Category: Mononoke

Taking screenshots was quite hard for this episode, considering the raw file I obtained. It seems that Japan was hit by quite a big tsunami, which covered the entire east-coast of the country, and most of the second half of the episode had some warnings and information pasted on top of it. Let’s hope the damages were minor. Anyway, this episode introduces the third story: Nopperabou. A woman has killed a number of relatives, and now she’s sentenced to death. The Medicine seller doubts this story, and suspects that a Mononoke is behind the killings, though the woman keeps insisting that she was the murderer. The Mononoke then arrives, in the form of a man, wearing a fox mask. The mask prevents MS from finding out the katachi, and the Mononoke uses this to erase the guy’s face. The Mononoke flees with the woman, after which he proposes to her. She agrees. Later, we see that MS got his face back with the help of a Japanese ritual. He then tries to see the real face behind the Mononoke’s mask, and the episode ends. Luckily, the episode was fairly understandable again, but I must wait till the next episode to be for sure. If it’s again incomprehensible, I’ll wait for the subs for the last two arcs, unfortunately. Anyway, I think that this Mononoke was the one who committed the murder, without the woman knowing it. The question is: where does he come from? It’s in any case clear that he’d do anything for her. I’m a bit afraid, though. In this episode, I noticed some flawed animation for the first time. There were a lot of shots of people in the background, and a few shots of the medicine seller were just off.]]>

Whoa, this quite possibly was the best episode of this series yet, but it’s also by far the hardest to understand. I haven’t been so confused in an episode since the episode in Seirei no Moribito where Barsa gets her spear fixed. If this series pulls such a stunt again, I may consider switching to the subs. Thankfully wabi sabi is following this series as well, and he managed to explain the events of this episode. Basically, the Priest’s sister entered that cabin in place of the monk, in order to fend off an ayakashi that was plaguing that sea. She did this out of love for him, while he didn’t feel anything for him. When he found out her motives, though, it continued to haunt him. Hence, the priest is the Makoto. This also probably explains why he sexually abused the monk. The atmosphere in this episode was awesome, though. Even though I couldn’t follow this episode, I loved it.]]>

About the only thing that I was afraid of for this series was that there wouldn’t be enough ideas for a fully fledged series. With this episode, these fears also got shattered. Umibouzu is one of the arcs that take up three episodes, and this episode spends most of its time fleshing out the different involved characters. How? By showing for each of them their biggest fear, with the help of illusions. I must say, it’s a brilliant idea, and with this show, it works extremely well. The owner of the ship is up first, and his biggest fear is seeing his beloved goldfish die. Quite the interesting fellow. He himself thinks that it’s losing all his money that’s his biggest fear. Next up, the samurai. According to himself, he has no fears, though Umibouzu shows him that he’s being haunted by the countless numbers of people whom he slaughtered. At this point, people are really starting to take Umibouzu (who appeared in the form of a strange fish with a Shamisen and the voice of Norio Wakamoto) seriously, since the owner went into OTL-position, and the samurai fainted. Our lovely servant from Bake Neko, however, is up next, though she can’t really describe her biggest fears. She originally thinks that she fears not being able to get into a great relationship the most, but Umibouzu shows her that she fears being unable to give proper birth. The medicine seller manages to bring her back to her senses by convincing her that everything is an illusion, and nothing has changed in reality. The bard has quite a strange fear. Manju. Apparently, they make him vomit. ^^; The medicine seller knows quite well what his fears are: a world without a Katachi, Makoto and Kotowari. In other words, void. It’s quite logical as his biggest weapon wouldn’t work, and the beginning of the episode already hinted that his life is linked to his sword somehow. Then the episode starts focusing at the real story of the arc when it’s the monk’s turn. His biggest fear is the priest. He may be his devoted master, but he’s been acting strange ever since they went on board of the ship. It also seems that the priest was the one who changed the course of the ship, and not Umibouzu, like I first thought. The priest seems to be the centre of this mystery, and he involved everyone in his problems. 50 years ago, something strange happened on that very sea. Umibouzu then uses strange ropes of fish to pull up a huge round chamber from within the tank of the ship. Inside seems to be a human, who’s rumoured to have been in there for fifty years! I’m sure as hell anticipating the next episode, as something tells me that something really disturbing happened fifty years ago.]]>

The name “Umibouzu” was rather confusing, especially with my lack of Japanese. After all, the “umi”-part could mean either sea or giving birth, and I could have sworn that “bouzu” meant little kid. Still, I was wrong. After looking up the kanji, it seems that we’re dealing with a seamonk here. Naturally, the episode again was pure awesomeness, and it has a very good chance of beating the first arc. At sea, we find ourselves a boat, carrying a strange companionship: The girl from Bake Neko, the owner of the ship, a bard, a monk, a priest, a swordsman and a medicine-seller. It’s there where Umibouzu releases its wrath on the poor ship. Here is what I believe what happened. It first makes the ship stray away from its course by placing a magnet near its compass. Then it calls its comrades, or a collection of fish ghosts to attack the ship. (I know they’re comrades, because otherwise the medicine seller would have figured out the Katachi by now).The medicine seller manages to repel them, but the fact remains that someone on the ship is hiding something. I’m putting my money on the monk. I wonder, though, do the goldfish on board have anything to do with the story? And what are the roles of the other characters? I’m looking forward to next week to find out. :)]]>

Seriously, Mononoke is pure awesomeness. It’s such a huge shame that there are so few people who gave this series a chance. Heck, the only blog-entry I saw on Animeblogger and Animenano came from a guy who didn’t like the style. Still, that doesn’t mean that I don’t love this series, and it’s going to be fun to blog. I’ve considered following this series subbed, but thankfully the dialogue turned out to be quite easy, with my biggest obstacle being some words I don’t know, instead of the usual incredibly long sentences. It’ll also probably take ages for this thing to get fully subbed, and I’m too impatient to wait for them. Well then, for those of you who haven’t seen Bake Neko: basically all you have to know is that the medicine seller needs three things before he’s able to slay a demon: the Katachi, Makoto and Kotowari, or the name of the demon, what really is going on and the events that made the demon act the way it did. He usually has no trouble finding the Katachi due to his knowledge (in this case it’s Zasshiki Warashi), but in order to get the Makoto and Kotowari, he needs the involved persons to open up. The central person for this story is a pregnant woman, who hired a room in an inn, owned by an old woman and her servant. The previous episode showed us strange cradles, a strange kid-like creature, the sound of playing children and the death of a guy who was supposed to be after her. So, the current episode basically explained the Makoto as follows: at one point, the inn used to be a brothel. And whenever a woman turned pregnant, the owner would kill her, since there wasn’t any chance for her anymore after that. I’m not sure whether the woman mentioned above worked at the same brothel, since the timelines don’t seem to match if she did, but the fact remains that she once was a prostitute as well, who fell in love with an important person. He offered to marry her, until he found out that she already was pregnant of him. She then managed to escape, but her former near-husband sent the guy after her that we saw getting killed at the previous episode. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this one. The Japanese may be easier than usual, it’s still vital to understand as much as possible. According to this, the Kotowari should be the following: the real form of Zasshiki Warashi is these rather strange children. They are, in fact, the unborn children who were killed by the owner of the brothel, and I believe that they were just searching for another mother. They’ve waited a long time until another pregnant woman showed up, which turned out to be our blonde woman. It now makes sense why they killed the guy in the previous episode: he was threatening their “mother”. Overall, this arc gave an awesome start to Bake Neko, but I still have to say that Bake Neko was better. But then again, Bake Neko had three episodes, compared to the two episodes of this episode. I’ve read somewhere that this series will feature 13 episodes, divided into five arcs. If this is true, and I had to guess, then the next arc will be another two-episoded one, after which the final three arcs will consist of three episodes. Ayakashi ~ Japanese Classic Horror already showed that the creators like to save the best for last, so I’m really excited to see the rest of this series.]]>