Kuuchuu Buranko (Welcome to Irabu's Office)

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Kuchu Buranko, Trapeze, Flying Trapeze

Japanese: 空中ブランコ

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Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 11

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Oct 15, 2009 to Dec 24, 2009

Premiered: Fall 2009

Broadcast: Fridays at 00:45 (JST)

Producers: Dentsu, Fuji TV, Asmik Ace, Sony Music Entertainment, Bungeishunjuu

Licensors: None found, add some

Studios: Toei Animation

Source: Novel

Genres: Avant Garde, Drama

Themes: Medical, Psychological

Duration: 23 min. per ep.

Rating: R - 17+ (violence & profanity)

Statistics

Score: 7.91¹ (scored by 25,384 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #770²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #2157

Members: 94,174

Favorites: 1,281

Available At

Official Site

Resources

AniDB

ANN

Synopsis

The world of psychology is far from strange to the unusual Dr. Ichirou Irabu, a resident psychiatrist of Irabu General Hospital. He and his charming nurse Mayumi run through several patients, each suffering from a mental illness that harms their everyday life.

Patients should be wary of the seductive Mayumi, with her spellbinding looks and devilishly short pink nurse uniform. On the other hand, the doctor seems to have three separate personalities: a child with an oversized lab coat; an intelligent, youthful man with feminine traits; and a selfish, outgoing green bear. While curing his patients in questionable ways, Dr. Irabu often tries to gain something from them outside of his profession—and in doing so, occasionally forgets his role as a doctor.

As each patient struggles to face the nature of their distress, an obvious yet invisible thread ties their paths together.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

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Characters & Voice Actors

Irabu, Ichirou

Main

Park, Romi
Japanese

Mayumi

Supporting

Sugimoto, Yumi
Japanese

Fukui

Supporting

Fukui, Kenji
Japanese

Ino, Seiji

Supporting

Takahashi, Hiroki
Japanese

Yasukawa, Hiromi

Supporting

Hatano, Wataru
Japanese

Tsuda, Yuuta

Supporting

Irino, Miyu
Japanese

Bandou, Shinichi

Supporting

Namikawa, Daisuke
Japanese

Tanabe, Mitsuo

Supporting

Okiayu, Ryoutarou
Japanese

Tsuda, Hideo

Supporting

Furuya, Toru
Japanese

Iwamura, Yoshio

Supporting

Iwata, Mitsuo
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Yamamoto, Kouji

Producer

Jouno, Masato

Producer

Nakamura, Kenji

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Nagasaki, Yukio

Sound Director

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Opening Theme

"Upside Down" by Denki Groove (電気グルーヴ)

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Ending Theme

"Shangri-La (Y.Sunahara 2009 Remodel)" by Denki Groove (電気グルーヴ)

Reviews

Jan 9, 2024

Teramol

Recommended

Kuuchuu Buranko, also known as "Trapeze" or "Welcome to Irabu's Office", quite ironically doesn't have much to do with the circus act of trapeze as the name and the first episode would initially suggest. In this series, we follow the work of Dr. Irabu, a mysterious psychologist with a rapidly changing personality and a huge injection fetish.

The whole series is an episodic one and takes place inside the Christmas week or so. Because it's episodic and it's the same week every episode, the series also is a little achronological. Sometimes during the episodes we see other weird things happening in the background and then later ...

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Nov 18, 2022

Myrmiderp

Recommended

What a show. Kuuchuu Buranko takes you on a bizarre tour of the mental illness pervading the surprisingly small world surrounding Irabu's hospital. If unconventional art puts you off, this certainly will. If surreal and unexplained metaphorical shifts in an anime's reality would distract or bother you, this is not the anime for you. Kuuchuu Buranko is about desires and fears and things that get in our way, and it takes many artistic liberties when trying to get its point across. The only way I could imagine someone saying it's boring is if they were so overwhelmed that they just tuned it out.

The art direction ... is nuts. If you've seen Mononoke, it won't surprise you that they share a studio. The colors and patterns clash harshly, there are pictures of real places, real human people, anime characters interwoven with pictures of real people, puppets made of pictures of real people, puppets made of pictures of anime characters, nightmarish perspective changes… it is absolutely something to look at. You might hate the style, but you have to respect that they were balls-to-the-wall going for it. It takes a little bit to get fully used to, but after a while it feels natural, and I really enjoyed the visual contrast. The style also supports the narrative quite well; these choices are anything but form-over-function.

Kuuchuu Buranko is almost purely episodic, with minor exceptions. As I mentioned, the world of Kuuchuu Buranko is remarkably small, and there's usually a handfull of tie-ins between episodes, if you're paying attention. Some episodes are more directly related than others, but ultimately they stand alone very well. Although I enjoyed the small nods to continuity Kuuchuu Buranko had to offer, I can't help but compare it to a similar series with a more refined construction: The Tatami Galaxy. Not only do I prefer when the episodes come together a bit more, but Kuuchuu Buranko is also a little too straightforward in the way it approaches its subject matter. I would have preferred a bit more subtlety to complement the artistry.

The tone, the storytelling, the general direction… it's all pretty sweet. They do a great job finding unique ways to convey the experience of these disorders to the audience. Irabu himself is also quite absurd, but the reactions of those around him provide a compelling contrast that grounds the show to reality. You can see his patients having these moments of thinking "well, he *is* the doctor here, maybe there's more to this", allowing them to tolerate his strangeness. It's a great dynamic that helps you contrast his absurdity to his patients' absurdity to the everday person, asking the question "what makes something a problem?". The voice work does a great job accenting this, and the only things I found to be hokey were some of the pictures of real faces.

Who gets sexualized in Kuuchuu Buranko? Mayumi, an adult, human woman. Also a handful of adults in an episode exploring sexual frustration. Love it. There's this fetishy stuff that Irabu does with injections, but it's a totally different animal from your typical anime titillation; its function in the show is almost like an avant-garde magic girl transformation. Luckily it's hard enough to explain that it's also really difficult to spoil.

So yeah, it's a very unique series, and the ending song is a bop. Because of how strongly episodic it is, I think it works very well as an "every once in a while" watch rather than a binge-watch, but you do you. That's really all you need to know. Check it out.

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Jul 2, 2023

sansneant

Mixed Feelings

If your diet primarily consists of anime, there's very little meat. It's mostly dessert, quick tastes of shows that are easy to digest and leave you feeling good but lack real weight or sustenance. You don't see a lot of anime that can successfully find a place between "i'm 14 and this is deep" and "completely meaningless" - both “empty-comfy” and “valueless” types of meaningless. I would go so far as to say the medium of anime abuses its visual similarity to Western cartoons to actively avoid making its viewer really chew on those important issues - it’s digestible, it’s understandable, good and evil, quips ... from anti-heroes and dark haired male fantasy protagonists and the couple ends up together at the end. Even shows which feature conflict heavily create a "good guy" and a "bad guy," which in itself is a flawed way of looking at the world - there's just guys, and girls, and everything in between - people, humans, individuals. Any grouping past the self is propaganda that's allowed our society to evolve past hunter-gatherers and cooperate with our fellow apes because we like the same football team or same political party or same god. There is no good guy in life - just Stacy in accounting who really wants to visit Paris with her boyfriend but he’s just not that interested, so she goes out of her way to be rude to her officemates to alleviate stress. Individuals. People. Assholes.

Kuuchuu Buranko is different. Immediately, it's not interested in being eye candy - where other anime have "Every frame a painting," every frame of Kuuchuu Buranko is a nightmare, nauseating colors, amalgamations of 3d and 2d animation, and even real life people, in the same shot. It's ugly. It's loud. The color palette is something out of an acid trip. The characters are broken people being treated by a broken psychologist - not in the emo-edgy way, but a refreshingly genuinely unhinged way, sufferers of OCD and PTSD and panic disorders. I could only get through one or two episodes per sitting before I had to put it down and go watch something else and process it later.

But that’s what I enjoyed the most about it - it’s a collection of people, doing people things, having people problems. It’s ugly without being gore porn or shock value. You aren’t supposed to turn your brain off and lazily masturbate to it - you have to focus, you have to chew on this stale bubble gum and extract the flavor. The psychologist never offers magic words to solve the problem, it’s debatable that he’s even intending to reach the results he does. The “fixes” for their problems don’t magically cure them - they just learn to live their lives in a way that is the most comfortable for them, without a hero or villain, without a magic wand to wave away the fact that they are damaged goods and they were simply born that way and that’s okay. The people always solve their own problems, maybe helped with advice here and there, forced into uncomfortable positions and facing their traumas, but always growing by themselves.

Each episode follows a similar format. An individual goes to the psychologist’s office with a problem - maybe forced by concerned family or friends, maybe on their own trying to make their lives better. The doctor, in one of his three personalities, has the nurse inject them with medicine that causes them to appear as an animal of some kind, a metaphor for their illness when it presents itself. And then he accompanies them in their day to day life, ostensibly for selfish gains - not a “heart of gold” story, but just an asshole who gives good advice without being pushy. A real doctor interjects once in a while as a voiceover giving insight into the real illness and its symptoms.
And then… they learn to deal with who they are. That’s it. They just figure out a safety blanket or a pair of sunglasses or something they can use to mitigate the symptoms that prevent them from living normally, and they get on with living and working their jobs and pursuing their passions and failing to pay bills on time and having diarrhea and whatever else our grubby little species does in its spare time. Being alive.

Their stories bump into one another, appearing in the background of each others’ stories, and there’s no throwaway appearance of a childhood friend or any kawaii desu nya -dere tropes. Everyone matters an equal, moderate amount to the story, which is to say - the characters in Kuuchuu Buranko are as close to human as I’ve seen an anime achieve, and I really enjoyed the whole thing. The background characters around them neither put them in a safety bubble nor degrade them - they just work with the guy who wears safety goggles because he’s afraid of knives or the guy who had a boner for four days straight, they shrug and go on with living themselves because hey, we all have bad days, we’re all a little cracked teapot somewhere. These people in the background are drawn as two-dimensional cutouts until they are needed and they become traditional animation or even 3d themselves, which isn’t itself revolutionary. What’s fascinating is that the main characters do too - they snap between important and not important, 2d to 3d to realistic, no different from the background characters. The show could have been told about any of them and it would have made no difference. It could have been any of us in that chair confessing to having panic attacks or being addicted to texting. The show could have been told about you.

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Cartoons on the Bay announced the winners of Pulcinella Awards 2010. Kuchu Buranko (Flying Trapeze) was chosen for the best TV anime for young adults. Marie & Ga...read more

Apr 23, 2010 7:26 AM by dtshyk | Discuss (25 comments)

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According to Newtype magazine August issue, a new anime "Kuuchuu Buranko" was announced. It will be aired in Noitamina block from this October. Kuuchuu Bur...read more

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Poll: Kuchu Buranko Episode 8 Discussion ( 1 2 ) tsubasalover - Dec 3, 2009	60 replies	by ManuelFragment »» Apr 19, 10:34 PM
Poll: Kuchu Buranko Episode 6 Discussion ( 1 2 ) tsubasalover - Nov 19, 2009	68 replies	by owonism »» Feb 18, 4:52 PM
Poll: Kuchu Buranko Episode 2 Discussion ( 1 2 ) tsubasalover - Oct 22, 2009	94 replies	by owonism »» Feb 18, 1:07 PM
Poll: Kuchu Buranko Episode 11 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) tsubasalover - Dec 24, 2009	113 replies	by Destroyer31 »» Oct 30, 2023 10:34 PM
Poll: Kuchu Buranko Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) grapeofdeath - Oct 15, 2009	196 replies	by Ronninn »» Aug 24, 2023 7:30 AM

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Kuuchuu Buranko

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Characters & Voice Actors

Irabu, Ichirou

Mayumi

Fukui

Ino, Seiji

Yasukawa, Hiromi

Tsuda, Yuuta

Bandou, Shinichi

Tanabe, Mitsuo

Tsuda, Hideo

Iwamura, Yoshio

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Kuuchuu Buranko

Alternative Titles

Information

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Synopsis

Background

Visit MALxJapan MALxJapan -More than just anime-

Characters & Voice Actors

Staff

Opening Theme

Ending Theme

Reviews

Interest Stacks

Recommendations

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Recent Forum Discussion

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