User blog:Samaru163/Deltora Comparison: Noradz the Clean

Hello Deltora fans, one and all and welcome to episode nine of my Deltora Quest comparison.

Anime Comparissons
Noradz the Clean covers the rest of chapter six, seven, and part of chapter eight from City of the Rats.

Characters
The people of Noradz are pretty accurate to their book description, wearing all black and high boots. However, they're supposed to have shaved heads, which is a little detail that adds a lot to the cult atmosphere of Noradz.

The nine Ra-Kacharz who govern the city are mostly accurate. They're dressed from head to toe in red, leaving only their eyes bare, carry whips, and the eight lesser ones almost always defer to their leader, Reece. However, their garments look to be a mixture of cloth and metal masks, wheras in the books they were dressed in cloth entirely. Reece also has a head piece added to his outfit to help distinguish him from the others. They also don't let their whips drag behind them like rat tails, as they do in the book. However, Reece is properly suspicious and cross with our heroes, so it's a decent adaptation. They even remembered to muffle their voices due to the mouth coverings.

Bridge

 * The companions awaken in Noradz: an isolated city perpetually smelling of soap and suspicious towards outsiders. Amon their reception is Reece, leader of the city.
 * The people of Noradz performing a sweeping motion across their bodies while chanting "Noradzeer" as a form of prayer, though the anime changes it to "Clean Noradzeer."
 * The companions not being allowed to leave the city until after dinner, since food had been set aside for them.
 * Noradz's dining hall having tall tables, no chairs, and no utensils for eating.
 * Barda being amazed that the people of Noradz serve chocolate alongside their dinner.
 * Tira, a young serving girl, accidentally spilling a bread roll and screaming like a banshee.
 * The Ra-Kacharz deciding to punish Tira for the beforementioned bread murder with one hundred lashes, only to relent when Lief takes the blame, as he is an outsider and stranger to theri customs.
 * Filli poking his head out of Jasmine's shirt to share in the food, which causes the entire city to fly into a panic and demand his death.
 * Filli escapes into the city during the confusion, though the companions are not so fortunate.
 * The companions being placed on trial to decide if they will be killed or imprissoned for life by drawing two cards from a sacred silver cup.
 * Tira informing Lief through lip reading that Reece put two death cards in the cup to ensure the companions would die.
 * Lief using the Topaz to come up with the idea of throwing his card into a nearby fireplace so that, through proccess of elimination, the Ra-Kacharz would believe he chose the life card.

Alterations
Our anime heroes wake up to the relaxing scene of the people of Noradz fumigating them with unknown substances. I suppose there's nothing to indicate this didn't happen in the book, but if it did, the companions never mention smelling different. Also, they originally only met Reece upon waking up and being given water, with the other eight Ra-Kacharz arriving for dinner. Here, all nine are present when the companions wake up.

Reece forces the companions to learn the "Clean Noradzeer" chant in the anime before telling them anything else about Noradz. In the book, Lief mimics the Noradzeer chant once when he mistook it for a greeting, but Reece never prompted him to.

Interestingly, the anime has the people of Noradz worry when Lief and Jasmine talk about Kree being a raven. In the book, nobody batted an eye about his species.

Several times throughout the episode, the Ra-Kacharz have a secret circle to decide what to do with the companions. As such, it comes across like they have an ulterior motive to keep them in Noradz, rather than it just being part of their customs not to let blessed food go to waste.

To get to that sweet twenty two minute mark, the anime added in a new "hand clensing ceremony" which has Reece lead everyone else, inlcuding the other Ra-Kacharz, through the proccess of washing their hands, and a follow up nail inspection. While it's not too outlandish compared to the other rules of Noradz, what kills this scene for me is the dialogue. It is beyound childish, with lines like, "Scrub and scrub your palms—scrub and scrub." I thought I was watching a high fantasy adventure series, not a hand washing PSA.

Jasmine says the line, "If nothing else, the food is good in this joint," while eating. I know this will come across as a nitpick, but it's another case of why I feel the anime does so poorly with non-book dialogue, and how it sounds nothing like what Emily Rodda would have written.

In the book, Tira spilled the bread roll because she was nervously trying to remove a serving tray while the companions were eating. In the anime, she spills it while apologizing to Lief that she didn't inform him that the water on their table was for hand washing, not drinking.

Filli's reveal in the anime amounts to little more than screaming and people frozen in fear. It was mass hysteria in the books, with the Ra-Kacharz whipping people who got in their way as they rushed to kill Filli, and several civilians being trampled in the stampeed of bodies.

The reason why the cup was chosen for the companion's trial is different in both versions. In the book, the nine Ra-Kacharz were split on the vote: Reece wanted them dead while others wanted them imprisoned. In the anime, all of them voted for death, but because of customs, they decided to go with the cup. The cup itself is also different, almost resembling a bowl in the anime, while the book says it looks like a silver wine goblet.

The trial was held in the great hall in the books, while in the anime, it is a seperate room with rings of open fire surrouding the judging platform. With how focused the city is on security and staying clean, you'd think there would be some guard rails or something to stop people from falling into the fire.

Tira informs Lief that Reece switched the cards before he chose one in the book. In the anime, it happens after he made his choice, resulting in a long and awkward pause that makes me wonder why the Ra-Kacharz didn't immediately assume he chose the death card. They are also renamed light and darkness, because, again, we can't say death to the kiddies these days.

Omissions
When Tira was being seized for spilling food, one person grabbed the bread roll she dropped and held it to the sky, almost like they were asking God to smite it. It's a tiny detail, but went a long way in showing us how paranoid the people of Noradz were when their rules were broken.

The anime cut out a good bit of worldbuilding for Noradz regarding children. Apparently they eat seperately from adults while learning the laws and customs of the city.

Final thoughts
Nitpicking aside, this episode is actually pretty good. Along with covering the beats from the story, the stuff it adds is, for the most part, OK. The dialogue might weight it down, but the hand washing and finger nail inspections feel like something that would happen inside Noradz that our heroes didn't mention. Also, having the people freak out when they learned that Kree was an animal also makes sense due to theri fear of animals, and the way Reece narrows his eyes in the scene might indicate that he recognizes who the companions are, which could be a way the anime tries to explain his actions.

The cult like atmosphere of Noradz was also on full display. Having the Ra-Kacharz repeat the Noradzeer chant again and again drilled in for the viewers how ridgid and strange this place was, and just what kind of dangers our heroes were getting into. Most of the dialogue came straigh from the books as well, which further sold the atmosphere.

With all that said, the episode is still not amazing. The animation is a big killer this time: the fact that no background characters so much as flinch away from Filli or the spilled food makes Noradz feel so lifeliess. There's a scene at the end of the episode that perfectly showcases this, with Tira walking down a hallway and all the people around her freezing in place. It's cheep looking and takes away any feel that this is a living and breathing city.

There were other problems to, like Jasmine's dialogue being too childish and snippy, but I've talked enough about them in the past.

In the end, this episode had its fair share of problems, but did a good job selling its creepy atmosphere and making Noradz feel like such an alien place, as it did in the books.

But what did you guys think? Did you need a reminder on how to properly clean your hands? Do you like the idea of people looking at your fingernails? Are light and darkness going to replace life and death in your vocabulary? Let me know below, and remember to keep an eye open for every change in adaptations you can find.

Next time we'll see if I can escape this fate with the aptly titled Escape.