What we’re left with is a much more down-to-Earth venture that’s more focused on showing you these one-off characters, Elderly and Esme, who feel like they’re right out of a Miyazaki film. This episode feels most reminiscent of the first season’s lonely ramen master planet detour, but while that journey was just as much a focal piece for Dandy, this time the spotlight wants to be pointed elsewhere. There’s also an interesting theme of piling on and excess coursing through everything, whether it’s the way Elderly and Esme’s house is designed with architecture haphazardly stacked on top of architecture, the multi-tentacled multi-eyed squid creature that seems to keep going on and on, the eel-ish monsters from Dandy’s dream, or even the absurd “tug line” that assembles from Kaiyu natives to take down this fish (sorry, moonagi). It’s a chaotic idea that such a simple (and this definitely is one of the simpler, if not the simplest Space Dandy to date) concept would be full of imagery of excess, but it works. By the time you see the sheer enormity of the famed moonagi, you’ve been appropriately eased in. Fishing is all about patience and subtlety and no episode has better illustrated this than with the relaxed approach it takes with everything here, only to visually strike and attack you towards the end, like a fisherman yanking in their reel for the kill. And sure enough, the climax of the episode which sees Dandy getting tugged away by the moonagi is inspired, gorgeous stuff. The resolution too that the moonagi emergence every 3600 years is actually them trying to planet hop and move onto a nearby comet in order to escape planet Kaiyu, is pretty inspired. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
