Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 18

This was the most light-hearted episode of Porfy no Nagai Tabi in what felt like ages. The tragedy has finally settled down a bit, and it’s time for Porfy to move on and search for Mina, as he travels to Italy.

Porfy walks around the harbour, searching for the place that sells tickets to the boat that travels to Italy. When he finds the ticket booth, he’s confused by all the complicated talk, and ends up ordering the cheapest ticket. The woman behind the counter then wonders where his family is, and gets a worried look on her face when she finds out that Porfy’s alone, and especially when she finds out that Porfy has no relatives whatsoever in Italy. She also warns Porfy that it’ll still take a long while until the ship departs, so that he doesn’t need to worry and take things easy, and also to buy some food in the harbour, since the stuff they sell on the ship is expensive.

Porfy buys a sandwich and waits a bit, and talks to Apollo. A girl then arrives, a few years younger than Porfy is, and she gets interested by Apollo. She wants to give him a few candies, though Porfy notes how owls don’t eat sweets. The girl is disappointed, and then her parents come and pick her up. She gives two sweets to Porfy, of which he saves one. Mina loved candy, and he wants to save that one for when he meets her again.

Porfy then falls asleep and nearly misses the boat, though Apollo wakes him in time for him to barely catch it. The ship departs, and Porfy looks at the ever-shrinking shore of Greece (if you ever believed that this series didn’t have quality-graphics, then this scene will prove you wrong). The small girl then arrives again, and introduces herself as Marika. She too wonders where Porfy’s parents are, and Porfy says that they’re not there. In response to that, Marika drags Porfy to her parents. Porfy then explains what happened to him. All three become worried about him, but Porfy says that he’ll be fine. He leaves them after tasting some of their cheese-pie that reminds him of the cheese-pie that his mother made.

Porfy then looks at the ocean, and reveals to Apollo how today is supposed to be his thirteenth birthday, and he gets a bit nostalgic again. When it’s evening Porfy looks for the cabin he’s supposed to sleep in. To his luck, it’s also occupied by a bunch of scary truck-drivers. These guys mean no harm, but of course they seem scary in Porfy’s eyes, so he runs away when one of them tries to touch his backpack with his father’s tools. Out of all places, he ends up falling asleep at the same spot that Mina slept at, two episodes ago. So sweet.

The next morning, Porfy is woken up by Marika an her parents, who are of course wondering why Porfy didn’t sleep in his room. They offer him breakfast, and then Marika grabs a piece of bread, and manages to feed it to Apollo. Marika’s father then suggests Porfy that some of the people boarding this ship might have been on it when Mina boarded it, like truck-drivers who went to Greece to stock up. In the end, one of Porfy’s “roommates” (they’ve all been wondering how he spent the night, by the way) remembered having seen Mina, along with a gypsy-woman. They then tell Porfy that the two of them left with a car, and had no idea where they went afterwards.

Porfy is a bit sad to still be far away from Mina, but at least he now knows that she’s with another woman. The ship arrives at the port of a certain city in Italy, and the episode ends.

One thing that’s really caught my attention in this and the previous episode is the emphasis on the kindness of humans. I’ve seen so many series now with a lot of focus on hate and other dark themes, which it’s quite refreshing to finally see how humans also have a side that helps out others. One series that especially looks like the complete opposite of Porfy no Nagai Tabi is Kaiba, where people and human lives are considered as trash at times. Incidentally, those are two of my favourite shows at the moment. ^^;

One thing that I really miss in nearly every anime is the ability for characters to just walk up to random people and make a small talk, without that character suddenly turning out to be really important for some sort of side-plot. I can understand how you’d usually ignore random by-passers, but when a character is alone on a ship like in this episode, and needs a bit of time to kill, it would make much more sense to find a random person and have a small chat with than just sit around and do nothing. It’s a shame you don’t often see that, because it’s exactly those things that make the world that the story tries to create come to live. Not every character needs to spawn his entire live-story if he’s introduced, and Marika and her parents did very well as serving as random people you just run into, without ever putting the focus on themselves, and instead they just try to help Porfy. I hope this rambling made sense.

There’s also one long-term thing I’m really curious about: what age will Porfy be at the end of the series? I’m intrigued at how the creators are planning to end this series. Will he just be like Damon, and remain a traveller for his entire live, or will he settle down? Will this series just like Les Miserables feature a major time-skip? Will Porfy remain a kid forever? Or will he grow up? Will he ever see Zaimis again?

I also wonder: how are the creators going to handle the language-barrier. Porfy obviously doesn’t know Italian, though I’m fine if the creators just ignore this. For as far as I know, NO series (or movie or whatever for that matter), whether anime or not anime, has ever managed to handle the language-barrier perfectly. Black Lagoon’s attempt, for example, failed horribly. Kishin Taisen Gigantic Formula gets points for trying, but that series too got hammered down by horrible Engrish.