Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Binchou-tan – episode 2

March 19, 2006 on 7:40 pm | In Binchou-tan | 2 Comments

“Bin gets a job”

Binchou-tan reveals its genuine charm and inventiveness in this episode. Also there seems to be very little doubt that this for small children, and I’m kind of weirded out by that fact (despite my not inconsiderable collection of shoujo anime).

Binchou-tan catches the “bus” into town to get a job – it seems she’s a freelancer who picks up a new task each day – and she whiles away the time by freshening rice and purifying water and deodorising shoes; she’s the living embodiment of a piece of coal, you see.
After work, Binchou-tan goes into a toy store to buy frog-print panties (!), and dreams fitfully of all of her favourite characters.

This was less of a drift than the first episode, as Binchou-tan seamlessly went from one activity to the next. I can’t pretend to understand the buying of underpants, but I thought her dream was quite an entertaining one. If I could dream like that, I’d want to animate it, too.
Due to the nature of Binchou-tan’s job, any sense of scale is thrown out of the window. The young girl is a different size for each task, and different for each time she has to interact with a human. That probably makes sense, but without explanation it just strikes me as weird.

Inoue Kikuko’s narration is the condescending type that you get in children’s shows all over the world. “This is the bus stop. Now, what sort of bus do you think Binchou-tan will catch?”
It’s the sort of patronising rhetoric that gives the show some of its flavour, but that it could easily do without.

Still, 12 minutes of fun.