Episode 46

EPISODE 46

戦慄！黒桃太郎の変身 (Senritsu! Kuro-Momotarou no Henshin)

Tremble! Kuro-Momotaro’s Transformations

First Broadcast: September 4, 1993

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): second half of chapter 80 (WSJ #32, 1992, July 27), chapter 81 (WSJ #33, 1992, August 3)

Summary: In his pheasant form, Kuro-Momotaro is now impervious to Hiei’s fire techniques. Cornered, Hiei invents a new technique, similar to Kuwabara’s Spirit Sword, and kills him. Next, Kurama fights Ura-Urashima, who uses his Reverse Tamate-Bako to try and revert him back to a baby. Kurama instead returns to his Yoko form, powering up immensely.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

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• The episode starts with a retread of Kuro-Momotaro introducing his pheasant form and everyone reacting.  His pheasant form looks really, really stupid in the anime, by the way.  It doesn’t exactly look great in the manga either, but in the anime it fares even worse.

• Hiei explicitly uses his Ensatsu-Rengoku-Sho technique in the anime when he punches Kuro-Momotaro’s pheasant form a zillion times to no effect.  In the manga his fists are covered in flames, but he doesn’t actually call out the attack name.

• More peanut gallery filler from Kurama, Kuwabara, Koenma, Jorge, and the Ura-Otogi Team members this episode.  As Hiei struggles, there’s a Koenma/Jorge scene where they try and think of a way Hiei could win.  While thinking, their faces shift into a more realistic, shaded art style, which looks purposefully out of place and absurd.

• In the manga, Kuro-Momotaro thinks to himself about how he can use three dumplings each fight, to become a monkey, pheasant, and dog.  Most opponents can be beaten just by eating one dumpling, so he commends Hiei for forcing him to eat two.  But even though in his current form Hiei should be no match for him, since Hiei’s so tricky he still figures it’s safer to tear him to pieces right away.  In the anime all this dialogue is given to Onji and Shishi-Wakamaru.

• After Kuro-Momotaro uses his third and final dumpling, but before he’s shown transforming into his dog form, there’s a filler scene of Keiko and co. in the woods.  Keiko notices how Puu still isn’t feeling well, and the scene cuts to Yusuke, who continues to have a less than swell time.  Genkai’s still watching over him, and has a flashback to when she first gave Yusuke the Reiko-Gyoku.  Genkai finally leaves, telling Yusuke to remember that he’s not alone.

• In the manga, once Kuro-Momotaro reaches his dog form and closes in for the kill, we see him clamp down on Hiei and bite his shoulder.  In the next panel, Hiei immediately uses his fire sword attack to cut Kuro-Momotaro to pieces.  In the anime, when Kuro-Momotaro bites Hiei, Hiei fountains blood for quite a while.   After this blood fountain slowly dies down, there’s an uneasy silence.  We see that Kuro-Momotaro isn’t moving and has pupil-less eyes, and Hiei finally uses his fire sword to break free, cutting Kuro-Momotaro’s body to pieces which burn away.  Kurama explains via flashbacak that Hiei actually slashed Kuro-Momotaro repeatedly before getting bitten, and that Kuro-Momotaro was already dead by the time he clamped down on Hiei.

• After Hiei beats Kuro-Momotaro and the mid-episode eye catch plays, there’s a filler scene of Shizuru and co. lost in the woods, and another one of Yusuke suffering.  Genkai’s still there, though last time she seemed to be leaving.

• When Ura-Urashima uses the Reverse-Tamatebako, in the manga he threatens to revert Kurama back to before he was a fetus, while in the anime he threatens to revert him back to before he was a baby.  Maybe they thought “fetus” was too fancy a word for a kid audience?

• In the manga Ura-Urashima also tells Kurama he has the same name as a famous, super-evil demon, and wonders if people haven’t confused him with that other guy before.  He is of course talking about Kurama’s previous life as a Yoko.  This line gets left out in the anime.

• As Kurama reverts into his Yoko form, in the anime we briefly see an image form of the same four-legged white fox used to portray Kurama’s Yoko form in earlier filler.  This dissolves and we then see the humanoid Yoko that this form is always depicted as in the manga.

• Also, as Kurama reverts, the manga shows images of Kurama with Hiei and Goki, him as a little kid decapitating a hostile demon with a blade of grass, him growing younger and younger while wearing the same clothes, and some images of him with his mother.  In the anime we only get the images of him as a kid and with his mother, and they don’t match the ones in the manga.