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
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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.
Jul 2, 2023
Kuuchuu Buranko
(Anime)
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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
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