Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 07

By request of Chris, I’ve decided to write full and detailed summaries for Porfy from now on. It’s the least I can do for this series.

The episode starts with Porfy, thinking back about the previous episode, and more specifically Alecia. Ever since she left, she’s been on his mind, and this is getting on Mina’s nerves. She then shows Porfy a letter that just arrived from Alecia, and she starts teasing him with it. Aneke then tells both of them to go outside because of the fuss they cause. In the end, the letter tells Porfy and Mina how they’re the first friends that Alecia has ever had, and how she had a great time with both of them. She also invites both of them to come to Italia once, so that they can play. Porfy is so caught up in this that he hardly notices how one of the goats is about to eat the letter. 😛

Porfy then leaves Mina and runs to Christopher, wanting to show the letter to his father. Then a customer arrives who mistook the service station for a gas-station, and believes that there should be gasoline at a station like this. This has a really big impact on Porfy, seeing a customer leave his father disappointed like that. He then suggests his father to also install some kind of gasoline tank for his customers. The sooner the better.

That afternoon, the family makes another trip to the city. Christopher is going to try and get his hands on a gasoline pump, while Porfy, Mina and Aneke go to a movie while they wait. Christopher borrowed another car for the trip, and he picks up his family. On the way to the city, they come across Zaimis, who is running errands with who looks to be his mother, and Porfy tells him how they’re going to see a movie. Mina then says that she’ll bring a small souvenir for him.

When they’re in the city, Porfy gets distracted by random cars as usual. Then the cars arrive at the theatre and Christopher drops Porfy, Mina and Aneke off. The movie was… cheesy. Remember that this is Greece in the 1950s, and apparently even then the movies weren’t what you’d call top-notch. What’s interesting is that it was an actual live-action movie. Did the creators actually go and film it, or did they just grab a random Greek movie from the shelves? I suspect the latter, though I do admit that it’s an interesting way to save budget. The story is about a rich boy who falls in love with a poor woman, but they break up in the end due to their differences in social status.

In any case, Porfy and especially Mina were really impressed by the movie. It was probably the first time they saw one, and I can imagine how awesome it must look if you’ve never seen it before. Mina also starts comparing the female heroine with Alecia. *wink wink*. When they exit the theatre, Christopher also comes back from his errands. He didn’t succeed in buying a gas pump, but h tries to keep this hidden from Porfy. Afterwards, Mina buys a red pencil for Zaimis as the souvenir, after which all four of them have dinner at a local restaurant.

Mina notes how the food is delicious, but it’s nowhere near as good. Of course, after hearing this Porfy just has to say the same, even though he had his mouth full at the time. When the dinner is over and Christopher is probably washing up or something similar, Aneke runs into an old friend of hers. Apparently, this friend didn’t yet know that Aneke married someone as poor as Christopher, and once she finds out, she quickly tries to find an excuse to leave.

Mina then starts comparing her parents to the couple in the movie, as Aneke too married a poor guy, even though she belonged to the upper classes. The last thing that Christopher needs to do in the city is refill the gas of the car that he borrowed, and during this process Porfy looks like a small kid in a candy-store.

During the drive back to Simitra, Porfy and Mina fall asleep on the back couch of the car. Porfy then has a dream of how he in a cool costume refills the gasoline for all the different cars (after all, it looked like a very simple task for him to do). He wakes up just early enough to overhear Aneke and Christopher talk about how the gasoline pump will be impossible. It’ll just cost too much money. Porfy clearly becomes upset, and even tries to suggest that Aneke’d borrow some money from her rich family.

When they reached back home, Porfy is still disappointed. Aneke tries to comfort him a bit. She also explains how she and Christopher decided that they wouldn’t depend on the money from her family after they married. It really had it coming. Porfy had a huge imagination, so it was only a matter of time until this would go out of control and he’d start demanding unreasonable things like a gas pump. It was Christopher’s dream to own a local garage, and something tells me that he’s already happy enough with just that, while Porfy’s ideals are a bit bigger than that.

I must say, though, that the creator went really into the mind of a child for this production. That’s one point where this series is already better at than Les Miserables. In terms of drama it may be very light and all, but the amount of realism is overwhelming. Porfy and Mina behave just like how real children would in this situation, and even Ghibli doesn’t come close to the level of realism for this series.