English Dub Review: Juni Taisen “The Man Who Chases Two Rabbits Catches Neither”

Never thought I’d feel bad for Tiger…

Overview (Spoilers)

Dragon watches high above the battlefield, strategizing his assault to co-ordinate with Rabbit’s through the corpse of his brother, Snake. Just as he’s about to act, however, an object zips past him. It’s Snake’s head, and Zombie Monkey threw it at him at full force! As he stares at it, mystified, Monkey throws something else: Rabbit. He slices Dragon in half and tells him to go down and help his little brother in killing Ox and Tiger.

While the two living warriors plan their attack on the slithering dead, we are treated to a backstory for Tiger. She started as a promising young star of her father’s dojo. After proving her mastery by way of a 100 man spar, her dad tells her that she will be the next head of the dojo, and keeper of the style. He asks her about the two mottos of the dojo. The first is to always improve the style and technique. The second is to do good in the world. With that, he tells her that she must go out onto real battlefields and experience true battle for herself. When Tiger is out in the trenches, though, she sees a very different reality. One where the fighting and destruction is not to make the world a better place. It’s just a cycle of violence for the sake of rich old men, a meat grinder to feed despots’ egos. Her incredible skill won her many awards, but she saw through all that. It was meaningless, and she was not doing any good. Then, in the alleys after drinking herself silly, she flops on her face. As she tries to get up, she discovers a new fighting stance: on all fours like a tiger. Thus was born Tiger’s special fighting style of the Drunken Tiger. Now, she was even better at fighting. She got more medals and awards while drunk than she ever did sober. When she attempted to return home, her father threw her out. She had betrayed the mottos of the dojo and was no longer welcome in his home. So, Tiger went back out to war. She became incapable of understanding people and started going it alone. Eventually, she just became an unstoppable beast, stuck in a cycle of drinking and violence.

Back in the modern day, Ox hints to her that Dragon’s weapon likely used liquid hydrogen. At first, she doesn’t get why that is important. Once the battle truly starts, however, she notices that Dragon doesn’t want to use his spray. Putting two and two together, she breaks open the tank on his back, spraying the freezing solution all over the zombie parts and almost all over Ox. He barely manages to escape in time. Rabbit comes out of hiding, and the pair zips in to chop the wacko bunny to bits. All that’s left is to dissolve their temporary truce and face each other in honorable combat. For a moment, excitement finally sparks in Tiger’s eyes. Nothing’s gonna stop her now.

Our Take

Oh, man! This episode was excellent on all points! Normally, this show has solid animation, with some creative cinematography that pits traditional and CG animation against each other. This episode takes that and turns it up to eleven with its (admittedly brief) big action scene. The characters are flying in every direction, almost too fast to keep track. We bounce in between the two animation types, and the director is very careful to use the traditional animation sparingly while focusing on the CG animation’s vitality. One fatal flaw of most CG animation is that it is often too crisp, too exact, leaving you with a mannequin that moves in starts and bursts. With this entry into the series, much of the “standing-around-talking” scenes in the present are done with CG. That way, when we see them in the action scenes, they don’t stand out as much. Once we do see these CG characters moving around, they do so with all the personality of the traditional animation. Though their forms are still perfect, their movement has quirks and irregularities that feel like someone really took time to get those movements fine-tuned. Whenever we needed to get in close with the character and see some emotion in them, like when Tiger accepted Ox’s challenge.

However, this mixture of animation types was confined to those scenes we saw in the present. Through the entirety of Tiger’s backstory, we see the traditional animation. Other than a couple small errors I noticed, the quality of this animation is quite good. Tiger’s discovery of her drunken style is actually rather interesting. You can see the (inebriated) thought processes figuring out the stance.

To go along with that, Colleen Clinkenbeard took some time to dig deep into Tiger’s voice acting. I could hear the slow descent into drunken madness in her voice, and it only drove home her feelings of despair and disillusionment. Her flashback sequence did something I wasn’t expecting. First impressions of her left me thinking she was just there for fanservice and was going to be a rather two-dimensional character. However, the story of how she fell into the bottle is a bit heartbreaking in how real and common it is. It isn’t melodramatic, with a story of how she lost it all. Quite the opposite. It was just her running from her problems by medicating. This story has played out over and over again in the lives of so many soldiers. They go in fighting for a cause and leave with nothing but a drinking problem and a violent streak. It isn’t their fault, they end up this way. The military machine is just bad at teaching people to turn off their kill switch. Colleen’s performance added another level of depth, where her repetition of the phrase “no one’s gonna stop me” began to feel saddened and disappointed. As if she really wanted someone to stop her. This later culminates in her acceptance of Ox’s challenge, where she sounds not only resolved but excited. Was she hoping Ox would kill her, or did her interactions with Ox finally spark her faith in humanity somehow?