Hi again, everyone. It’s time to announce our newest Anime Book Club selection. And the winner as of 12:35AM today is…
Kino’s Journey!
Unsurprisingly, this series got the most votes; two thirds of people who voted said they’d be interested in watching it, and that was far-and-away the most agreed-upon result. I think this will be a great watch, as well as a great starting point for some discussions.
Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is a new animated take on the Kino’s Journey novel, which had a previous anime adaptation back in 2003 with a couple of additional OVA episodes a couple of years after that. I’ve watched both series, though I purposely avoided a re-watch of the original version before watching this one since I saw a lot of other critics comparing them and I wanted to judge this version on its own merits. I really enjoyed this one a lot. Perhaps after we’re done tackling this series, I might go back and re-watch the original at that point. In any case, I encourage you to go into this viewing process with an open and hungry mind!
I would like to start by watching 2 episodes a week. If that timing doesn’t work out well, we can watch more or less at a time. Each Sunday I’ll put up a discussion post with episode summaries, some of my own thoughts, and some potential discussion questions. Discussion can happen in the post comments section. I’ll monitor each post on an ongoing basis and make sure that people’s comments are approved (if you’ve commented here before, you should be good-to-go, but I have a basic filter going where I have to moderate new commenters so I can catch bad language, spam, or trolling from unfamiliar sources).
Because I’m going to be out-of-town this weekend, let’s start things on Sunday the 17th:
- Episodes 1-2; Discussion starts on Sunday, June 17th
- Episodes 3-4; Discussion starts on Sunday, June 24th
- Episodes 5-6; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 1st
- BREAK – I will be attending and presenting at CONvergence July 5-8, but since this is halfway through the series I may put up a short post where people can talk about their feelings so far.
- Episodes 7-8; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 15th
- Episodes 9-10; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 22nd
- Episodes 11-12; Discussion starts on Sunday, July 29th
- Final thoughts, etc. – Sunday, August 5th
Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World is available on Crunchyroll and Hulu. The dubbed version is available on Funimation if that is what you’d prefer (I’ll be watching the Japanese language version and my posts will be based on that).
Thanks again to everyone who voted, and happy watching!