Cheap Kino's Journey - Emerging Lanes (Vol. 2) (DVD) Price

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Customer Reviews of Kino's Journey - Emerging Lanes (Vol. 2)

Chaos Still Reigns...
Once again we find Kino and Hermes on the road. This disc features three episodes. The first is a set of small travels, begining with a trek along a railroad. They encounter a series of men along the rails, one cleaning them for use, the next dismantling the old track that has fallen into disuse, and the third rebuilding the tracks for future use. Kino relates a story of a country where people no longer have to work, but do in order to maintain essential stress. Then they come to a nation that has pushed the law of majority rules to a horrid conclusion.
This also features a two-part story, with Kino wandering into a nightmarish land where travelers are forced into a series of gladiatorial games by a cruel and insane king. This is the first time that we see Kino take a proactive stance in a country that she is visiting, and it is a powerful act at that.
There are those who decry this series as being empty and useless. Some of them have even reached for their thesauruses in an effort to sound superior and important. They accuse devotes of this show of following the crowd and jumping on the bandwagon.
As for myself, I had read no reviews, been told nothing by anyone, and had no preconcieved notions when I first encountered this series. I first discovered it due to a promotional insert in Newtype magazine featuring the first episode, and I was immediately hooked by the soft narrative style. And for the record, of the dozens of free inserts that I have recieved with Newtype, I have only been moved to buy two of the series they've previewed. This was one of them.
Kino's Journey is not for everyone. It isn't fast paced action and mindless pyrotechnics. It's a character driven peice, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you'd be best leaving this alone.

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A LITTLE LACKING IN PACE AND IDEAS
The second volume of Kino's Journey doesn't seem to be up to the quality of the 1st volume. Actually, since the 3rd episode, the storytelling has taken a plunge. The first episode on this volume is entitled "3 Men Along the Rails". Afraid of getting lost in a forest, Kino and Hermes decide to follow an abandoned rail line that seems like it hasn't been used for years. To their surprise they come upon a guy polishing and refurbishing the line. He says he's been doing it for 50 years. The old man asks Kino to tell him a story from one of his travels and so he tells him the story about a country where nobody works. What follows as they go along the line and through stories Kino tells is the pointlessness of work, or rather, how people occupy their lives with some sort of action, whether they like it or not to make life worth living.

"Coliseum" is a two part episode in which Kino comes to a country which is segregated into two classes. First class citizens live on the surface and have all the luxuries of life while those that are not citizens are little more than slaves to them and must live underground in horrible slums. People who are new to the land must fight in gladiatorial battles or face slavery. Whoever wins the contest becomes a citizen and is allowed to add one law of their choosing to the country. Kino decides to fight.

The first episode seemed very disjointed because it did not focus on the main story enough. It told a number of shorter tales within its 22 minute timeframe at the expense of focus. The Coliseum episodes were better and had some good action scenes but suffered because the whole gladiator thing has been done to death so many times. This dvd was still a lot better than most of the anime out there though. Kino is a great character. Also, the theme song is a beauty. Hopefully, Volume 3 will have more episodes with a single storyline, instead of mini-episodes within episodes.

Some production sketches, Clean Openings/Closings. Not much in the way of extras.

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Whoa! Violence, politics, and social commentary
When my friend Troy spoke to me today, he said, "I will *NEVER* challenge your taste in anime again". He was talking about the first volume of Kino's Journey.

This one is similar in quality, but slightly different structurally, mainly because the second story, "Coliseum", is split over two episodes. "Coliseum" is the better one, because it takes what could be a Ray Bradbury short and twists it into the contextual fabric of the rest of the series. "Coliseum" is, in part, about choices-- hard ones-- and how to deal with them. It could have been done clumsily, in the vein of American film blockbusters like Deathrace 2000 or The Running Man, but the writing, direction, and visual choices in this version come together to make a subtle commentary about what we value in entertainment and government.

In conclusion, I have one eensy nit to pick. Kino's gender is already known, since Episode 4 of Vol. 1, Idle adventurer; why, then, is it still necessary to keep the mystery alive (in "Coliseum", some refer to Kino as "Missy", "Miss Kino", etc., but the fight announcer consistently says things like, "Mr. Kino-- you're up!")?