Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 41

Short Synopsis: Porfy goes along to the salesman’s home and wrecks a potential marriage.
Highlights: The pacing really gets faster and faster as the show goes on!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Well, there you have it. A few episodes ago, I wondered whether the soundtrack would change, now that Porfy’s in France. And here you go: this episode starts playing the accordions; I should have known.

In any case, the salesman grabs Porfy firmly, but he does offer him a ride to his house. There, it turns out that he has a daughter and two sons, who are living in a rather poor house. They offer him a couch to sleep on, and when he wakes up, the two sons have drawn a moustache on it. The salesman has already left for another job. Porfy then goes with the two of them (after having washed his face of course) into the town, to ask for Mina. He then finds out that they too don’t have a mother. When they look at one of the cars at the local toy store, he decides to make one from wood for them.

Back home, it turns out that Cecile, the daughter, is quite similar to Mina. She’s gentle, and likes acting and movies. She also dreams to become an actress, but she knows that she’s never going to make it. She even recites her favourite movie in front of Porfy just like Mina did. When she does, however, the owner of the house they’re living in pops up and tells her that her father is three months behind on rent.

A little while later, Porfy’s done with the car, and the two sons are very enthusiastic to see it, especially because it’s modelled after their father’s truck. Cecile offers Porfy to stay for as long as he wants, but Porfy leaves immediately after he realizes that he’s taking food from a very poor family, especially after the little sons start complaining that they haven’t had enough dinner.

We then see Porfy as he walks across a (beautiful) lake, and he sees a boat there. The only problem is that his money has finally run out, so he just goes there to look. He there meets a couple that’s about to marry, though the guy is telling a bunch of lies about his supposed family in Greece that was struck by an earthquake, in order to get some money from the woman, Matilda. Porfy, coming from Greece and having endured that earthquake, unknowingly exposes these lies while worrying about them, and Matila slaps the guy. But as it turns out, Matila was the one who was rejected because of Porfy’s meddling, and not the other way around. Matilda actually liked how he was nice to her.

Still, Matilda ends up buying a ticket for Porfy. (At this point, we don’t hear Porfy telling about his sister anymore, so I assume this gets omitted from now on). Matilda asks him what he’s going to do next, and so Porfy says that he needs to work for a bit of more money, and she happens to know someone who can hire him. The episode then ends as the boat arrives at yet another beautifully drawn town.

That beginning of the episode was really a nostalgic moment, which anyone will probably recognize from their childhood. That “oh, I screwed up and he’s going to punish me”-feeling, while the salesman just kept silent. He’s quite an interesting character; he hardly said anything and just accepted that he was fooled by Porfy.

This is also a thing that only took me so long to realize, but the pacing of this series just keeps going faster and faster. The series started off with a very sloooooooow slice-of-life arc that took up 12 episodes. The disaster-arc was also pretty long. Then came travel-arcs from three to four episodes, until Rome, after which the show became episodic. And now, as the series enters its final quarter, the stories become even too short for individual episodes, and every episode shows Porfy as he meets two different places. The only exception was when Porfy met the car mechanic and the woman in the abandoned city, but if you consider those as one standalone arc, then everything falls into pieces perfectly. Let me just say that this definitely ISN’T something I expected this series’ finale to turn into!

At this point, I consider Les Miserables to be a bit better than Porfy no Nagai Tabi, but that’s only because of the longer travel-arcs. Not only was their pacing slow, but their writing was just way too sloppy for this series, whereas Les Miserables was very thoroughly built up through its entire story, and had some very effective climaxes because of it. I don’t expect Porfy to become better than Les Miserables in its final quarter, simply because Les Miserables surpassed itself in just about every aspect for its final quarter, but it’s nevertheless getting interesting where the creators will be going. The pacing will definitely something to look forward to, as it removed just about the only flaw of this series out of these travel-arcs: the incredibly slow pacing. The creators have also shown that they’re masters at building up, so really… what the heck could they be planning?