Welcome everyone, to my 2nd show of the season, Kaina and the Great Snow Sea! For the sake my sanity, and word count, I’m just going to call it Kaina from now on. I hope you’ll forgive me this transgression. Now without further ado, onto the episode!
Starting off, lets take a deeper look at Kaina’s animation and production. As we mentioned in our initial impressions, Kaina… Kinda (heh) looks like shit. The character models look plasticky and stiff, in what has sort of become Polygon Pictures staple. That’s no surprise. But where I do want to give the CGI credit is in the monsters and their design. This CGI may look like shit on soft, squishy people, but on hard carapace-d giant bugs like the Tree Fly? It doesn’t look half bad. Not great, but it certainly sticks out far less on something we know isn’t supposed to be recognizably human. Pair that with Kaina’s greatest production strength, it’s absolutely stellar background art, and you have what I think is an ultimately passable art style. At the very least it’s enough that I picked it up to blog about it for a season.
Getting into the actual content, this episode starts with something we all expected: There is no sage! Ririha’s quest was in vain and now she’s stuck at the top of a tree with no way down! Guess you’re part of the village no girl. In the mean time, how about you give the tree country bumpkins, and us, some backstory on why you needed the sage? And that’s just what she does. And you know what? It’s kind of interesting. Oh the evil nation attacking everyone else and subjugating cities isn’t, that’s a dime a dozen plot point. But the idea of building cities at the base of the great trees, and the amount of land available to do so decreasing as the snow sea piles higher and higher, is really cool. It’s effectively just an ocean, but the idea of drowning in snow adds some flavor to it.
Going back to the evil nation though, this is something we’ve seen a lot of in anime. What kind of makes it work for Kaina though is the very premise of why this nation is superior. From what Ririha told us, all the other nations are locked to the base of trees. But it seemed from the images during her story that this evil nation doesn’t have the same limitation. Via some kind of ancient technology, which we will talk about, they seem to have built some kind of… float/sailing city, allowing them to go from tree to tree. Add on to that the resource war in a dying world and you have something that, despite being seen before, should at least work. Let’s just ignore the issue of a water shortage in a world with a fluffy snowy sea, maybe one day they will figure out snow melts.
After a story like that, plus this is an anime so we need some kind of inciting incident, Kaina end’s up going with her on her journey back home. That’s all rather expected. What was unexpected however was that he left with the Old People’s blessing. I was fully prepared for Kaina to make them have to sneak out, leaving against the wishes of his elders. The sort of “Rebel against the older generation” that we see so often. But instead it seems that the Elder’s recognized that staying with them simply meant living, and eventually dying, alone after they passed on. So rather then subject him to a life as the last tree dweller, they sent him down to meet and live with the snow people. It was kind of poignant, if you ask me. And only slightly ruined by the plasticky textures of their faces.
It’s in climbing down the tree that we finally come back around to the technology thing. As Kaina so helpfully points out, they don’t have a long enough rope to get down. Lucky for them the Sign Keeper has some super special ancient artifacts for just such an occasion: Steel carabiners! I actually chuckled at this, because normally the legendary artifact given on the outset of the heroes journey is something grand. And maybe the little laser cutter for making hooks in bark qualifies as that! But I really like the idea that steel has become this mythical material in a dystopia, and that simple mechanical climbing tools are far behind their ability to produce now. It makes you wonder just what it was the evil nation found to turn them into such a super power if simple carabiners have achieved artifact level.
With that we just have the question of what happens when Kaina and Ririha reach the bottom. If you’ll remember, Ririha doesn’t have a boat down there. They got boarded and killed by the evil soldiers, and they seemed to ride some kind of snow dolphin to get here. So how are they going to get off the tree? Will they be captured by the soldiers, or perhaps steal a ship? Build a boat out of bark? I’m really curious how they are going to traverse and survive this dystopian world, which makes sense since generally that’s the most interesting part of these kinds of stories. Even if the evil nation stuff is pretty standard, if Kaina can make surviving in this world interesting, then the show should be interesting. Only time will tell on that one though.
So yeah, all in all I’m still a fan of Kaina and the Great Snow Sea. I’m not expecting to much just yet, and the production leaves a lot to be desired. But I don’t mind slow starts spent building a believable and fantastical world so long as that world actually ends up getting used. I want to see more of the kinds of creatures that survive in this environment! I want to learn why the Snow Sea is piling up, what these giant trees and the canopy between their branches are, and what exactly is powering the sailing city. If Kaina can give me satisfactory answers to those questions/desires, then I think I’ll have a good time with it. If nothing else, I’m going to be taking pictures of these backgrounds every week.
Oh and P.S. Make sure to keep an eye out for those green floaty things. I don’t know what they are yet, possibly some kind of lifeforce representation of the planet guiding them, but they clearly seem intelligent and benevolent since they appear just in time to save/delay/guide our heroes.
