The Eccentric Family 2

Episode 3

After this third episode, it feels like I can finally say that The Eccentric Family is well and truly back. After spending two episodes introducing this season's main additions to the cast, the series returned to its roots this week, tailing Yasaburo across a series of strange and rewarding Kyoto adventures. Everything that makes this show special was on display this week, from its dynamic cast to its gorgeous environments, fantastical set pieces, and firm emotional center.

Episode three's first major sequence followed directly on the heels of last week, with the magician Tenmaya pointing a very functional gun right in Yasaburo's face. In an echo of season one's rooftop date with Benten, Tenmaya responded to Yasaburo's trickery by actually reaching up and stealing Yasaburo's moon. There's no conventional explanation for an act like that, and The Eccentric Family will never provide one. Like many works of magical realism, the show really doesn't sweat the details of its fantastical touches. Magic exists in this world - a force of mysterious wish-granting and temperamental trickery, a power akin to the fluid and effortless acts of mythological gods and tricksters. Magic's inexplicability is central to its nature. If anyone in this show said something like “I don't have enough magic power to fight them,” the spell would be broken. There are creatures of great power in this world, but the right trick will always get you through.

In this case, Yasaburo is saved from whatever fate awaits a moonless tanuki by the return of Benten. Benten is The Eccentric Family's charismatic, proudly alluring, and often inscrutable femme fatale, a woman Yasaburo pursued on and off throughout the first season. She's often described as dangerous (she ate Yasaburo's dad, after all), but she's still someone you just can't help but like. Her relationship with Yasaburo is as contradictory as the rest of her - the two clearly like each other, but a substantial portion of their feelings is built on how they mythologize each other, and how little they truly understand one another. Benten is intrigued by Yasaburo's free spirit, but she feels compelled to capture him and thus kill what she loves. Yasaburo is enraptured by Benten's callousness, mystery, and beauty, but he wouldn't necessarily feel the same way if he came to learn how lonely and brittle she was. They are each other's moons - objects to covet at a distance and perhaps hope to claim, but ultimately toss back into the night sky.

After the rescue by Benten, we jumped to Yasaburo and his mother visiting her mother, high in the woods surrounding the city. This trip offered plenty of opportunities for beautiful new backgrounds, making great use of The Eccentric Family's rich color palette and distinctive style of painted background art. P.A. Works shows often have trouble nailing their photography (the process of integrating characters, backgrounds, and everything else in the frame into a cohesive whole), leaving characters feeling out of place in their own environments. The Eccentric Family is consistently good about avoiding that hurdle, which not only makes for a more pleasant visual experience, but also facilitates the show's core focus on depicting its Kyoto as a place you could easily stumble into.

The den of the tanukis was certainly a setting I'd be happy to visit, and Yasaburo's own visit offered a warm return to Eccentric Family's titular focus. Tousen Shimogamo's mother has been rendered frail and forgetful by age, but it's clear that tanuki society deeply values their elders, and even Yasaburo was able to summon up a little reverence for his dear grandmother. Tousen and her mother's conversation was something you rarely see in anime - a conversation between a mature adult and her somewhat incapacitated parent, with gaps in understanding bridged by their mutual love. It was clear in this grandmother's advice to her grandson that she still has some tanuki wiles - chastising him for acting like the misfortunes of society don't apply to him, she urged him to apply himself and cause a whole lot of trouble.

The episode ended with Yasaburo and Yashiro making an informal visit to Nidaime, a sequence that once again demonstrated The Eccentric Family's style of magical realism. Tramping up to the top of a cramped apartment complex, they found Nidaime ironing his shirts on a vast, geographically impossible rooftop. Like with Benten's lagoon in the first season, visual set pieces like this both imbue the overall world with a great sense of mystery and also directly reflect the power of Akadama-sensei's students. Benten and Nidaime are the two proudest and most temperamental of The Eccentric Family's stars, so it's no surprise that their first meeting ends in tears. Whether or not Yasaburo ends up throwing himself into tengu squabbles, it seems like Kyoto is in for some interesting days.

Overall: A-

The Eccentric Family 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.