The First Ten Mushi-Shi

I wandered into a random screening room sometime around ten at night, mostly just looking for a place to sit down and rest. It almost didn’t matter what anime was showing; a seat and a break from the convention was the goal. As soon as I sat down, the opening for the next episode began. Some seconds pass. Hazy forest images and the first phrase of an acoustic guitar walking beside a gentle voice singing — I knew Mushi-Shi was something else. The opening imagery and music were so atypical of anime that I found myself relieved of any cynicism I might have carried into the viewing experience. Almost a purification. It’s kind of funny that the opening song is The Sore Feet Song considering the only reason I was in that chair at that particular time was because my feet hurt.

Wallpaper from Desk Top Anime

Ginko is a mushi master that wanders the landscape and encounters people whose lives have been touched by the mushi, creatures invisible to all but a few. Mushi are said to be the purest form of life. Ginko describes the relation between human and mushi on the continuum of life by saying if humans exist on the tip of the middle finger the mushi are at the point closest to the heart and all other life forms lay at some point in between. There is great distance there, the furthest possible distance. Interesting that humanity resides at the point furthest from the heart. Perhaps it is that distance that makes it impossible for most people to perceive the mushi.

Each beautiful episode is a self contained story of a life altered by the mushi. These encounters people have with the mushi are often tragic, lives are destroyed and even lost, yet Ginko says that the Mushi are not evil. The destruction that their existence brings into people’s lives is not the fault of the Mushi for they are simply trying to live. Part of me agrees with that view. Is the fox evil for killing the rabbit for food? In the grand scheme of things, the fox needs to eat and isn’t evil; however, another part of me views the situation from the rabbit’s perspective.

In any case Ginko refrains from passing judgment as he tries to remove the mushi from where they don’t belong. The matter of fact view he holds, that mushi simply are, does something to what is essentially a monster of the week formula in Mushi-Shi. The mushi become background and setting. There is no villain. What’s being fought for, the struggle in each story, isn’t against the mushi. The real story in each episode is the past, watching a life (or lives) destroyed and that person finding either hope or despair, taking either or both as the next step in their destroyed lives. Mushi-Shi feels very much like a fable, the dark kind, the old kind that lurk in the part of the brain where the ancient and timeless memories reside. These stories haunt.

Ginko is kind of a strange character. He is different from everyone else in the land. The setting of these stories appears to be a Japan before the modern age, a time where science hadn’t yet turned the popular consciousness against the unobservable. In this place Ginko is an anachronism. He is a modern in an unmodern world. His wardrobe is something out of a recent Eddie Bauer catalog, whereas everyone else wears what today is considered the costume of Japan in antiquity. Part of me wants to say he is a scientist in a world that hasn’t absorbed science as a world view. His observation of the mushi is scientific rather than mystic, such as in the third episode, where he describes the motives of the Aa mushi in terms of their ecological needs. However, many of Ginko’s methods for removing the mushi from its human host aren’t scientific and he seems to have some sort of mystical connection with the mushi.

One of the interesting things about each of the mushi tales so far is that almost all of the persons that had been cured feels a loss with the removal of the mushi from them. They express an emptiness. It’s interesting in consideration that the mushi had pretty much destroyed the life they would have had otherwise. I’ll be interested to see if some of the other episodes show a little more about what happens afterward. A couple of the stories on the second disc show Ginko trying to guide these survivors back to path of a normal life and warning against the lure of bringing the mushi back into their lives.

For now, I see Ginko as a guardian.

The Funimation Dub

Mike McFarland directs the English cast for Mushi-Shi. From some of his previous directorial work (Fullmetal Alchemist, Trinity Blood), he struck me as the bold brush stroke type, a style contrast to Mushi-Shi. There is something to be said about getting the chance to work on something different. This is one of the best dubs of 2007.

Naturally, the lead is the key. Travis Willingham perfectly expresses Ginko. Nothing in the performance feels cheap to me. Funimation must have to explore all avenues to cast this show, since each episode has a different set of characters to cast that the usual talent pool just isn’t large enough. Sure enough, reading through credits of each episode gives me a couple of names I’m not that familiar with and a who is who among voice actors who work in anime in Texas and beyond. For the most part, these roles sound much better than episode characters tend to sound. In particular, Laura Bailey and Brina Palencia in the second episode were devastatingly good as Sui and Biki.

The only thing that takes me out of the show is the narrator. It feels like they were going for the same narrator style as those old PBS story time shows, where an artist would draw a scene while the narrator would tell the story. I used to be fascinated by those draw and tell programs, so my memory might be overeager to make that jump.

Summary

Mushi-Shi is a spectacular anime with gorgeous artwork and careful stories that can sit in your head for a couple of days if you let them. While action buffs might find it a bit slow, Mushi-Shi is so first rate that I encourage everyone to give it a shot.