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 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.