Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 34

Short Synopsis: Porfy arrives at a town with some strange customs.
Highlights: Porfy’s back! New background tunes! Awesome background art! Thought-provoking story! Increased pacing! No “I need to save you”-subplot!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Okay, I think the phrase “IT’S ABOUT BLOODY TIME” fits here like no other. It’s been more than TWO WEEKS since this episode aired. I suspect that the one guy who did the uploads for this series went on a holiday or something, and that’s when you get this. Still, I have no idea who this bloke is, but thanks for continuing to upload this wonderful series, even though its low popularity.

The summary is going to be very short this time, as I have a ton of thoughts and I still have two more episodes waiting to be blogged. Basically, Porfy arrives at a town, and stays with a poor family. There’s something strange going on in that town, though: they have a ritual where they sacrifice old things to the angels, so that they can live a happy life afterwards. This goes for dolls, but also living things as donkeys and old people. The entire episode was basically about Porfy, realizing that there are people with very different customs than himself.

And the best thing: HE NEVER DID ANYTHING TO CHANGE THEIR VIEWS! There was no sort of “here he comes to save the daaaaaay!”-themes that you could find in the travel arcs between episodes 20 and 30. This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for: Porfy who meets other peoples and cultures, and gets a bit of a taste of their customs. I really wonder what Porfy would have done if he ran into this town, right after starting his journey. I bet that he would have bugged the villagers to change their ways.

I must say: I really hope that the episodic stories continue. It’s strange: some series are better when their stories are just one episode long, while others are better with multi-episode arcs. As it turns out, Porfy’s travel arcs are at their best when they’re just quick storylines that only take up one episode. It really keeps the series on its toes, through the already incredibly slow pacing of this series.

Also, the background art in this episode seemed better than it’s ever been. Especially the flower-garden was absolutely gorgeous, but the entire town was beautiful. There also were some new tunes added to the soundtrack, and they also sounded really nice. They added to the empty mood that came from the town in this episode.

Still, I do think that the next instalment of the World Masterpiece Theatre does need to put some more effort into establishing its viewer-base. As this episode showed, there are hardly any people who are interested in this series, apart from World Masterpiece fanatics that happen to know Japanese. You indeed need to put some effort into this series in order to be really able to enjoy it, since nothing really happens throughout the first twelve episodes. I think that the next WMT, whatever it’s going to be, needs to spice its introduction up. Make people want to come back and watch it, instead of starting immediately with the building up. There’s no doubt that this is one of the most well-written series of 2008, but that’s not going to matter if nobody wants to check it out. Seirei no Moribito, for example, did things a bit more wisely: it also had a lot of slice-of-life moments, where nothing really happened, and its pacing was also very slow, but the third episode did feature an awesome fight-scene that kept its viewers watching long enough to see the other beauties of that series.