Kuchu Buranko – 01

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WHAT THE HELL IS THIS WEIRD SHIT I’M WATCHING??…

Ok, Trapeze had aired already and I immediately checked it out to see how the visuals will go. As seen from the trailer, we get a glimpse of the live action hybrid with the anime style and so much bright retro colors in them. So I pretty much prepared my eyes for how odd the visuals would be. But, it turned out to exceed what I had expected. This is like SHAFT’s Shinbo asked to be a clown on ecstasy for a day and come up with this… thing. I-I don’t know what to say with the artistic direction. It’s very eccentric to the core so you’ll just either love it or hate it.

Cardboard background people FTW.

Which brings me now to the character designs… They’re just plain screwed WTF. Again, love it or hate it. It’s just very odd that it isn’t really friendly to my eyes. I also don’t like how they animate  the characters. It’s very choppy and awful to watch especially with their 2d faces having mixed with actual 3d human faces. Sometimes it just looks unintentionally funny. I still like how they experimented with them, so I guess it may grow on me. But hey~ at least it could have been worse.

The over-the-top artistic direction works very well for the backgrounds and the buildings, I must say. It’s really pure weirdness with all the bright and fluorescent colors but they’re very detailed and funny (in a good way) to look at.

Kuuchuu Buranko will seem to have an arc-by-arc story with different protagonists. In this first arc (namely Kuuchuu Buranko as well), we have Kohei Yamashita, who works in a circus as the guy in a flying trapeze team. He fails at his trapeze acts though, and he feels like his co-worker is harassing him. That leads him to visit a psychiatrist.

Going now to the main character of the entire series, we have the psychiatrist Dr. Ichiro Irabu. Rather immature and oddly eccentric and hidden in a bear suit, Irabu is indeed a psychiatrist here to help people about their dilemma.

Irabu has three forms. The first, bear one, next is a middle-aged man having blond hair with glasses. Both are voiced by Mitsuya Yuji. His third form is a little kid, this time he’s voiced by Paku Romi. Well Irabu is definitely an interesting character, having three personae just makes more factor on how crazy this show will be.

Here we have sweet Nurse Mayumi. Oh wait, did I said “sweet”? Well she’s not. She’s stoic, she smokes, she loves syringes and injecting them while distracting them with her assets. But she’s awesome all in all.

The introduction scene with her transitioning from anime form to live action form was also pretty awesome. But yeah, 3D girl in anime ””orz seems like this gravure nurse will be the source of fan service in here, if ever, since she had more than a minute of sexing up herself, leading to a very weird still scene of her giving an injection to the arc’s protagonist while he’s moaning.

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OP & ED:

OP: “Upside Down” by Denki Groove

ED: “Shangri-La (Y.Sunahara 2009 Remodel)” by Denki Groove

I was disappointed in both OP and the ED. I was expecting more bizarre and trippy since the show already is but instead we have simple sequences. Lol at the retro funkiness the both sequences have though xD. I guess its theme is really groovy and psychedelic.

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Bottomline is, this is some trippy weird-ass shit, I have no bloody hell of an idea what would this be about, but I must say that everything got pulled off very well. It’s ridiculously funny too, I don’t know if most of them are intentional or not though.

Paku Romi, hands down, gets my favorite performance. I love how bratty yet cool young Irabu sounds. Mitsuya Yuji also gives a good job too. The nurse is obviously hot, I think she’s more of a gravure idol more than a seiyuu since I haven’t heard of her so much yet.

This seems promising in a sense that this one gives something new to my anime-watching table. I guess that’s best to describe this show, it’ll be different for sure. I’ll try to blog this one weekly if it does not disappoint and if subs comes out fast (the moment I’m typing this they’re not releazed yet). I pretty much enjoyed some noitaminA shows because they are in a different standard compared to those mainstream ones currently. “Trapeze/Kuchu Buranko/Kuuchuu whatever” makes an early stand out this Fall, though it’s up to everyone to decide if it stands out in a good way, or in a silly way.

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