Sora no Woto - Episode 6

Episode six introduces a wonderful, wonderful day in Kanata's working life, and one that I'm sure a lot of us remember ourselves - The first pay day. Ahh, the beauty of opening that envelope and finding the reward inside, your mind racing with just how to spend all that beautiful moolah...

Anyhow, in her excitement (and naivety no doubt) Kanata never stops to ask just how come she's been paid on time, and in cash no less - This post-war world clearly isn't usually one where money becomes readily available quite that easily, even if you've earned it. So, as Kanata goes racing off into town on market day to spend her earnings, so the other girls turn to their "other job" - The one that actually allows them to make a living.


In a sense, this particular facet of the story had already been hinted at by the bottle of wine used as a gift last episode, and in appears that the girls in fact have a whole cellar of the stuff to sell and trade as they wish, while the wine itself has an ironic connection with Rio, and more precisely her mother. On this occasion however, it isn't so much selling the wine that is their job as making sure a local Mafia group don't get their hands on it - Truth be told, I suspect this is just a vehicle for us to see all of the girls (except Kanata) dressed as gangsters, but to be frank I can't really complain about that seeing as it actually looked rather awesome.

While the first half of the episode concerns itself with these gangster-related goings on, so the second half rewinds to view the day from Kanata's angle, as she goes out shopping but ends up doing something far more important in the form of helping an orphan named Mishio who gets herself into a spot of bother. This side of the story is rather nicely weaved and intertwined with the other half of the story we've already seen, which adds a little to the entertainment value before dumping some big globs of raw emotion over the proceedings.

Even though I wasn't quite so enthralled with this episode as I have been with previous instalments of Sora no Woto, there was still a lot to like here. The animation quality proved to be excellent once again (did I mention how awesome the "gangster girls" looked yet?), and the more frivolous aspects of the story were nicely balanced by more emotional or important moments which further revealed the world in which the show is based, giving us an understanding of both its economies while also delving into some of the atrocities of the conflict and how it destroyed so much. The episode even found time to leave a few potential avenues to explore in future episodes, which is always good to see - If nothing else, it suggests that both this series and the story its trying to tell has a very well defined path ahead, which once more reminds us that this is more than some slice of life series about a bunch of cute girls; a depth which I'm growing to appreciate more by the week, even when it only appears fleetingly at times.