released 23 jan 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Ryotaru Nakamura's SERIAL EXPERIMENTS LAIN anime series was an interesting if extremely mixed experience, with enough good points for me to be interested in his new anime series, KINO'S JOURNEY.
In the first volume of KINO'S JOURNEY, we meet Kino, a tomboyish teenage girl, and her talking motorbike or "moterrad" Hermes as they travel through strange fantasy lands. In this first volume, she visits a tidy kingdom under a curse, the inhabitants having been careless about what they asked for and got exactly what they wanted; helps three starving traders trapped in the snow, only to find out they are not quite what they seem; passes through cities obsessed with a bizarre legend; and, lying in a field of flowers, recounts her childhood in and escape from a land that had learned how to enforce conformism with a vengeance.
Kino is something of a contradictory figure, with a very Buddhist sort of calm detachment and aloof coolness , but armed to the teeth -- an unarguably sensible practice given some of the places she visits. The series is somewhat contradictory as well, by halves imaginative and predictable, clever or just plain pointless and silly.
Production values are good if not outstanding, and I did appreciate the atmospheric fantasy tone of the whole thing. However, in the end there's not more than the tone there, and though I found the first volume of KINO'S JOURNEY pleasant enough, I see no point in obtaining the other volumes if all I'm going to get is more of the same atmosphere. I might as well watch the first volume again.