Dandy teleports down to a planet overrun by sentient plants who have organized themselves into nations, replete with spies and aggressively guarded borders, but his search for a rare alien instead turns up the secret to the planet...
I have a new favorite episode. This episode was a very different beast from what came before, but it was a sheer delight and is easily the most consummately crafted episode of the bunch so far.
Organic, colorful, hand-drawn - all words that spring to mind for this unique episode that really feels like the creation of someone with a strong artistic vision. A delight to behold because of its riot of beautiful otherworldly visuals, it has the hand-drawn feeling of the Michio Mihara episode, and was crammed from start to finish with creative ideas and pleasing visual schemes.
The characters looked quite different in the hands of the staff here, and even the atmosphere was different from what we've grown used to; the silly gags and irony are absent and the story is told at more of a remove, both in terms of staging of shots and the more restrained style of directing. But the pacing, humor, characters, animation, music and backgrounds all work so well together that the episode that you're too busy enjoying it to care. Certain moments gave me goosebumps because of the perfectly beautiful combination of otherworldly music, colors and shapes.
Eunyoung Choi is the creative brain behind the episode, having come up with the idea for the story (which was then written by Shinichiro Watanabe), designed the aliens, done the conceptual art (settei), and storyboarded and directed. She's one of the most talented people to emerge from the Masaaki Yuasa group alongside Michio Mihara, and already proved that she can go it alone on that episode of Wakfu that I mentioned in the previous post.
The creatures in the episode are among the most fascinating in the show so far. Rather than just one or two new aliens, we're regaled with an entire planet populated by creatures that seem like a blend of plants and microorganisms. With membranes and receptors that allow passage only to certain microbes and not others, and strange creatures matter-of-factly going about their strange business, the episode feels like a cross between Fantastic Planet and Fantastic Voyage.
This episode works splendidly well because you come away feeling like it's thoroughly explored the world of the characters. It feels real. Much of the episode's runtime is devoted to depicting in meticulous detail the interaction between the planet's plant inhabitants, like some kind of alien nature channel program. It's like in Planete Sauvage - you don't know the logic underpinning the crazy interaction of all these bizarre alien life forms, but it feels like there IS some logic there, and together they form a living ecosystem.
The nice part is that these things aren't overexplained, and yet you don't feel like they're underexplained. If the goal of this series was to regale us with a bewildering array of colorful alien creatures, this episode feels like the one that delivered the best in this regard, because it creates a whole planet that feels like it is actual pulsing with various life forms that are all interconnected. The episode actually takes the time to show us snippets of this interaction in a way that evokes the bigger picture. You really feel like you're in Dandy's shoes, recoiling at a bizarre creature and gazing in awe at a beautiful scene as he explores the new world.
And in the midst of all that, Eunyoung actually achieves the unlikely feat of making us invest in the strange plant creatures like the little one and her 'father'. The ending was actually surprisingly moving. The side-story about Meow meanwhile was amusing and added some variety to the proceedings while Dandy was on his adventure learning about the planet. So the episode isn't just artsy and quirky, love it or leave it - it has humor and heart too. It's a very likeable episode.
The episode even had something of a musical interlude, though it was very well done and didn't come across as an overt Disney-style musical interlude. In fact, the music of this episode was exceptional. With lots of odd noodly electronic soundscapes and a capella warbling, it was unusually organically linked to the goings-on, as if it had been specially commissioned for this episode. This is the first episode where the music felt simultaneously so beautiful and well integrated.
When I saw the preview I originally thought it was the Masaaki Yuasa episode, and many parts of the episode remind of his style. The episode felt like it could have come straight out of Kaiba. The visual style, with its weird colors and gradients, also reminded me of Cat Soup. This is perhaps due to a combination of the fact that Eunyoung has worked with him for so long and that the backgrounds were all drawn by Kevin Aymeric (tumblr), who was the art director of Yuasa's Kick Heart and is an incredibly talented and flexible artist. Look for more from this great talent in Masaaki Yuasa's upcoming Ping Pong.
(In a side-note, as a big fan of Disasterpeace, I bought The Floor is Jelly game when it came out to support him and because it looked awesome (and is), but I was surprised to find just now that the beautiful cover art was drawn by Kevin Aymeric.)
The sakkan was Kiyotaka Oshiyama, who first came to my attention for his work on Denno Coil. I don't know his style well, but the characters here are very uniquely drawn, with the sort of meandering, organic line that I associate with Yuasa. It works very well for the plant creatures in this episode. Dandy looks quite different from previous episodes, but the drawings are fantastically well done, and if anything he looks even more yankee Elvis than before. The lines of the characters bulge and twist in different directions in a stylized way that reminds me of a Yuasa production.
A bevy of talented animators helped bring the episode to life - Gosei Oda, Norifumi Kugai, Cedric Herole, Ikuro Kuwana - but I can't distinguish their work. Anyway it's not like in some episodes where the animation isn't particularly interesting most of the time except for certain highlights of good animation - every single shot of animation is pleasing to watch in this episode. This is a great example of an episode that is a perfectly balanced whole.
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[Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 
[Economic Policy Institute, 
