Pui Pui Molcar

Pui Pui Molcar is one of the best anime of recent years, and you are missing out on it. Some of the ratings and reviews might be at least partially steeped in irony due to the weird memetic following works like this, Bananya, and the 2017 CGI Pingu reboot received. However, Molcar is sincerely one of the most charming, creative, and downright surreal anime of recent years.

The best part is that you can literally watch all of it in under half an hour.

So, what makes Molcar so fun? Simple: it’s a surreal, adorable comedy. Each episode is only 2 & ½ minutes, so the ... show relies on rapid fire joke after rapid fire joke to paint a strange and fun bite-sized story. While the first ⅓ of the anime consists of cute skits involving the molcars in order to flesh out this strange world of guinea pig cars driven by tiny toy people, the rest go in different directions. Zombie parodies, spy movie parodies, a racing episode with veggie boost power-ups, a fucking Back to the Future type episode. Each episode provides a radically different story from the last so that nothing gets stale. The sheer variety on display is staggering.

Molcar is able to tell all of its stories without a single line of dialogue. The sound effects, movements, and expressions show it all, and do so with such high-octane energy. How else can the show go from an episode about a guy trying to make a romantic gesture in the midst of an ice storm, to one where a superhero fantasizing molcar gets an entire character arc stemming from receiving unwarranted magical girl customizations, back to back? How else can each of these stories still sell the emotions they wish to convey while being gut-bustingly hilarious and almost sickeningly adorable? Each of the cars have their own distinct, simple personalities that are as expressive as they need to be for these gags and stories to work, as do the one-off human characters.

This show would be infinitely harder to sell if not for the stop-motion felt-doll animation for the molcars themselves, and the adorable noises they make. The way they integrate the felt with the props and other stop-motion elements, as well as the occasional 2D or live-action element, adds to each of the gags. Instances like the molcars boosting during the racing episode, or the magical girl decals reacting to whatever the hell is happening in that particular episode exemplify this. It gets even funnier once you start seeing actual people and cats reduced to tiny figurines, or when an actual hamster interacts with the felt molcars. It’s the kind of cutesy multimedia production that you just don’t see very often, and that proves to be a testament to just how much fun quirky stop-motion projects can be.

There’s really not much else that can be said about Molcar beyond just rambling into review-padding digressions about stuff the Akira drift in episode 9 being followed up by an Akira parody poster in episode 10. Its setting and worldbuilding is as strange as its references and parodies are eclectic. It has an insane amount of energy, as well as a joke per minute ratio that gives early Spongebob a run for its money. Pui Pui Molcar is quirky, adorable, hilarious, and unlike any other anime you’ll probably see for a good while. The styles present here may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but with only 2 & ½ minutes per episode and a variety of cute jokes and stories presented in each, it makes for a wonderful comfort show. It’s really as simple as that, so go out there and have some fun, why don’tcha?

In a brightly colored, sunlit hall of soft cotton, filled with uplifting music, gentle breezes and ambient nature sounds, comfort figures of the world have gathered around a plush throne, ready to be claimed by the supreme monarch of cuteness! The time for re-election has come, and amidst successful veterans including cat videos, laughing babies and “moe” anime, a new challenger has appeared by the name Pui Pui Molcar, humbly campaigning for the title with its adorable handcrafted stop-motion animation, wholesome mini-tales, and loads of squeaking, veggie-fueled guinea pig cars!

Every facet of these “molcar” designs adds to their cuteness, from their fuzzy arts-and-crafts appearance, rounded ... body shapes, button eyes, malleable sewn-on mouths and stubby wheel-feet, to their squeaky vocalizations sampled from real guinea pigs. Many situational touches also enhance the effect, whether the molcars' exaggerated bulged cheeks while munching on lettuce and carrots, visual effects animated with home materials, or the emphatic use of sound effects such as tiny bell dings for surprise or shock. Time and care was also taken to give distinct colour palettes and accessories not only to every molcar, but also each of the various locales, buildings, and most of the humans, lending personality and credibility to its strange setting. Thanks to these effective designs and the inherent cuteness of small fluffy pets, merely watching molcars going about their adventures can easily stir smiles in troubled souls!

But Molcar is not only excellent as an animation equivalent of comfort food, but a genuinely well-made and inspired series of shorts. Having a world filled with giant, fluffy guinea pigs doubling as sentient cars with actual human passengers is an outrageous yet ingenious premise that gets concisely explored in under 40 minutes. Each short episode features a new unique scenario and tells a simple self-contained story purely through its expressive stylized animation, with hardly a moment wasted.

Some episodes explore wacky scenarios arising from the logistics of having self-aware cars with their own free will and desires, imagining how familiar problems like traffic jams, bank robberies and cars parked in the hot sun might play out in the Molcar universe. Others borrow concepts from pop culture and put insane new spins on them. There’s even a guinea pig dance sequence or two. Whether cute, funny, heartwarming or just plain ridiculous, each episode is its own unique delight. I could give more examples, but I’d just be spoiling the fun, and if there’s any series where the phrase “knows how to have fun with itself” applies, Molcar is it!

Beyond its expressive visuals and high density of memorable concepts and gags, Molcar’s greatest strength is its consistent mix of cute absurdity with simplicity and earnestness. With it, the series has created something that can appeal to almost anyone. As a teeny-tiny time investment, I highly recommend it!

Pui Pui Molcar is simply put, an very easy anime to watch that makes me, among many else, happy.

Haven taken internet by surprise at the beginning of 2021 with its light-hearted and fun visual outlook, Pui Pui Molcar very much succeeds at what it clearly is aiming to be. Every now and then people tend to find something catered towards a different audience, and this years most wide spread example of this has been Pui Pui Molcar. An fun short ride of 24 minutes as a whole, Pui Pui tells many adventures featuring, and of "Facebook animals, but make them cars". With that sentence I ... think it is clear why internet has taken such a liking to this soothing and joyful animation.

Expressional animals are something that everybody likes. As the anime is able to relay everything it is trying to tell only relying on the Molcars' expressions, it speaks to the greater extend of it having succeeded at this. Many anime, very well known, tend to fail at this infamous "show, don't tell" storytelling method, can Pui Pui provide something different to the viewers that have grown numb to overloading amount of dialogue many anime tend to have.
Like many other pieces from the obscure world of children's animation that seems to appeal more to an older end of demographic, Pui Pui might have something different to offer. This proving once again that being odd in many senses can be an huge helping factor in selling the series. They achieve this expressional style with great utilization of wool and stop motion, reaching an very similar warm and cozy style of Yoshi's Woolly World (2015) in the best possible sense. In short, the of the best values this comedic short ride has is its pleasant outlook, that even if something that even child can enjoy, can provide even the older audience something nice and soft to look at. There never comes an age where something being adorable is an necessarily bad thing.

As you see the guinea pig cars partake in many different scenarios parodying many well-known cultural icons and other scenarios we are very used to seeing in children's media, it still doesn't fall to the pitfalls of most of the parodies we have seen catered towards children; too long run. By this we can get to the most fatal weakness of the series: Like the nature of many other "inconspicuous and unobtrusive" parodies, aging badly is an easy thing to fail at, with most likely not being able to stand up to re-watching of the series, specially after few years.

Something great at small pieces, and for the pure sake of being cute, fast and easy entertainment, it doesn't have much else to offer. Thankfully not all media needs to be more than that, but can still affect the enjoyment people are going to take out of it. The saving quality for this one being the stop motion animation, that we clearly haven't seen enough of from Japan. As we have seen from the works of Murata Tomoyasu, the medium of stop-motion animation clearly has even more to offer, if we as the audience and main sources of profit are willing to pay attention to works that dare to differ from the general anime look.

Pui Pui Molcar is one of those obscure sounding anime on paper, that end up loved by everyone no matter the age, but need the realistic expectations and appreciation for the momentary bliss it is able to offer as a whole.