Rascal

Otterly Painful

(Spoiler-free review)

Sarazanmai is the latest brain-fart of "visionary" anime director Kunihiko Ikuhara, creator of such acclaimed cult classics as Penguindrum and Revolutionary Girl Utena. As the first of Kunihiko Ikuhara's works I've encountered, Sarazanmai, needless to say, does not exactly convince me of the quality of the others, so I can't comment on expectations that come with this show having seen the director's other works, as I went into this with a fresh perspective. If you want a perspective from an Ikuhara vet or fanboy, look elsewhere. No strings or bias here!

With its uneccessary scattering of arbitrary symbolism and surreal, gross-out imagery, as well as its mish-mash of random themes and ill-fitting storylines with unlikable characters, It's plain to see just from this atrocity exactly the kind of director Ikuhara is, so there's a pretty good chance this is as far as I'll get into his catalogue. That said, on to the review:

Sarazanmai holds no regard for the viewer from the first second to the last. From the opener of the first episode there's a lot of arbitrary symbolism, talk about "connections" and really transparent themes that are hammered in and glazed over with metaphors and sprinkled with random visual symbols to hide their simplistic nature. As transparent as the themes are from the beginning, the feeling which such instant overcrowding of the senses with meaningless symbolism can only be described as pretentious. At least that's the vibe I got from it.

Ikuhara never bothers to contextualize any of this symbolism leaving it to float around without attribution, hoping I guess that at some point people will notice that "oh, that random thing which meant nothing now still means nothing in retrospect because it held no narritive weight, but at least I know it's connected to this thing now. That's... super". And that exchange repeats itself.

I do not know what was intended to be accomplished with this overwashing of bizzare imagery, because most works of fiction dealing with heavy symbolism always draw appropriate attention to these things when they're needed to keep them in the viewer's mind and contextualize them to the plot at hand, so they can connect parts of the plot, but this doesn't happen in Sarazanmai. They're just floating there needlessly, poising as if to say "look what I did, I bet you're wondering what this means" without ever paying off.

That's the least of my complaints there, is the over-saturated metaphorical nature of the presentation, but that's only surface level. It's the real meat of the show which is flawed. This anime is themed based on a lot of obscure Japanese mythos and culture, which is cool all things considered, until you see how it's presented, and then it's just gross.

Like, I get it, it wants to be wacky, it wants to be bizarre. But rather than rely on comedic beats, timing, good directing, or denial of expectation in any tasteful way, Sarazanmai's entire comedic spirit and everything else relies only on the merits of how weird and cRaZy and lol's teh random it is, that there are these kappas stealing metaphorical balls out of people's anuses (graphically), and looking like they're constipated while pushing out a kappa version of the person they just assulted, in full anus juice-covered disgusting fasion.

Ha... ha. Very entertaining.

Now I'm not here to judge people's tastes, but this kind of "bold and brash" imagery is... disgusting. It's stupid. It's gross. It's the kind of "artistic" choice that I don't want to see. I legitimately don't understand what's appealing or funny about this. It's tasteless and weird in ways that just aren't okay. I suppose that's one of my main criticisms of this anime. It's very shameless. This kind of thing that doesn't take the viewer into account at all, this is what you're getting whether you like it or not. And this is coming from someone who delights in surreal and weird anime, like FLCL, Space Dandy episodes even, Flip Flappers, Mononoke, Boogiepop Phantom... there are an infinite amount of ways to be creative with this medium and this is a perfect example of how not to do it.

Some will say it's due to the folklore. This is after all how the Japanese myth of the kappa goes, or at least one of the versions. But are we really supposed to take something like that seriously or even create this kind of rendition for it? Mythical depictions of weird creatures are fine to study their weirdness, but I don't understand the choice of basing an entire anime around it.

But I digress. Some people bloody love the kappas and their anuses and apparently it's the funniest thing in the world, no one cares that it's gross. So fine, moving on to other less subjective criticisms then.

This is actually a monster-of-the-week kind of show. Now you may think when I say that, this means a kind of episodic week-to-week breakdown where a team of heroes fights a single threat in some differing but similar way, saturday morning cartoon style. We've seen this kind of storytelling in Anime like Stardust Crusaders or Blood Blockade Battlefront. It's cool and it's usually a favorite formula of mine, simply for the variety they're able to bring sometimes in having a different enemy every episode and having it be its own contained little situation. But this show absolutely destroys the idea of this formula in a really disappointing way. The goal is apparently to have these three little boys turn into kappas so they can steal a zombie's shirikodama (from their anus lololol) so that it stops wrecking havoc on the world. And this brings us to a major problem with both the Story and the Animation.

This anime has no problem in shamelessly re-using Animation assets. The battles presented week-to-week aren't just repeditive, they're the same set of frames, taking up 3 minutes of every episode at least. And they're choreographed. It's lazy, and it doesn't just grow old because it wasn't even cool the first time. And the worst is the singing. For some reason because the kappas in the weird zombie world taking you completely out of the real-world experiences the characters are getting into just to participate in this isn't enough, they figured they need a song-and-dance routine to go with it every time too. It's actually really obnoxious and I wish they'd stop, but it happens every episode. Someone could be dying and they'd pop into this little sequence like the episode minute count depends on it. And it's almost completely seperate from the events of the show.

I'm really baffled among all the other choices made in this show, with this one right here. The rest of the animation is actually quite good, thanks to the staff on hand. It looks decent enough and I have hardly any complaints with the actual quality of the visuals besides this, which is why the animation rating is so high. But yeah, those sequences. Repeditive, annoying, and just plain dumb.

This leads me to the next point, the loosely interconnected storylines. Every character in the main trio along with two other characters, have their own kind of arc they go through, so there's about 4 different arcs. This actually ties right into a singular legitimate Praise I have for the show, but I'll get to that in a minute: the kappa anus shenanigans and surreal imagery and useless symbolism and re-used monster of the week battles is all surface level. These 4 story arcs is what the show's really about (rendering all of those other elements COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS) so just consider this if you're into Story and Characters.

One storyline follows the main character Kazuki and his brother Haruka as they deal with some kind of relationship thing involving a lot of unrelatable stuff like crossdressing for no reason, angst, and general nonsense. And I care about none of it. It makes no sense and isn't interesting at all.

A second storyline follows the inner workings of Enta's mind, one of the other three boys, as he pines after his gay crush Kazuki in really creepy ways, and stuff happens. I just couldn't care less, man.

A third follows Toi Kuji, the third of the main trio, as he deals with the loss of his family members, the pressure from his brother's illegal mafia life, and the dealings therein which are actually really quite well realized and has some good emotional weight to it. Yeah. I said it. I like this aspect of the show. I wish this aspect of the show WAS the show. It's relatable, it's grounded and down to earth, and it's well presented. I really wish it was a complete show. But it isn't. I'll get to that.

The fourth and final follows an almost completely unrelated duo of characters, two cops, mabu and reo who happen to be attracted to members of the opposite sex which is both beautiful and brave, and their relationship and dealings with a mysterious force.

Oh, and adding in about the repeated animation:

New footage machine broke, but the yaoi machine is working just fine

They all get really twisted in. Some of them have one entire episode dedicated to their arc. Lucky me! Because I can skip the others and just watch Toi's, which works perfectly well as a standalone without watching any of the other episodes. But sadly as it goes on, it becomes a complete mess of the four, all jammed in together to save time, no well thought out locations for emotional beats, bleeding into one another, and... it's really just a sad mess. Especially for the fact that I don't care about most of it, at least let the viewer focus completely on one of your four threads if you aren't going to have them hardly be connected.

Enta as I said, is just kinda creepy, the show tries to present him in a cutesy way but it's very just self-serving and weird. Probably my least favorite character. There is at least something more to Kazuki. He cares deeply for his brother which is something, but the way he goes about it is both embarrassing and needless. The whole thing really should just be about his brother but the kappa thing finds a way to crowd in. There isn't much to Toi but his situation makes me care about him, so they succeeded there. And lastly the gay cops. All there is to them is they love each other. That's literally it.

The Opening sucks, the ending theme is decent but really unfitting for the show, and the rest of the sound design is again just as repeditive as some of the animation.

The show's themes are connections, desires, secrets, and other such things which could potentially be very interestingly explored. But they aren't. Instead this anime's ambitions are hidden away in super secret symbolism and subtext leaving the audience to gawk at a few transparent messages amongst a wave of weird visuals and a story and world that's as fragile and nonsensical and gross and alienating as it wants to be, but never having a reason to be so.

Needless to say, all of that doesn't make me want to be connected in any way, to Sarazanmai.

2/10

______________________________________________________________________________________

Reccomendations:

If you're into anime with some complex themes and bizarre visuals, I would strongly divert you to something like FLCL and its sequels, Flip Flappers, Mob Psycho 100, or if you want to get really out there, Space Patrol Luluco. If you actually read this, wow that's amazing, and thank you!