English Dub Review: Saiyuki Reload Blast “Sky Burial”

It’s the circle of life, and none of us get out of it alive.

Spoilers Below

The same force that has been making demons go crazy has altered the western landscape. That means that right in the middle of the road, there’s a mountain range. And guess who gets to climb it. That’s right! The Sanzo party. The sucky part is, as they approach the top, a horde of demons gathers to kill them. Thankfully, our heroes manage to get to the top and turn them all into corpses. Just as the last one drops, the dead are swarmed by vultures. The carrion eaters are thankful for the meal, or at least, that’s what their caretaker says. He guides the party back to town for a meal and some rest. It’ll cost them, though. The town has been having a string of bad luck since the demon wave. Someone has been kidnapping people, and they would just feel better if that priestly-looking dude Sanzo would recite some sutras for the blessing. If only he was actually a priest and knew the sutras for tha- Oh wait, he is. Cool. The villagers begin discussing with Sanzo’s companions about their suspicions. They think the weird bird caretaker is the one behind all this nonsense with the disappearances. The party agrees to go have a word with him.

The caretaker is a nice enough guy. A vegetarian, to boot. He cares for the vultures because they had been used for the village’s burial rites. They would leave their dead out on top of the mountain to be eaten by birds so that they returned to the circle of life. Since the demon wave, however, they’ve had to bury their dead underground, as the mountain is too dangerous. The party has no suspicions that he’s behind the disappearances, and prove it shortly thereafter by catching the real kidnappers. Everything seems to be going swimmingly until a villager recognizes a child’s mitten Gojyo found. It belonged to a child who had recently been buried. But that mitten was up on the mountain! Sanzo and Hakkai head off to the cemetery to confirm the priest’s suspicions, while Gojyo is sent to rescue Goku, who had gone off to see the caretaker earlier that morning. He arrives just in time. The caretaker is about to kill Goku to feed him to the birds! Apparently, the man went crazy after seeing his son get eaten by the birds and has been worshipping the vultures ever since. He’s been defiling graves to take the recently deceased and feed his birds with their remains. Gojyo chops off the man’s hand, and takes Goku back to the village, as the bird man bleeds out. As he lay dying, a vulture arrives to consume him.

This episode was sadly a bit too much of the classic Saiyuki’s formula. Go to exotic places, meet exotic people, and kill/get killed by them. How do we know that bird-man is evil? By how frikkin’ nice he is! If anyone in this show is hyper nice, they’re either secretly evil or about to die to a very obvious evil. I halfway expected them to reveal he had hired those kidnappers to get people for his birds. This show makes you a cynic, really. What is good about this episode is the philosophical dialogue between bird-man and Goku, and the fact that it dredges stuff up for him that he has no direct knowledge of.

For those of you who are new to this franchise, Saiyuki is based on the ancient Chinese epic “Journey to The West”. It focuses on the journey of the monk Xuanzang or Tripitaka (here represented by Sanzo) as he attempts to acquire a missing scripture from India. He is joined by Sun Wukong (Goku), the Monkey King, who was imprisoned under a mountain for beating up every single god and goddess in heaven. But let’s be real, they were all being kinda douche-y to him. His other companions are Zhu Baije (Gojyo), a womanizing pig demon, and Sha Wujing (Hakkai), a sand demon that looooves him some killing. However, with the exception of Sun Wukong, each of these characters are reincarnations of people from heaven of the ancient past. While Zhu Baije and Sha Wujing were incarnated as punishment, Xuanzang was once a disciple of the Buddha himself. Why do I give you this whole lesson? Well, near the end of the episode, Goku has a vision of his traveling companions. But, they fade, and are replaced with similar, but distinctly different people. Previous entries into this franchise dealt with the past lives of the Sanzo Party, but this is the first mention of it in this series. Because of this hidden past, the bird-man’s questions about the destination of the soul after death pokes at Goku’s repressed past life. He just can’t help but ponder the question. So far, his only answer is to live the life that is right in front of him. But is that everything?

The technicals of this show are unchanged from the previous episode, and that’s in its favor. Shortcuts in animation hidden by excellent directing and a mature, edgy art style. The voice actors know their stuff, and Ian Sinclair pulls off a few good one-liners as Gojyo. I feel like Greg Ayres (Goku) wasn’t quite watching the video during some of the more somber lines. He got his timing spot on, but the tone in which he said them didn’t feel like how Goku looked. It isn’t bad, it’s still a great performance. It was just a little off. Despite that, I’d give this episode eight overstuffed vultures out of ten.