Yuru Camp Ep 7 – The Ghost of Robert Altman (Winter Games 2018)

• Genre : Slice of Life
• Studio: C-Station

Did you guys see the points update? We all agree we should call it and announce a Winter Games winner now right? No need to add up this week’s total, we all know what’s going on. Good!

I feel like I write this every single week but I wish they would have chosen to dedicate the episode to what makes Yuru Camp delta special and interesting instead of framing it into the standard slice of life mold. We already have plenty of those stereotypical offerings and Yuru isn’t adding anything of value there. It’s really a waste not to take advantage of the beautiful moody atmospheric stories it seems to be able to create so well yet so sporadically. Oh well this week the girls had slightly cooky adventures on a campground.

Picking up right where last week left off, Rin and Pinky set up camp as Rin understandably fangirls over hot sister and Pinky frets over her fear of the supernatural. The she goes exploring on her own… It seems that when she fell, Nadeshiko (I did it guys! I remembered a name. But now I forgot my bosses name. Oh well…) hit her head rather hard as she’s back to being particularly ditzy, prompting even Rin to plainly state that she is very stupid.

As she explores, Rin meets two random characters a boy(man? Ages are hard to tell with these designs) camping with his clearly alcoholic sister who also happens to be a teacher. Both characters served their purpose during the episode with the nice boy coming to the rescue and the drunk lady being “comic” relief.

However, as these characters have now had more development than anyone else in the series, save the two leads, I have to imagine we will see them again. At least briefly. The drunken lush chara was a bit of an odd choice for this show. Far be it for me to shame a girl for getting her drunk on, there’s a limit to everyone hypocrisy, but the archetype was a bit of a clash with everything else we’ve seen from the show thus far and I’m not sure that it brought anything to the table.

So after calmly meeting the other nice campers, pinky goes back to Rin who is having trouble with the grill. Other nice camper helps out and then… the obligatory food portion. Although not as ever present as last episode, a good chunk of the runtime was once again dedicated to watching food as it cooks then watching them eat mostly red meat. A lot of it. Very enthusiastically.

Eventually the girls go to bed, Rin can’t sleep, I’m guessing due to the indecent amount of food they have been eating, she wanders off to the bathroom and meets a ghost!!!!! I wonder if the boys will let me have this one. Of course, it was just drunkie in bad lighting but Rin thought it was a ghost. I think it should count – we’ve given points for much less. Cough, cough, nudge, plead.

Rin is freaked out and eventually morning, everyone go home. The episode was fine. For Grancrest and Sanrio, I have found that reinterpreting (or purposefully misinterpreting) the episodes was the best way for me to enjoy them but there just isn’t enough in an episode like this for me to do that. So instead, I’m going to read stuff into it that isn’t there, namely the obvious influence Robert Altman has had on the director.

Altman is considered by many a virtuoso and a master at his craft. His completely unique style has formed generations of movie makers and brought to light a new naturalistic more loosely structured form of storytelling that has allowed for some of the most interesting works the past 50 years. In Yuru Camp, light touches pay tribute to the artist throughout.

The floating camera, the subdued and unobstructive soundtrack, the minimalist dialogue are all hallmarks of the great author. This week, we once again saw a blatant wink to Altman’s oeuvre as we find out in a quick and very offhand scene that the mysterious stranger who was offering meat to high school girls in the previous episode is in fact Rin’s Grandfather who shares her love of camping and not talking. The casually intertwining vignettes are one of my favorite features. I can’t wait to see where they take it!

For those of you who are trying to impress a cinema major, feel free to use the above analysis as your own. You should probably know that I have seen a grand total of 3 Altman films and that discussing floating cameras in the context of animation means something completely different. I think. 

Predictions:

I honestly don’t have any predictions. The next episode is called Exams, Caribous (we have so many here) and Steamed buns. I’m guessing this is not the hardcore hentai some of you may think it is. Please, please, don’t let there be a hardcore hentai version of this show out there. I think my brain just decided to quit…

So um they’ll be back at school, they’ll definitely be eating things… 

• Nadeshiko will not know what a Caribou is and will be OMG super duper amazed by it!!!
• We will see the drunk teacher again

 

I feel like I’m off my game this week. Like the rest of the province, I have a huge flu. I’m confident that AstralGemini, Leap and TPAB, will all agree that I should get 3 extra points this week to make up for my handicap!