Transformation complete!
- In last week’s Silver Spoon, we met Hachiken’s brother and parted with Mikage’s family as the summer break ended.
- Summary of Silver Spoon episode nine: the students return to Ooezo Agricultural High as the next semester starts. Some haven’t changed a bit, like aspiring-to-be-a-vet Aikawa; some change rather drastically, like our math anti-genius Tokiwa or the chubby girl Tamako. The teachers, however, don’t appreciate this flashy version of Tokiwa and assign him forced labor as disciplinary action. Meanwhile our protagonist reunites with the fattened-up Pork Bowl soon to be sent off. He takes up the task of fattening up Pork Bowl even more, and is willing to get up at three in the morning to do all the things he volunteered for. Seeing how tired he is, Mikage suggests to visit a nearby festival so he can get his spirits high again, where he eventually tells her of his conflicting feelings about eating meat.
- My impressions: Quite a few things happened in this episode. Hachiken got serious seeing how his favorite pig wasn’t gaining enough weight and decided to research and try out some sure-fire method to help it get heavy enough to fetch an acceptable price. We got to see how the summer break affected some of the students, particularly Tokiwa and Tamako. There was a summer festival where the food stalls got raided by hungry seniors from Ooezo High. Hachiken started contemplating on the fate of animals raised solely for becoming food. Even Shingo, his older brother made a cameo appearance. Unlike previous episodes, where each episode had a distinct theme in my opinion, this episode didn’t have one, and became a collection of smaller stories. This doesn’t mean that the episode fell apart – on the contrary, the writers of the show managed to keep the smaller stories interlinked.
- The transformation of Tokiwa to a total hipster was surprising to see, but even more shocking was this young lady:
Just who might you be, fair lady?
…who turned out to be Tomoko having lost much of her weight. She’s quite attractive in this form. Too bad she returned to her usual self at the end of the episode.
- Hachiken’s getting more and more used to getting up at ridiculously early in the morning. He was complaining about getting up at five in the first episodes, but gathered the resolve to get up at four when he was helping out Mikage’s family, and now when he decided to feed Pork Bowl to combat its not getting enough food, he gets up at three. One can only admire the lengths he goes to help out others, or in this case, to help out an animal he considers his pet. He asks his teachers and seniors on how to best accomplish this, which shows initiative and determination. If we compare how lost he was when he got into Ooezo High, there definitely is an improvement of his character. This extra task, however, takes its toll on him, something the others don’t fail to notice.
- There were quite a few side characters in this episode, some of whom I don’t think were even introduced. For example, the names of the two seniors who gave Hachiken advice on how to feed his pig were not even told. It was a small but nice change from the previous episodes, which featured almost exclusively the six characters introduced in the very first episode.
I name you Unnamed Senior #1.
At the end of the episode, however, the military instructor lady admits that having Hachiken in the class, who was like a fish out of water, has somewhat unexpectedly strengthened the bonds within his class and sparked hitherto unseen discussions. I’m rooting for him to get more and more accustomed to this lifestyle and fit in more and more in his class.
- Another thing I noticed in previous episodes was the use of CG to animate livestock. Take, for example, the inside of the chicken coop in episode one, where one can notice that all chickens repeat one specific movement infinitely; or the cows seen in the background of episode seven. The motion is fluid, unlike the usually somewhat jerky movement seen in animating human characters. This got me thinking that animation technology has evolved so much over the years that it’s actually faster (or more cost-effective) to create a 3D model of chicken and make it move than to assign animator staff to draw stills of said animals. There were examples of anime series even having animated people walking up and down on a street, and accurately modelling human motion is considered to be difficult – just think about all high-budget games using motion capture to transfer the motion of actors into the game instead of animating 3D models. This episode didn’t have CG animals, but it did have a CG car.
- It was nice to watch the senior of Mikage getting suspicious over what might just have happened between Hachiken and her while he was staying over.
Someone is really clueless here by the looks on her face.
- All in all, a very fun to watch episode while being informative (I didn’t know how much weight a pig gains for each unit of food eaten) while being hilarious (the raid of the food stalls or the poisonous cooking of Shingo). I just wish some of the characters got more screen time; for example, Aikawa is barely seen recently.
