We all have this time to be going through the backlog of old media, which is how I watched Kino's Journey for the first time. The 2003 version. Others compare it to the 2017 version, often with the newer and prettier version not coming off well, but I haven't seen that and don't intend to, so I'll be ignoring that. There's also the manga. But I was pleased enough with this version, which seemed a lightning in a bottle I wouldn't expect to be replicated elsewhere, because it made some painful decisions in its portrayal.
Let's talk about existentialism, a favorite topic of this blog already. At its simplest core, it is about one sentence: Existence precedes essence. This is in contrast to "essence precedes existence", which is the belief that things have meaning or purpose prior to their physical existence. The belief that the soul precedes the body, or that the destination precedes the journey. In opposite to that, Existentialism isn't exactly "life without meaning" but rather "life before meaning." You're here, now you gotta figure out why.
While not a feature of current existentialist media, originally it was also very austere and minimalist. Albert Camus is the best example of this, particularly his novel "The Stranger." The scene whose action determines the entire plot of the novel is just this:
“I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. ”Sure, an action happened. We don't know why (and neither does the murderer ever know.) We don't feel the visceral detail of it. We don't see the infinite tragedy of the human life that was lost, and the perpetrator hardly feels like a rich, complex human himself. A thing happened. That's all.
Elsewhere I have established the spectrum between Humanist art and Archetypical art from where art serves its narrative masters by filling in as many details and connections as possible, to where Archetypical art creates very simple, stark shapes of characters. This 60's era of existentialism made use of the Archetypical, though not all existentialism in the future did. (The Little Prince, is another classic Archetypical existentialist example.)
Kino's is an amazing throwback to this art/philosophical combination. We do not get thorough backstories of everyone, even of the main characters besides one point in their lives. The animation is simple and clear, without much ornamentation or details. When Kino visits a "country" we meet one or two people, and rarely see anyone else. These are not "real people" in the in depth, conflicted, rich sense. These are certainly not "real places" but much more like fairytale settings (and before any modernist has gotten their hands on them by exploring the economy and sociopolitical relations of such a setting.) You could almost say the anime itself is fairytale like, except the substance of what happens and what is said is anything but that.
The substance is Kino being a self-driven agent, and often arguing about that (or refusing to argue) with his snarky motorcycle or disbelieving townspeople. She's on a journey (though her gender is ambiguous for several episodes, serving as the ultimate null-identity. [Edit: I've been told Kino denies both genders.]) To where? Who knows. Which direction should they take? Doesn't matter. (The very first scene is Kino and the motorcycle arguing over what journey means and why are they doing this. The motorcycle makes some good, if ill-tempered points. Kino doesn't care.)
The theme of freedom comes up a lot. Hardly surprising in a work about journeying, and that I am calling existentialist (birds and wide open skies are also commonly referenced imagery.) So just acknowledge we pointed it out and move on to more astonishing material.
I'd say the theme of "when to take a life" comes up next most often. Kino, despite looking like a child on a motorcycle, is a crack shot and athletic duelist, who carries a variety of lethal weapons. Kino basically is capable of killing anyone she is interacting with at any time, and can transition to doing that very suddenly. It is as if at all moments she contains the question "Should I kill this person?" even when no one else is asking this.
Which Kino devotes a lot of thought to. Kino never claims to be a pacifist, and gets herself into violent enough situations that you wouldn't believe her if she did (and kills several people by the end.) But she takes deciding whether to take a live very seriously and in particular resents anything trying to make her take one.
The second episode starts with her shooting a rabbit in the snow. She brings it to three stuck travelers who are starving. She contemplates with her motorcycle whether killing one rabbit to save three humans was a good choice. Obviously any of us would say that's a bargain, but she is distinctly uncomfortable that she inserted herself into the decision of who should live and die. Later the travelers betray her, badly enough that she is forced to kill them. She continues to angst - not because she killed three bad men, but because she had killed the rabbit to no benefit.
Every episode is like this. It's a meditation on "why we do things" that is not about the reasons behind our intertwined lives, but the choices in an open and cold field that we have no explanation for. I have grown tired of "twists" and dramatic reversals, but with Kino, every single episode had some change at the end that a) surprised me and b) was loyal to the existentialist themes.
The reveal in the episode about robots where the maid is a robot is not just that her human masters are robots too, but that the nanny was a human roboticist who made the masters and then pretended to be a robot just to hide from the trauma of her own life. Without a human to give them purpose, the real robots commit suicide.
In the final episode she goes to a land that is known to be hostile to travelers, but is actually being very generous to her. She promises to stay only her three days (which is her custom.) She is guided by a young girl who reminds Kino of herself. It's such a good time she decides to stay longer than usual. The town is up in arms over this, so Kino leaves, with gifts from a once again kind town. That night a volcano washes away the entire village. Kino finds a note in the gifts saying the town knew its end was coming, and just wanted to live life as they always had, and to be kinder to travelers so they would be remembered well. It's devastating to our usually stoic protagonist. And it is both a callback to a previous town that believed the end was coming due to a holy book of poetry they believed too much in, and to the episode where we see an older traveler wordlessly give his life for a young girl so she can have freedom, and that young girl becomes Kino. "What do you do in the face of death?" and "What could be worth dying for, not in the sense of Helping More People, but your own priorities" are classic existential questions.
One of my favorite things about the show is how often Kino is asked the same question, but gives different answers. Repetition is of course a common Archetypical tool, but Kino's insistence on not repeating herself says a lot about her.
One episode starts with Kino meeting a man repairing railroad tracks. He has been doing this for decades, because that was the job he was given, and he has never questioned whether he should stop. When asked her thoughts, Kino tells the story of a land where robots could do all the work, so the people created stressful jobs just to feel they deserved the rewards. Kino continues on and meets a second man, who is destroying the track, for as simple and bureaucratic reason as the first. He was told to, and never stopped, decades later. When asked her thoughts, Kino talks about the same land but from a different perspective. At last, Kino meets a man who is building a new track where the old one used to be. When asked her thoughts, Kino says it doesn't remind her of anything and just leaves. I cracked up. Kino refuses to spend her life repeating the same thing for no reason like these men.
The whole time, Kino is meeting these lands who have their deep and ingrained reasons for doing things the way they do (which are often bizarre to us.) This show is not a humanist description of "how amazing and different we all are," because frankly these lands are too absurd, and too minimalist, to evoke sympathy or understanding. The show is the Outsider marveling at these different ways, rarely passing judgment, and yet leaving everyone feeling judged when Kino leaves.
I really could relate every episode in such a short summary, both beautiful and stark, like a good joke. There's the episode where Kino is asked separately by a murderer and victim "what is your advice for travel?" and she gives them different advice "Don't get killed."/"Don't kill anyone." It's heart-breaking and also funny. And we don't take away an easy answer from it. The scene even had someone ask Kino "if you didn't want me to kill them, you could have stopped me", in a way very reminiscent of the existentalist classic Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen when arguing with Eddie Blake.
And of course, when Kino supports a local plucky girl inventor in her mission to make a flying machine, which beats everyone's doubts and actually flies, Kino expresses surprise. She never thought it would work. Her motorcycle asks "why did you help?" "I wanted to see what would happen." Kino was not acting as part of some heart-warming community tale, but rather as just someone who would sate their curiosity at the passive cost of human life.
Camus' Mersault shot an Arab because the afternoon was hot. We're appalled, but the existentialist fiction says that these reasons are no less "real" than the reasons that surround everything in our absurd culture. The Kino who joins a coliseum tournament claims no greater moral reason. We just do it.
