×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Ushio & Tora
Episode 34

by Lauren Orsini,

How would you rate episode 34 of
Ushio & Tora (TV 2) ?
Community score: 4.4

At long last, Ushio & Tora delivers one of the most highly anticipated plot points of the show—Tora's backstory. The episode, simply titled “Tora,” is a moving ride that doesn't disappoint. But while the content is far from lacking, the execution could use a little work. In a stylistic choice to make the visuals look dated on purpose, Tora's history comes out looking sort of cheap. Thanks to the ho-hum animation, this otherwise emotional bombshell of an episode turned out just OK.

Let's start with the good stuff. Things are looking great for the Hakumen no Mono and bad for the humans (at least it looks like those elementary schoolers on the island are going to be fine!), which means it's the perfect time for Ushio to have some kind of breakthrough. As he sinks to the bottom of the ocean, he begins to have a vision of a figure from the past named Shagakusha. Now we know as soon as Shagakusha opens his mouth that he's Tora—or at least has Tora's same voice and mannerisms! Through Ushio's vision, we learn the story of a man so filled with hatred that he birthed the Hakumen no Mono.

This backstory, which takes place 3,000 years in the past, packs a powerful emotional punch. It's not without its elements of predictability—Raama and his sweet older sister were earmarked for a tragic end as soon as they showed up—but we can cut Ushio & Tora some slack simply for being a '90s pioneer of its genre. The story itself is as old as time, but viewers' affection for Tora, established over the past 30+ episodes, makes us care about Shagakusha. There's always been something deeper beneath Tora's blind rage, and now we see just how justified his ire has been. Tora is directly responsible for the worst villain in the Ushio & Tora universe, and yet I can't feel anything but sympathy for him. It was a wise storytelling choice to make us wait this long. If I had known Tora caused the Hakumen no Mono to come about back when he was a morally gray and reluctant ally, I wouldn't have felt this way.

Ushio & Tora has always had a simplistic delivery style, and until now I've always praised it highly. This show has mastered spare audio and monochromatic visuals. When it hones in on shades of just one color to set a mood or limits a scene to just silence punctuated by sound effects, it proves that less can certainly be more. Take the scene early in this episode with Ushio sinking into the ocean—an almost-absent musical score combined with a monochromatic violet palette firmly establish Ushio's mood of finality and hopelessness better than any amount of dialogue ever could.

However, I'd argue that Tora's backstory takes this visual spareness a a step too far. To indicate the immense age of the tale, the art grows incredibly grainy to the point that I wasn't sure whether Crunchyroll was having connectivity problems. Furthermore, the frame rate has been reduced so much that you can see afterimages of character's mouths when they speak. If it weren't for the consistent quality of the show up until this point, I would have thought perhaps they'd run out of budget. But no, it's a stylistic choice, albeit a poor one.

The failure of this episode's visuals reminds me how consistent the story and animation of Ushio & Tora have been for 30+ episodes, and that's no small feat. This was a misstep that even Tora's most revealing emotional trauma couldn't completely save.

Rating: B-

Ushio & Tora is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Lauren writes about geek careers at Otaku Journalist.


discuss this in the forum (178 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to Ushio & Tora
Episode Review homepage / archives