Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro – 09

「笛の音」 (Fuenone)
“The One Who Bears the Flute”

One of the common criticism about the Star Wars prequels (episodes I to III) is that it had too much politics. Too much blah blah about taxes and treaties and queens that need to be elected, not enough space battles and beam swords. Yeah, I get it. Who watches parliamentary debates unless it’s the kind that devolves into a circus? If we can’t even get past our apathy for the politics of our own governments what chance does a fictional one have? And subject matter aside, it just doesn’t play well on screen. In a visual medium, do we just want to watch people talking in sober, poker-faced settings?

So I don’t blame the Utawarerumono adaptation for cutting out a lot of that stuff. The visual novel packs in a lot about the roles of the owlos, the geopolitics of their territories, and their relationship with the Crown but a visual novel, visual though it may be, is a medium of words and can afford to be slower and more thorough. Anime does not have that luxury.

These cuts aren’t without cost, though. This setting information may not drive the plot or provide any action, but they do build up the world. And the world is what gives context to the plot and the action. It gives a sense of scope and gives meaning to our characters’ actions. For example, the prestige of Rulutieh being the princess’s handmaiden only makes sense in the context, just like the temerity of her sister’s defiance. Consider, for comparison, episodes VII through IX of Star Wars, which may have cut back on the world building perhaps too much. There, the world has no substance at all and accordingly the conflict has no scope. There seems to be no wider galaxy that cares about the First Order v Resistance showmatch and as such we the audience has less reason to care as well.

But again, politics and diplomacy is boring so in the end we’re just going to settle disputes with violence.

This fight is also something the anime has scaled back, and again for a good reason, it seems. The visual novel was also a tactial RPG, as we’ve discussed and the fight between Oshtor and Shis was a gameplay segment involving two sides worth of chess pieces. In the anime, it’s just a duel, and I think the scene is better for it. For one, the anime has not really have a good grasp of how to handle multi-character action, with a lot of them having not much to do other than to throw out one attack and then go off-screen. This one-on-one actually has choreography and a back-and-forth, and distilled the conflict into something personal. It also further developed Oshtor tapping into his mask and I assume something will come out of that at some point.

The end result? They managed to fit Rulutieh’s character arc into one episode without too much fuss, which is pretty good work. Yeah, maybe the art couldn’t keep up and all the models went off a bit this episode, but let’s just pretend that’s the price we have to pay in animation.