English Dub Review: Juni Taisen “Even a Champion Racehorse May Stumble”

That is a dumb horse.

Overview (Spoilers)

Rabbit is fighting Monkey, Snake is hunting Rat, Ox is chasing Sheep, Sheep is creeping on Tiger and Horse is… Wait, where is Horse? Oh, there he is, hiding like a little coward in the vault of a bank. He’s scared spitless after his encounter with Ox. In the meantime, Monkey’s battle with Rabbit isn’t going so well. At first, she’s holding her own against him, but he runs away. When she gives chase, he attacks anew. She leverages her superior maneuverability to jump over and behind him, but ends up with two sword in her chest for the trouble. He was fully aware of her position, even though he couldn’t see her. Snake’s head tells him everything he needs to know from its perch in a nearby tree. As Monkey lay dying, Rabbit titters on about how she’s going to be his new friend. Elsewhere, Sheep’s quality time with Tiger is underwhelming. She might as well have been the warrior of the skunk for how drunk she is. Even though she was able to sense his presence at a distance, she spends most of their conversation on all fours with her butt in the air, purring at him in her drunken stupor. He readies a bomb to take her out. Before he even pulls the pin, she zips past him, cutting him down. For those of you who didn’t read this telegraphed twist from the previous episode, she’s a drunken master. She not only manages to kill him in one shot, but she pulls out his jewel at the same time! So, that brings us back to Horse. He runs through his backstory while he wets his pants in his little vault/fort. He was a soldier in Vietnam or the Congo or something like that. He fought against an opponent that was wearing power armor, who knocked him off a cliff. Ever since then, he’s done every form of training and treatment to make himself invincible. As he whimpers, Rat appears nearby inside his hidey hole, playing his game. Rats get into all sorts of strange places. He’s taking momentary refuge from Snake’s flamethrower, and comments on Horse’s situation. In a game like this, “just surviving” is basically dead. His break time over, Rat leaves with a bit of advice: Snake is coming, better run. Horse is skeptical, and sits around. Slowly, he finds it harder and harder to breathe. Just outside the vault, Snake burns down the building. The fire and heat may not hurt Horse, but the fire is burning away the oxygen, and you gotta breathe something. Still, not as tragic a death as Monkey. If she even is dead…

Our Take

I gotta admit, this episode just didn’t catch me as much as the others did. Not just because I liked Monkey. It just felt like not enough was going on. Sure, three of the players are out of the game, but once Monkey was taken out, the others felt more like staring contests than deaths in a massive, free-for-all tournament. I honestly wasn’t expecting Monkey to die at this point in the game, and I’m wondering if that’s because she isn’t dead yet. It just seemed so sudden and unceremonious. The rest of the episode was predictable, and the dialogue isn’t even that worthwhile. It isn’t poorly written, it just has no content to it. Maybe it’s because I saw it all coming from a mile away. I’m actually having a hard time finding something to write about here, simply because it was just so low-octane.

Similarly, the animation just isn’t always to the quality the show has set down in the past. It isn’t horrendous, but there are plenty of small errors and frames that could have been tightened up. Most of these are in the limited action sequences we get. Characters landing strangely, their bodies not moving in ways they should. It probably isn’t anything that would be noticeable unless you were looking for it. The shots of Rabbit maneuvering around Monkey were well done, however. They felt like Monkey’s actual POV, with parts of him briefly crossing the shot, but no full view of him.

Most of the lines this week were parts of inner monologue. However, I did enjoy Colleen Clinkenbeard’s performance as Tiger. She captured many unique cat sounds and incorporated them into her speech. Not in a cheesy way either. She blended the cat with the drunk to make Tiger’s speech patterns, and I found them delightful. Her opponent in Sheep’s Kenny Green handled his monologue well. He varied his tone throughout the sequence, keeping Sheep from getting too boring. Jerry Jewell’s Rabbit continues to be terribly creepy in how he sounds. So childlike but lower and breathier. Now that I look back, the voice acting was probably the best part of the episode.