Yurikuma Arashi, impressions

[type_wild]

I liked it, but not as much as I'd have liked to have liked it.


My general impression is that in order to fully understand what this anime is gunning for, you need to understand Japanese views on homosexuality a lot better than I do, there's that.

There's also that I'll have to watch this one again if I'm going to say something coherent about it, and here's the thing: With Penguindrum, I would happily do so. With this one? It's... not instantly tempting.

I realise that it normally isn't particularly helpful to compare a work of fiction to the creator's previous ones, but Yurikuma kinda invites it by plenty of visual callbacks to Penguindrum and Utena both, and at least one BGM piece that I could've sworn was from Penguindrum. And yeah there's a lot of Utena and Penguindrum in this story, and both of them are also better - at least for the viewer who's probably missing a ton of references to society and other works. And honestly, I think I'll probably need to watch this one dubbed so that I can pay better attention to the visuals than I do when reading subtitles.

If you want to watch it, then please stick around until episode four, it starts making more sense by then. For what it's worth, it's very, very rare for me to physically react to stories I watch or read. I did at a couple of points in No. 6 - credit there! - and I did it a lot in episode eleven of Yurikuma Arashi. It gets there, eventually.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

I was just thinking the other day that I need to rewatch Yurikuma as well in order to get all of the nuances that I missed in the repetitions. I'm pretty sure I have a sense of what it's trying to say w/r/t Japanese attitudes towards homosexuality, but I think there are some other aspects that I missed in the mad whirl of visual overload.

(I also think that some of the subtitling suffered from the nature of simulcasting, that rush to crank out a translation within hours of airing. I don't know whether Funi went back through and revised the subtitles before releasing the series on BD/DVD, but I remember that there were some lines and romanization that felt incredibly clunky.)

[type_wild]

I honestly don't know how to feel about Yurikuma, in that what I mostly feel is that there are pieces missing from it. Having watched Ikuhara shows before, I suspect that these pieces is stuff I've missed because of references I'm not getting or visual clues I've missed. If CR is running the original subs, then that could probably have explained a thing or two as well. This definitely isn't the kind of story where translating on the fly is at all advisable.

[gramarye1971]

I remember that there were issues with the romanization -- Kumalia/Kumaria for one, and Mirun/Milne for another -- which is not uncommon in simul-subs but which I think hurt the narrative quite a bit for viewers in the West.

I seem to recall that there's some decent Yurikuma meta and discussion floating around, though sadly it's scattered across various message/discussion boards, blog posts, and Tumblr. One of the better aspects that I remember was the discussion of the Court as a fascinating commentary on the patriarchy -- that in a female-dominated series, it's a group of men who are passing judgment on women's decisions to love (and approving whether something is yuri enough for their tastes, which I personally see as a dig against the preponderance of male-gazey yuri tropes). Sha-ba-da-doo. But since the series was shorter, it didn't have the time that Utena and Penguindrum did to really ram home its messages through repetition, so it comes across as a lot more frantic to me.

I don't buy Funimation releases, so Penguindrum and Yurikuma probably won't end up on my shelves. But in Yurikuma's case, I really do wish that Sentai or had gotten their hands on it, because I think they do a lot better with shows that have specific Japanese cultural context.

[type_wild]

They've fixed the subs then, since Milne at least was consisten throughout, so Kumaria probably was too. (if it wasn't, however, it could explain why it took me so embarassingly long to get it). But I've seen at least one person say they dropped Yurikuma after episode three, and if the subs are bad on top of it, then it's no wonder :/

I don't doubt that it has talk, no. Google has led me to ridiculous amounts of huge blog posts trying to pick apart Penguindrum, and Yurikuma felt a lot more overtly political. Then again - well, could be the pacing and having to put in all that clever metaphor in half the time. It certainly feels a lot denser. That comment on the Court was something I'll have to admit was sadly helpful, since they were another part that was okay I love them, but what are they doing here. Ha, that explain why the judge keeps agreeing with the defence *g*

My reasons for staying away from Funi if I can has little to do with quality (I can't really judge, but I've heard complaints before) and more to do with dislike of how I feel they cater to fans more than to quality sometimes. Sorry, I'm not paying money to hear Vic Mignona do another Miyano Mamoru part. I have the UK release of Penguindrum, which uses the Funi dub but possibly not the Funi sub, since people were complaining about on-screen text being left untranslated. But then again, I've seen a clip of the Funi release with on-screen footnotes explaining "triple lace day". I somehow don't think that approach is very helpful when dealing with series likes this.

[gramarye1971]

I own the ADV release of Excel Saga, which I think has one of the best ways of handing footnotes -- a separate pop-up track that explains references, much as MTV's Pop-Up Video used to do back in the day. It was extremely handy for a series like Excel Saga that was crammed to bursting with obscure and semi-obscure cultural references...not to mention an entire episode that was essentially one big Leiji Matsumoto ripoff. The best part was that you could turn the pop-ups on and off depending on whether you actually cared about the references. A sadly underused approach to subtitles.