Anime: Golden Kamuy (2020) 6e5dk

Golden Kamuy is a very well made anime which visits many aspects of life and culture of the natives on Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and Kuril Islands through the prism of an equally well written adventure. The story goes in depth to show things like food, language, hunting and other crucial elements of cultures native to the region, with most attention being devoted to the Ainu.

The story line is somewhat reminiscent of the 1974 Soviet film "At Home Among Strangers" (not literal translation). In the film, an elaborate scheme is developed by former White Guard officers to steal gold which is intended to be used to buy food from abroad for the fledgling Soviet Republic. To this end, they kidnap a Russian officer to get information on the train that carries the gold. Unfortunately for the thieves, they themselves get ambushed by bandits, who take the gold from their dead bodies. The story generally follows the aforementioned Soviet officer as he encounters these various groups to get the gold back, as it is believed that he stole it himself. In Golden Kamuy, the story focuses on Sugimoto, a demobilised IJA soldier, and Asripa, a Hokkaido Ainu with Polish ancestry. They set off to collect coded tattoos on the torsos of death row inmates that make up a map leading to buried gold intended for a hypothetical Ainu uprising. As this is discovered, many self serving groups and characters gain possession of these tattoos in order to find the gold, with Sugimoto, Asripa, Shiraishi being caught in the middle of it all and following one group or the other as long as their objectives align.

Spoilers
The plot has downgraded somewhat since the last season. First, the plot almost completely stops following Tsurumi and Hijikata. They were the leaders of the two factions racing to get to the gold previously, as such it is surprising that Tsurumi is essentially not shown, and Hijikata went on a completely different route and did not follow other main characters to Sakhalin. The main problem with the plot is that some events feel way too forced. For instance, the Russian border guard sniper that watched for several hours for Ogata suddenly decides that he is in one of the boxes for the deceased and shoots the box without second thoughts, for which he got a bullet through seemingly his cheek. Another example of this is when Kiroranke was dying, he was just saying seemingly random things to Asripa and Asripa herself did not ask anything important until after he died, which prevented in a stupid way of any revelations appearing. Such moments where illogical and unrealistic things take place in order to move the plot or unnaturally offset a certain event appear quite a bit especially late in the season and they are too annoying. The way Ogata managed to escape in the end is also quite dumb I feel. Ogata's motivation is also very confusing. It is very unclear why he betrayed just about everyone, let alone want the gold.
One thing that the creators did right is keep introduced characters to a minimum. There is just the right amount of characters being followed by the story and just enough for the viewer to be engaged with watching all of them.
/Spoilers

The comedy in this season relies a lot on homoerotic jokes for some reason. They are mostly funny, although I did cringe quite a bit when one of the characters pissed on the two main characters after one of them had an eyelid stuck to a metal button of the other's coat in a blizzard. Essentially a small girl was pissed on by a 30 something guy. Generally not everyone will like the humour in this season.

The themes that the anime tries to show are themes of trust, betrayal, greed as well as the problem of great empires assimilating other cultures. This is a prevailing theme and whereas in previous seasons, mostly the Empire of Japan came under fire for their role in the effective assimilation of the Ainu, the Russian Empire is also not spared from being criticised in a similar manner. While it is explained why the Ainu among others feel repressed by the two great empires, there appears a third faction searching for the gold. This faction slowly emerged from Kiroanke, a newcomer Sofia, and Ogata for some reason, who had all conspired in advance to betray their comrades and search for the gold themselves. The explanation they have for looking for the gold is that they want to use it to arm the Ainu and other local populations to combat both the Russian Empire and Empire of Japan and to form a hypothetical "Far Eastern Federation" composed of Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Even so, it is not clear why the former two of the aforementioned characters would want to do this, let alone Ogata whose motives are a mystery. These characters have talked about things like change and progress for the Russian Empire in the same tone as speaking of separatism, and these two do not necessarily mix; why would they care what happens to the Russian Empire if they want to be independent of it? They have also been branded terrorist for assassinating Alexander II which sets them up to be radicals but they barely have a back story to back up their motivation, which already seems confused. Even so they have no qualms about killing whatever the Empire throws their way, in this season it is mostly policemen.

The otherwise decent voice acting is spoiled by the Russian one. The creators in the very least appeared to pay as much attention to detail as they can regarding the Ainu language as well as various dialects, but listening to them speak Russian is sometimes too much. At times it would have been completely incomprehensible were it not for subtitles. This is definitely not the only anime to bungle its foreign vocals. For instance, one of the relatively minor problems of the last season of SAO was the characters speaking English quite frequently and it was quite incomprehensible as well. Another example is Girls und Panzer, but the heavy Japanese accents on foreign languages there are explained by the fact that most characters there have at least spent most of their lives in Japanese speaking schools. Moreover, they actually have at least one CV who appears to be native Russian judging by pronunciation. This season of Golden Kamuy uses Russian frequently and its low quality stands out very much to people who know the language amidst good quality of everything else. I can only assume that the creators decided that it was too expensive to hire CVs that can speak Russian without an accent especially since the anime is not really aimed at audiences outside of Japan.

The animation is simple but consistent and fairly well detailed most of the time. Not much to be said here, it is simply high quality for most part.

To end this review, the 3rd season of Golden Kamuy is not as good as the previous ones in of plot. Nevertheless it is still an exciting adventure full of learning about cultures and interesting characters.