Tag: Rust-Eater Bisco

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 3 – “Tag Team”

If you’re looking for the ingredients of a classic adventure story, they are there in Sabikui Bisco. That’s more evident in the third and most recent episode (“Tag Team”) than it has been. This is probably the weakest episode of the series so far, but it’s good enough that the very term “weakest” feels a bit too harsh. There’s a lot of promise, here, but also some notable room for improvement.

So Bisco fails to take the hat trick. Still, it’s a solid episode. We’re introduced to a couple key points here. The main one is that the mushrooms that we’ve so far been led to believe spread the Rusting sickness actually feed off of it and can thus cure it. This has interesting implications for Bisco’s wider world. Almost everyone thinks the mushrooms cause Rust. The episode opens with a loudspeaker announcement warning the residents of Imihama City to avoid inhaling spores, and elsewhere another character calls the fact that mushrooms create Rust “common sense.”

This is framed as a simple misunderstanding; people assume that mushrooms cause Rust because they grow where it’s found. But I would not be surprised if it later turned out that someone was lying about something for some ulterior motive. It would slot in well with Sabikui Bisco‘s more ambitious storytelling aims.

About the less ambitious ones, though. As foreshadowed at the end of last week’s episode, Bisco and Pawoo* get into it here, and while their actual fight is pretty good, this is where some cracks start showing.

Sabikui Bisco is, at the end of the day, a shonen series. And while it’s not universal, that does tend to imply certain things. One of them is what I will call a, I don’t know, casual sexism tax? Bisco remarks on Pawoo’s looks some three or four times during their fight, and while his internal monologue and later actions imply he doesn’t “really” believe any of the things he says, they’re still kind of shitty. This is the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for, mind you, so comments like this coming out of his mouth unchallenged reflects pretty poorly on the series at large.

Worse, at the end of the fight (which Pawoo only loses because Bisco snipes her with an arrow tipped with some kind of knock-out poison), she’s left behind in the City Watch’s care while Bisco and Milo set off on their journey. (Which, we’ll get back to that momentarily.) Effectively, this writes her out of the series for the time being. I don’t really want to add Sabikui Bisco to the long, long list of otherwise solid action anime that treat their female characters like trash, but this is not a terrific start. A kinda-goofy “sexy” outfit is one thing. This is quite another.

At the very least, the fight itself is pretty good. One can’t say that Bisco wins too easily. Pawoo is the uber-serious shoot-first-ask-questions-later type, so she doesn’t buy any of Bisco’s talk about mushrooms healing the Rust. She does nearly beat the hell out of him, though, which is pretty great. There’s also some truly weird set dressing going on here. Why does their fight at one point pivot to being on top of a huge bowling pin inexplicably in the middle of Imihama? Who knows! It definitely rules, though. Moreso when Pawoo shatters the thing and there’s an audible “bowling strike” sound effect.

You might say Pawoo has no time for games.

There’s also some brief but fun color commentary from recurring secondary character Chiroru Oochagama. (Miyu Tomita, probably best known as the lead character, Riko, in Made in Abyss.) Her cowardly put-upon minion vibe makes her great for this sort of thing, and I hope she never stops doing it.

Intercut with all of this is Milo healing up Bisco’s mentor, Jabi. He eventually recovers enough that, when the time comes for Milo and Bisco to split at episode’s end, it’s he who stays behind to provide a distraction. (At least Pawoo will have some company in Good Characters Temporarily Absent From The Show Jail.)

As for where Bisco and Milo are actually going, it turns out that the “Rust-Eater” alluded to in the series’ alternate English title is, in fact, a mushroom. One that can heal just about anything, including Jabi’s (and presumably Pawoo’s) particularly bad Rust infection, which will eventually claim both of their lives if it’s not treated.

It’s worth noting in the latter case that Milo does give her some of the same injection that fixed up Jabi, but that the mushroom is still being sought out at all implies that this is only a temporary solution. Also, there is a bit where Milo gives a very long, heartfelt, tearful goodbye to his unconscious sister while saccharine music swells. The entire time, Bisco impatiently taps his foot in the background and then tells him off when he’s done. It’s pretty funny.

So, there you have it, Bisco and Milo exiting Imihama and setting out on an epic quest to get a special mushroom. Complete with all the fightbro homoeroticism so common to this sort of anime.

It’s classic stuff, and despite my criticisms of the episode’s handling of Pawoo I did enjoy it overall. (Time will tell if that continues to be the case, but here’s hoping.) There’s a post-credits scene here where Milo and Bisco come across a “war memorial,” a temple made out of and absolutely covered in ancient, rusting war machines. It promptly comes to life when they attempt to stop there for the evening. Thus, cliffhangers beget cliffhangers, and the adventure continues.

Until next week, anime fans.

*Official sources seem to disagree on whether her name should be romanized as Pawoo or just Paw. Because of how these things work, neither is exactly wrong, and they’re pronounced the same way. But the official subtitles use “Pawoo”, so it’s what I’ll be using from here on out.

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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: What the Hell is SABIKUI BISCO?

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

A sickness called the Rust. Forbidden mushrooms that offer toxic euphoria. A desert with iron sand and the foggy streets of the sin city beyond it. Those streets crawl with the sick and dying, hucksters, hookers, butchers, and a doctor with a heart of gold. This is Sabikui Bisco, one of the season’s most singular offerings.

Bisco is absolutely suffused with atmosphere, and it’s tempting to spend the entire article talking about that instead of the actual story (which is only in its very early stages anyway.) But we should at least touch on that before we get into what this thing is actually about. Despite a fairly modest production from an animation point of view, the visuals on this thing are beyond engrossing. (The series comes to us from the brand-new studio OZ. This is, as far as I can tell, their first-ever production.) Almost everything in the city itself is lit with a neon undertone that really sells the whole “Las Vegas of post-apoc Japan” vibe. The character designs, similarly, really pop, and there’s a lot to love about them. Even minor characters get to look good.

But yes, about that “post-apoc Japan” bit. Bisco takes place in a world overrun with something called The Rusty Wind. It makes people sick, and eventually kills them. Also factoring in are a group of people who have some sort of supernatural control over those mushrooms I mentioned before, The Mushroomkeepers. I am quite sure that before watching this episode I had never heard the phrase “mushroom terrorist” in my entire life. Having now seen it, I’ve heard it several times. Most people don’t seem to like the Mushroomkeepers, and while it’s too early to draw clean good guy / bad guy lines (if that’s something this series ever wants to do at all), it’s not hard to get why. Most Mushroomkeeper activity seems to consist of causing huge colonies of tree-sized caps to sprout in places, which causes a lot of damage. One of our protagonists, the titular Bisco (that’s the wild-eyed redhead on the cover. Played here by Ryouta Suzuki, probably best known to readers here as Ishigami from Kaguya-sama: Love is War!) is a Mushroomkeeper. Apparently quite an infamous one. We’re made aware of his legend in this utterly brilliant exchange from the episode’s opening minutes.

Bisco himself doesn’t do a ton in this first episode. What he does do is quite impactful and sets the whole plot in motion, but we’ll circle back around to that. Let’s talk about our other protagonist first.

Milo “Panda” Nekoyanagi (Natsuki Hanae, easily best known as the lead, Tanjirou, in Demon Slayer) is a feminine-looking doctor with a heart of gold who appears to quite literally treat his patients out of a brothel. He seems like a genuinely very nice man, as demonstrated by his habit of giving away treatment (both for Rust and a number of other things) for free. He also collects illegal mushrooms, hoping to synthesize a permanent cure for the disease from them. There’s a personal investment here, as his sister Paw, the city’s guard captain (Reina Kondou, who given that she was also Nikaido in the Dorohedoro anime, seems to be building a niche for herself voicing dangerous women in weird science fantasy settings) is also ill with the disease.

Milo also has one other connection we should discuss. That with the prefectural governor, Kurokawa. (Kenjirou Tsuda, an industry veteran most famous as Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! Though I’d be remiss to not also mention his roles as The Giraffe from Revue Starlight and the talking dog Yamabiko from Sonny Boy.) Kurokawa does not seem to be a nice man, and in his first on-screen appearance tries to bully Milo into abandoning his sister so he can offer his services to the prefecture’s rich elite instead.

His attempt at a verbal beatdown is interrupted, though, by Bisco, who for reasons currently unknown to us, lets loose a mushroom colony in the middle of the city. Utter chaos ensues, with Paw dawning her guard uniform to go stop him despite Milo’s pleas. (And if I may, she looks amazing while doing it, too.)

I try to keep obvious thirsting over anime girls to a minimum on this site, but you’ll have to pardon me here, I have a type.

Paw actually knocks Milo out, but, unfazed, the good doctor simply slinks into his laboratory to continue his work. That, of course, is when Bisco inexplicably shows up behind him, and the episode ends there, with our two leads meeting face to face for the first time.

A lot about Sabikui Bisco reminds one of Dorohedoro, but beyond that I struggle for reference points. (And even in that context, Bisco is very much its own thing.) This is absolutely one to keep an eye on, we might be looking at the start of something big. Even if not, it promises to be intriguing.

Grade: A-
The Takeaway: If you have the time, give the first episode of this a watch. It’s interesting.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.