[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER BLADE EPISODE 29

This time on Whatever The Hell Inoue Felt Like Writing About: Hajime loses his memory, meets his conflict-averse doppelganger, and falls smack-dab in the middle of a Romeo & Juliet-style war between two street food empires! That’s basically it, because did you even read that last sentence!



It’s a really fun episode, obviously. It’s very light-hearted, giving almost everyone in the cast a chance to either play straight man or comedian. Hajime even gets to play both! It’s also doing a thing I don’t think Inoue gets enough (any?) credit for, which is trying to foreground what it’s doing thematically. It’d be enough to just have the stuffed street foods, two of them, to represent Hajime and Ryou. It’s smart to have both families stymied by people thinking you can just shove something new inside and it’s going to be better. (I'd honestly be into that banana taiyaki.) But Ryou and his dad both give their family’s advice on takoyaki, which is that you have to honor the ingredients, stay true to them, and by doing so the whole snack tastes better. You don’t have to make it differently, you have to make it by understanding why those things are inside. It doesn’t need to have anything replaced, you just need to appreciate what’s already there. It’s a good theme to have if you’re doing a switcheroo/amnesia comedy, and I like how central Inoue makes that theme.

Also, holy shit, the directing and editing in this one is… you guys. I’m just going to talk about screencaps on this episode.



Opening scene with Medusa Undead Or Whatever. I love this angle on her, shot from below. The filter makes everything feel uneasy, unsafe, and the big metal railing shooting diagonally through the frame is a nice touch. She’s not a powerful looking woman, but this framing sells her as a terrifying opponent.



The whole first Team Blade scene is shot outside on the farm, with Kotaro looking for Natural and criticizing Hajime for being either someone who trusts in the people around him to make the best decisions for themselves, or a complete asshole, depending on who you ask.

But the scene keeps playing and we pull back through a window, over Hirose’s head, and we’re in a scene where she’s talking to Kenzaki and Tachibana about what happened to Shima and Mutsuki. Just a great camera move to get us from one tone to another.



Then we get them extreme dutch angles! Look at how obscured nearly everyone in this shot is. Hirose is washed out by the window. Tachibana’s got his head in his hand. Kenzaki’s the only one fully visible, and he’s so pensive that he’s all you need to see. It’s a shot that says that they are lost, with a huge sacrifice that either saved the day or doomed them all, nobody knows. And then they fade to black before the credits! It’s solemn as hell!



This is a little one, but I like the tracking a lot. It starts on the sign outside Mutsuki’s house, while Nozomi gets turned away by his parents. It’s only after she finishes talking that the camera pans left to catch her walking away from the front door. (All of that was almost definitely because no one felt like paying Mutsuki’s mom or dad for one nighttime scene with Nozomi.) Also, man, the vertical break of that sign and hedge are a great visual bookend to Mutsuki’s scene, which is next!



It’s not my favorite shot. It’s a little on the nose, with the spider web of mirror pieces reflecting… whatever is going with Mutsuki. (Spoiler, this is the last we see of him in this episode!) But it’s still a gorgeous shot, and there’s that vertical break of the wall on his left as he walks out of the shot, into a headlight, fading into nothingness. Great composition.



But, y’know, not just a dour episode of psychological mystery! It’s also a story where Hajime loses his memory and switches places with a pushy sexcreep named Ryou, so there’s going to need to be some gags. The Ryou ones are mostly based around how easygoing and ingratiating Ryou is, and how those would be the last words you’d use to describe Hajime, coming in just after Victorian and woolen. This shot is killer, with Ryou mugging it up, practically telling everyone that it’s time to par-tay, and everyone else frozen in shock. Even Kotaro’s dropped milk bottle stays frozen in the air, until Ryou finishes his shtick. Priceless.



I love this exterior shot. The room that Michi and Hajime are in is microscopic, barely enough for the two of them and the camera, so we get this nice shot of her out the window, doing a little bit of dialogue. It’s a pretty shot, a bunch of rectangles receding into the distance.



The blocking for this gag! Chef’s kiss!




Double chef’s kiss!




And then we hit the cliffhanger, crosscut between Ryou screaming in Tachibana-esque terror, and Hajime getting married to Michi in an attempt to solidify the takoyaki family’s standing in the cutthroat world of Japanese street food.

INOUE FOREVER.



Next time on Jesus Who Even Knows: I’m pretty sure my birthday isn’t until November, but I’m not sure I’ll be getting a better gift than whatever I just saw in this teaser.