Genji Monogatari Sennenki - 04
Short Synopsis: Genji gets a chance to see the princess (the one he kissed in the first episode) again.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
So yeah, you can pretty much consider me a fan of Osamu Dezaki right now. First he did a great job on Ultraviolet, and now he promises to do an even better job with Genji Monogatari. These episodes really keep getting better and better. It’s interesting, though, because based on the stories I’ve read about his other works, his series and movies are either incredibly good or incredibly bad. It seems that in the seventies and eighties, he established himself as an incredibly strong director. Then in the nineties, something went terribly wrong and he produced one terrible anime after the others, but with the new millennium he has managed to pick up himself really nicely, with the Air and Clannad Movie, the Snow Queen and Ultraviolet. It’s always interesting to see what happens when an already established director learns from his mistakes.
Anyway, in this episode, Genji feels pretty much down from what happened in the previous episode, when the ghost of the hatred of one of his neglected loves ends up killing his current love. He however, becomes his old self again when he meets the one he kissed as a fourteen year-old (I believe her name was Lady Fujitsubo). It seems that both of them are still heavily affected by that moment.
There’s also a young girl he meets (she probably will play a bigger part later in this series, but it’s quite disturbing that age really seems to not matter for Genji…), but the biggest event of this episode was of course when Genji forced himself upon the Fujitsubo, even though he probably wasn’t allowed to come near her at all (especially since she’s married to his father).