Hello, friends. It’s time once again to check in with our animal(?) friends (more on that beneath the cut) with episode 3 of Odd Taxi. This episode seems to continue along with its blend of interesting, snappy dialog and slow-burn narrative movement, giving us some more insight into a few of the characters and adding a bit more intrigue along the way. If you haven’t been watching the series, I still highly recommend it. As you may expect, this post will contain spoilers for the series up to this point.
You can check out my previous blog entries about the series via the links below:
Episode 1
Episode 2
The beginning of this episode returns us to Odokawa’s cab, where his current passenger, Dobu, threatens him with a gun. We learn a few more details about why Dobu (working with our corrupt police friend, Daimon the elder) wanted Odokawa’s dash cam footage, and why he’s seeking information about the missing schoolgirl’s whereabouts. The thread I find more interesting in this conversation has to do with Dobu and the way in which he’s choosing to manipulate his own image to supposedly gain from the discrepancy between expectations and reality.
This episode is dotted with characters either misperceiving the reality of situations based on their incorrect preconceived notions, or attempting to project some sort of alternative truth about themselves out into the world for whatever kind of gain is meaningful to them. Dobu by all appearances is a petty criminal and he’s fine letting his bosses believe that while he works in the shadows to his own ends. Kakihana is willing to lie about his job and his “wealth,” as well as to believe in the reality of the 18-year-old who’s likely catphishing him, in pursuit of a chance at meeting someone and falling in love. Daimon pretends to be a good cop while apparently sticking his hands into underworld business and making nice with the criminals he’s meant to thwart. While we all have our reasons for keeping our true selves out of the spotlight, sometimes those reasons go beyond simple privacy or a desire for self-preservation.
The net effect of all of these secret dealings and half-truths is that it becomes difficult to take pretty much anyone at their word. Kakihana finally meets up with the girl he’s been chatting with on the dating app; as it turns out she’s seemingly got a couple of thugs in tow ready to pounce on this unsuspecting stooge. This is something easily seen from a mile away – even Odokawa tried to warn Kakihana off of meeting up with her. But sometimes lies can be painfully tempting, especially when it’s about something you’re truly longing for. I get the occasional Facebook friend request from random profiles – “recently single” middle-aged men with no mutual friends and no other information freely given about who they actually are. I’m happily in a relationship so I can see these for what they are; wide-cast nets hoping to bag some unsuspecting, lonely woman willing to believe that the attractive profile photos correspond to someone who might love them. Having known people whose family members have fallen for these scams, I’ve seen just how tempting the lie can be.
So what of Odokawa? He’s this series’ grand high curmudgeon, but now that we’re starting to get a little bit further into the series I’m beginning to feel like his gruff, standoffish personality might be a defense mechanism as opposed to a genuine character trait. There’s something a bit nerve-wracking about having truly genuine relationships with people, even relationships that aren’t romantic; there’s a point at which you have to demonstrate your own vulnerability in order to develop deep closeness with another person. When you’ve been hurt in the past, there’s the constant temptation to keep people at an arm’s length to avoid a repeat of the pain that comes along with a close relationship going sour. Whatever happened to Odokawa to make him the way he is, I get the impression that it informs his insistence that Kakihana’s love interest has ulterior motives (and his pessimism seems to prove itself correct). But it also has some effect on his budding relationship with Shirakawa, the beautiful nurse who appears to have taken a genuine interest in him. He still has some level of disbelief that she might want to actually spend time with him. He tells her that he’s starting to get mixed up with some bad characters, to scare her off. Yet Shirakawa seems undeterred, and Odokawa doesn’t get up and leave, either.
Shirakawa’s motives are still a mystery to me. The end of the first episode suggested that she too has some things to hide; it looks like she’s been taking meds from her clinic’s stockroom, and now Dr. Goriki seems to be missing. Yet she seems so kind and innocuous, with a bit of a philosophical streak that makes her interesting. Because Odokawa’s been the primary touch-point thus far, I think it’s easiest to interpret her character through his somewhat clouded vision. Why would she take a specific interest in him when they seem to have nothing in common? I think I’m looking forward to hearing more about her the most (though I could probably say that about any of the characters with any air time thus far and be telling the truth in that moment).
This episode begins with a really fun scene that I wanted to call out – Kakihana is at the bathhouse and ends up in a seat near Kuroda, who we only previously saw as a background character. There’s a mix-up involving a phone conversation that I’ll leave folks to watch for themselves; let’s just say I echo the frustrations reflected here regarding people having ambiguous phone conversations, loudly, in public, using headphones. I recall one time many years ago when I was walking around downtown and a man was walking in the opposite direction coming toward me. He seemed to be saying something to me, and I tried to respond; as it turned out the conversation was through his earpiece and I had nothing to do with it. Embarrassing! I was also immediately struck by Kuroda’s voice, provided by none other than Takuya Kuroda, who I recognized after literally about three words. Bringing that Kazuma Kiryu energy to another character with visual ties to the yakuza, I see.
While I haven’t been paying too much attention to the internet chatter about this series (aside from the fact that other folks are digging it, which makes me happy) one thread I’ve picked up on is that there’s an interpretation of the show in which the animal characters aren’t literally animals; that the character designs are obscuring reality. That’s a feeling that I got while watching the first episode that I filed away for later. As I get closer to catching up with current episodes I’m starting to like that idea more and more, since it reminds me of another series I really love – Masaaki Yuasa’s Kaiba.
I’ll never be able to find the interview again (I’ve tried; I’m fairly certain at this point that the information that follows was conveyed to me via some forum post rather than directly via said interview), but one anecdote I recall from around the time Kaiba was first broadcast was that Yuasa specifically wanted the character designs for the series to be such that they discouraged viewers from projecting their preconceived notions onto them. The series tells a fairly serious story, but the characters all appear cartoonish and child-like and this definitely allows for some surprises along the way.
Anime tends to have its own specific visual language and included in that language are character design archetypes. This dialect makes it easy to rely on shorthand for initial character development but sometimes makes it difficult to allow stories to unfold without expectations muddying the waters. Odd Taxi’s character designs, whether implying that the characters are literal animals or obscuring their true nature in some way, definitely add a level of intrigue to the series that might not exist with more typical human designs. As a part-time member of the furry fandom, I’d go so far as to say that quite a bit of anthropomorphic entertainment benefits from either confirming or subverting expectations that come along with animal characters.
To get back to the issue at hand, I’m not entirely sure where I fall on the debate surrounding whether or not the characters in Odd Taxi are actually animals, but I did certainly find it odd that Odokawa’s origami alpaca looked much less anthropomorphic than the woman with whom he recently spent time…
I’ve been getting a lot of pleasure out of watching this show so far; I feel like it toys with my (honestly very reserved) expectations at every turn, and I like the feeling of being taken along for a ride. I suppose that’s a fairly apt metaphor for a series in which so much happens from within a vehicle.