English Dub Review: Sakura Quest “The Rural Masquerade”

Follow your passions or die a zombie.

Spoilers Below

Great new opportunity! A small-budget movie wants to film principally in Manoyama, in love with the rural, small town atmosphere. This means that everyone who watches the movie will hear about Manoyama, and might come visit! There’s a lot of work to be done before filming begins, so everyone gets to work… except Maki. Despite having acting experience and time as a stage hand, she wants nothing to do with this project. Even without her, the girls get things moving along. Permits, extras, permissions from owners. They only have a couple slight hiccups. For one, Chitose (owner of a traditional sweets shop and mother to Ririko) refuses to have any filming in her shop, citing it would disrupt business. She relents when Ririko reminds her that the movie would have manju buns featured. If they don’t use the Oribe Shop’s manju, they would have to go with the Chupacabura Manju. Our second issue is a bit more… complicated. In the final scene of the movie, the house is to be burned down. The director wants it to be a really old house, and to make it look run down. The one he wants, well… Shiori claims she can’t find the owners. She totally does find the owners, and they actually WANT it to be burned down… What’s her deal?

Filming begins, and most of the town is out in the streets as extras. Even Ushimatsu has a role. As a zombie. So nothing’s changed. This movie may not have been what the tourism board was banking on, given that it is a zombie flick with a haunted house, but they haven’t completely noticed yet. One of the main actresses has to back out, and Yoshino approaches her to be a stand-in. She utterly refuses, and runs off. Sanae has had it with Maki’s lack of contribution. When she goes to confront her, she sees her in the middle of a conversation with the starlet of the film! Turns out, this actress joined the same agency as Maki, but was willing to do strange and disgusting things to get noticed. Her career blossomed while Maki’s stagnated. She gave up, and felt that if her career in showbiz were to take off now, it would be wrong. So, she has turned her back on acting entirely. Sanae scolds her. It’s one thing to not know your passion, or even to take a break after a setback. But running from your calling is self-destructive. Maki clenches her fist, but is she resolving to follow her dreams, or fighting the truth?

This episode was absolutely beautiful. Every shot from the first half was loaded with gorgeous scenery. There was great attention to detail, not only in larger shots of unmoving things but in smaller, moving things. One shot focused on a cat close up. it was intricately drawn and lifelike. The next shot zoomed out a great distance, but there was incredible detail on it even then. It’s motion was very natural, feeling almost as if it were rotoscoped. The scene with the children playing the taiko drums was perfectly rendered, and the timing of the drumming was spot on with the music. I noticed how the scene in the cafe had the owner’s daughter blush in a subtle way while other things were going on. That way, if you were paying attention, you would understand what was going on before they took pains to focus on her face. I found next to no errors in the animation, which is astounding for traditional work like this. Again, their use of CG is very intentional, and works in places that traditional animation would be difficult to do smoothly without an insane budget. The one that I noticed was the watermill wheel. They used CG here so that they could give it the same amount of detail as its surroundings, but still have it animate well. Perfect choices.

Voice acting was similarly on the high end. Even minor characters have life infused into them here. Not only do I feel that all of these characters are grounded in reality, but they feel more alive than some live-action shows would. Further, the cast’s timing and the localization scripting is on point. I scrutinized the syncing on long-distance shots of the words to the mouths, and I was not disappointed. They took pains to make it look like those words were really coming out of those characters mouths, even though the video was originally geared for them to speak Japanese. Excellent job!

As far as the plot goes, we’ve been given a number of different plot hooks in this episode. We have seen Maki’s backstory, and it explains a bit of why she’s so adamant against her nickname from the show she was in. We’re still waiting to see how this resolves. At the same time, Shiori’s history with the doomed building is left a complete mystery, and may lead us to deeper things with her. I’d like to see that. Despite the fact that she’s been in the group the longest, we haven’t seen much from her, other than the fact that she’s sweet and hard working. I want to see some more depth from her character. Lastly, we can see the restaurant owner’s daughter has developed a crush on someone, and his face is the only one that can take her from hating the world to a blushing schoolgirl in a second. I want to see if they’ll do anything with that, or if it’s a one off. My only complaint on the episode is that it felt a little slow at times, but with a show like this, you have to roll with the slow. I give this episode eight runaway actresses out of ten.