next Gurren Lagann), I’m expecting this series to not really become that popular.

Another reason why I decided to blog this series was that within only two episodes, we’ve already seen quite a few sides of the male lead, and he’s definitely not a stereotype, which has potential for this series’ second season. The guy will feel annoying in this episode, though, especially in the way that he stands in the way of Machina like that. It’s also quite rare for such a guy to actually be voiced by a voice-actor that still sounds young, who still has that nose-sound in his voice. It’s a shame that the children in this episode were obviously voiced by adults that tried to be overly squeaky, but I guess that that can’t be helped.

If I’m still blogging this series next week, then the creators need to pay attention to the ultimate villains of this series, and don’t make them stereotypical bad guys who are out to destroy the world. The children in this episode were a fine example of enemies that were neither good nor bad, so let’s hope it can keep things that way.

Short Synopsis: Casshern ends up at a small refugee village of robots.
Highlights: Surprisingly solid.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
As for the shows I’m not blogging (as usual, this isn’t really about “is this good?”, but “do I feel like writing about it every single week?):
- I almost wanted to blog Tales of the Abyss, but then Mouryou no Hako and the 12-year-old girl who strangely was a guardian convinced me not to for now.
- Hearing “urusai urusai urusai” once was enough to convince me to never go near Toradora again.
- Hyakko is funny, but the characters feel a bit flat.

So, basically because of the large amount of series that are continuing from previous seasons, and Tytania (the one that won my little contest, a month ago), I only have the room to blog five new series. If Tales of the Abyss would have aired during a lighter season, I definitely would have ended up blogging it. There’s also the matter that three series that I’m planning to blog haven’t even aired yet (and because I’ve only heard a few very vague details of what they’re about, they still can utterly disappoint me), so who knows?

In any case, even though I didn’t like the first episode, I’m going to blog Casshern. Even though the main character is a bit emo, there’s a lot of good stuff in this series. It probably is one of the most solid series to have aired this season, and the slow pacing contributes to that. But what I especially like is the different variety of robots that Casshern runs into, and how they’re trying to live within the mess he caused them. The concept of robots is a bit strange here, and it’s almost like they’re stuck somewhere between humans and robots. They’re made of metal, and yet they can think, and be killed very easily. It seems that there’s either no mechanic left that can repair them, no cure against the rust, or no new metal to replace broken parts. There’s a story going around, that if you eat Casshern, you’ll be saved from the inner destruction. My guess is that that’s some sort of rumour, started by someone who wants to get rid of Casshern.

But really, seeing how everyone in this world is just waiting for destruction. It makes for a very appealing premise. And so far, I really like the side-characters. And about Casshern: he can grow enough, with 22 more episodes to go. Even though he’s emo, he’s not stupid. He wants to find out what the heck he’s done. Memory loss was very well done in Kaiba, so why not here?

Then there’s the matter of this show’s staff. I honestly got scared when I learned that the director of this series was the one behind several Dragonball Z movies. But then it got me thinking: I’ve spent so many seasons, preparing by looking at the staff list, and that only turns out to be reliable in 50% of the cases. There’s only a handful of directors that can really be consistent in their work, like Akiyuki Shinbou, or Koichi Masahino. In fact, quite a lot of my favourite series were directed by people who also directed more questionable series: the director of Toward the Terra screwed up with Itazura na Kiss, the director of The Third went on to direct Penguin no Mondai afterwards (what the heck!?), the director of Shion no Ou also did series as Dragon Drive, Beyblade and Tenjou Tenge. So, why not? At least I can say that Casshern doesn’t feel like anything Dragonball Z at all. Who knows?