What is Kino’s Journey?

Kino’s Journey originated as a series of light novels written by Keiichi Sigsawa and illustrated by Kouhaku Kuroboshi. Our titular protagonist Kino is a young traveler who visits a variety of countries across the world accompanied by her sentient motorcycle Hermes. Each country she visits has its own unique customs, political systems and moral code. Kino stays in each country for up to 3 days, learning about people’s different ways of life while avoiding becoming too attached to stay there permanently. Through its episodic setup, it explores different philosophical stories on both the good and bad aspects of human nature and society.

Adaptions

Kino’s Journey was first adapted in 2003 bringing together creatives like director Ryutaro Nakamura (Serial Experiments Lain, Ghost Hound, Sakura Wars) and scriptwriter Sadayuki Murai (Perfect Blue, Boogiepop Phantom, Mushishi the movie). It consisted of 13 episodes adapting various storylines from the light novel series. It was followed up by an OVA half episode as well as two movies (although each are only about 30 minutes in length).

Kino’s Journey was adapted a second time in 2017 featuring a new creative team including director Tomohisa Taguchi (Akudama Drive, Bleach Thousand Year Blood War, Digimon Adventure) and scriptwriter Yukie Sugawara (Sword Art Online, Kaguya-sama Love is War, Overlord), as well as recasting Kino with the prolific voice actress Aoi Yuuki. The 12 episodes repeat a few of the storylines from the original adaption, but are mostly other stories not yet covered in anime form including for some episodes expanding beyond just Kino and Hermes’ viewpoint.

It is my plan to cover both adaptions as part of this rewatch.

Why Watch?

There’s many anime out there that are well known for tackling philosophical topics and human nature, such as Ergo Proxy, Ghost in the Shell, Texhnolyze or my previous rewatch, Shin Sekai Yori. Kino’s Journey stands out in that is able to cover philosophical concepts in a consolidated and relatively easy to understand fashion. It’s episodic nature enables the plot to cover a variety of different topics while never lingering too long on any particular one. Kino essentially embodies Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “free spirit”, someone who shuns attachment and is seeking a way to create her own value system by observing a variety of others. Rather than push a particular viewpoint at you and emphasize it as hard as possible to influence the viewer on that topic, the show often provides differing points of view and leaves what to take away from it to you, the viewer.

This video from one of my favorite Youtubers does a great job exploring the philosophical approach of Kino’s Journey (including the concept of the free spirit). It is also how I first discovered this anime. The approximate first 9 minutes are safe to watch before it wades into spoiler territory.

The closest anime I would compare Kino’s Journey to structurally is Mushishi and Galaxy Express 999, both of which are also episodic and explore various philosophical themes (especially the latter). While it is not a Yoshitoshi Abe anime, the 2003 adaption also comes off like several of the anime he was involved with such as Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain (which shares the same director) and Texhnolyze.

To get an idea of the differing visual styles of the two adaptions, here are Youtsube clips of the opening sequences:

2003 Adaption
2017 Adaption

Availability and Schedule

My plan is to kick off the rewatch on Monday, December 7th with daily posts appearing at 6PM EST. Knowing things can get hectic around Christmas time I would project we’ll take a 2 day break in between for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This projects a wrap up date of December 22 for the earlier adaption material and January 5th for the newer adaption. I’m also open to starting this one week earlier on November 30th if that works better for the audience.

The majority of Kino’s Journey is available on official streaming platforms. The 2003 version is available on HiDive, while the 2017 adaption is available on Crunchyroll. The OVA special and movies do not appear to be on an official streaming platform so one will have to find other sources for that.

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