What kind of an episode was this? Seriously, this was by far the WORST installment of this series so far. It was ridiculously stupid, poorly produced, incredibly rushed and generally an entire waste of time. It makes no sense. It was horrible to watch. Who were the idiots responsible for this mess?

So get this: in this episode we meet a bunch of people who don’t agree with the policy of the Letter Bees, and are of the opinion that their fees are way too high for the poor people who’d like to send mail to their loved ones as well. Fair enough, competition is always good. So what do they do? THEY CHALLENGE A BUNCH OF KIDS TO A RACE. On a horsed cart. To test who is the best at delivering letters. It only gets worse from there on.

Connor for example halts his cart in front of a few roadblocks. We never actually see anything going on at that road. They could have just passed it, there was no reason to block it whatsoever. Connor stands still because he believes it to be the shortest road and his gut feeling (read: stomach) says that it’ll be removed in no time.

Along the way the bad guys decide to cheat for no possible reason whatsoever, since later in the episode it’s more than clear that they’re good guys. They end up crashing because a wheel on their cart was loose. What the heck? Later, as the finish is near they run into a bunch of Gaichuu (since this was a race to a nearly abandoned town and back, why they didn’t run into these Gaichu on the way to this town is beyond me), and the cart of the “Letter Pidgeons” is destroyed. When the Gaichu are taken care of by the Letter Bees, Lag abandons his cart in turn and just starts running as well. The entire cart just disappears during the entire rest of the episode, even though it would have been way faster.

The endless stupidity in this episode was just unbelievable, but the Letter Pidgeons themselves are just plain badly characterized. They’re just a bunch of paper bags and the dude who could only utter 3-word sentences was especially bad. The animation was cheap and the characters looked even worse and more like cardboard cut-outs with just one emotion.

But what pisses me off the most about this episode was how it completely ignored and side-stepped important themes for the setting, and at some point even contradicted the SERIES ITSELF. It’s like the writers of this episode knew absolutely nothing about the story, and just looked at the first OP for inspiration. Connor just continuously whined about food, even though it had already been established that while he likes to eat, he isn’t completely obsessed over it. Zazie is an experienced Letter Bee. While he can be cold, it’s nothing like him to just curse in front of small children (seriously; wtf!?) and yell at them to hand over the letters they want to deliver.

Also, it completely ignores one very important issue, and that’s what upset me the most about this episode. Lag is someone who we already know is obsessed over justice. This episode addressed how Letter Bees basically discriminate and don’t give poor people a chance. And Lag doesn’t even give this a second chance. He does lecture the Letter Pidgeons on how it’s important for a Letter Bee to deliver the heart of their clients. However, it makes no sense in the context: none of the mistakes that the Letter Pidgeons made would amount to such a lecture: these people simply did not know about how dangerous Gaichuu can be. Lag then completely avoids answering why he’s basically ignoring poor people. This would have been a great chance for the creators to clear up this little plothole of how the Bees make money, but the creators just continuously avoid it in order to go for cheap adventures.

I know I sound angry and I’m very much ranting here, but I really hate to see this show’s potential wasted like this. It really was going into the right direction before this thing came.
Rating: —- (Abysmal)

Remember Night on the Galactic Railroad? It was probably one of the quietest movies you can get. In any case, it was based on a story from Kenji Miyazawa, and back in 2007, it was animated for a second time by a digital artist named Kagaya. I was expecting something with cat people again (something that returns in nearly all of Kenji Miyazawa’s adaptations), but instead I got something much more unique than I thought.

If you looked at the screenshots you might wonder why there aren’t any people on it. That wasn’t because I was in some strange mood when I took them. There really are NO PEOPLE, or any other sort of characters in this OVA. We just have a narrator who reads the story of Kenji Miyazawa, combined with visuals and music. She also does the voices of the lead characters, but they never appear on the screen. All this show is is one huge chunk of atmosphere as we travel through all sorts of locations and constellations.

Don’t worry though. This is really an excellent recommendation if you like visual poetry. What this movie does excellently is combining the narrative, dialogue, visuals and music into one. It’s the perfect movie for if you want to relax for about an hour and dream away, and because of the limited storytelling and how we never get to see the characters, the narrative speaks to your imagination to fill in the omitted parts. It’s such a relaxing, yet thought provoking and imaginative OVA.

Which is really helped by an absolutely beautiful soundtrack. Every second of that soundtrack fits perfectly with the rest of the story and visuals, and it’s been very skillfully composed. The visuals themselves are also utterly gorgeous. Nearly everything is in 3D, and not everything is perfectly and realistically rendered, but nevertheless it’s full of eye candy. This is what I meant with the art of cutting corners in 3D animation, back in my Urban Legend Hikiko Review. Everything that matters is rendered beautifully, and the rest, like realistic water or textures. Ah well, who cares. They don’t prevent the visuals in this movie from being awesome.

Fantasy Railroad of the Star really is an engaging adventure and a beautifully imaginative journey across the Galactic Railroad. It’s obviously not for everyone, and you have to be into this kind of stuff otherwise you’re going to be bored out of your skull, but it’s OVAs like this that start off with a great experimental idea, and actually make it work. It’s a shame that it’s taken three whole years for this thing to get released in the west.

Holy crap, you people weren’t kidding about this episode! This series just continues to get better and better. What an incredibly creative script, this series really takes no conventions for granted.

Oh, remmember the first few episodes of this series, in which Volken was nothing but an average lead character with a strong sense of justice. Seriously, I never expected that someone as Olivia Litlet would get more screen-time than he did. The way that this series plays around with our expectations and turns them into something unpredictable is just unbelievable.

So yeah: Volken died. The creators actually had the GUTS to kill him off. And yet Olivia still lives at the end of this episode. This episode did such a great job of developing the two of them. Volken on one hand seeing his beliefs destroyed when he found out that his mentor was not the upholder of justice he believed him to be, while Olivia as a strong woman searched for the passion that she once lost. It’s that passion and perseverance of her that really allowed her to live as a meat. Colio had already shown that it was possible, and she just took it a small step further. The whole ritual? She was trying the entire time to get her memories of Vend Ruga back. As someone who took care of her when she was a child and before the church got her.

Also, we’ve been expecting this for quite a while now, but Hamyuts finally confirmed it: the Church and the Armed Librarians aren’t at war at all. They just pretend to be. Heck, the Church was even created by the Armed Librarians. My guess is that they were intended to take care of all of the dirty work, probably for that damn tree or something. My guess is that it feeds on exciting books. That would be quite the irony: that the Armed Librarians and the Church just exist in order to provide nice books.

It’s also interesting: all this time it turned out that Hamyuts Meseta followed after a red herring, and basically sank a ship for nothing, just because Olivia wanted to scrabble her feelings on the wall. However, for her to go through such lengths. I really believe that we’ve found our major villain of this series. Or rather: the major good guy, since we’ve now pretty much confirmed that the Armed Librarians are the bad guys.
Rating: *** (Awesome)