Anime Review: Papuwa

I wish I knew how to begin this review. I usually enter with some common thing a reader can relate to, then go into my opening statements and opinions about the anime I’m reviewing. However I can’t seem to come up with anything meaningful this time around to properly describe exactly what the anime “Papuwa” is, except this:

Crack.

Pure awesome and silly crack.

Now, you may step back for a moment and say to yourself “Well I’ve seen alot of anime, and most of it is weird. That’s just how the Japanese are to westerners.”

This is very true, as we have some anime that deliberately defies logic, reason, and the space-time continuum. However, Papuwa is its own special brand of weird, and people will either totally fall in love with the cracked-out goodness, or will hate it entirely, and it all depends on how drunk or high you may be at the time.

Surprisingly enough, there is a story to try and follow as you wade through the insanity of the show. There are two warring clans with supernatural powers fighting with one another. Four years before the opening of the show, the little brother of the leader of one of the clans blows up an island in the Pacific called ‘Papuwa Island’, with powers that are supposedly the most fearsome and strongest of his clan. To contain things, his brother puts him into a coma to keep him from destroying anything else. Cut to fours years later during the opening of the show, and the kid – Kotaro – wakes up from his coma, and if guided by a mysterious voice, steals a motorboat and escapes from his brother’s compound. He crashes onto a second Papuwa Island with no memories as to who he is or what has been going on around him. There, Kotaro is then met by the strange inhabitants of the new Papuwa Island, including a little boy in a grass skirt named after the Island itself, and his man-maid Liquid. (who actually is a member of the army under Kotaro’s brother, and does everything in his power to keep Kotaro from remembering his past and his terrible power – even going to far as to change his name written in his underwear to ‘Rotaro’)

The rest of the series then snowballs into a seemingly drug-induced series of events and random occurrences, including meeting the rest of the cast and Island’s inhabitants – a large gay fish with shapely legs in fishnet stockings and snail who is his hermaphrodite lover, a transvestite Tyrannosaurus, a mushroom who gives off hallucinogenic spores and is constantly trying to get people to smoke him, Papuwa’s constant racoon-cat companion Chappy, and a colorful assortment of men trying to come find Kotaro for either his brother or for the opposing clan.

Everything surrounding the bizarre island and it’s residents may have you constantly doing double-takes and asking yourself “Did they really just go there?!”, but it doesn’t stop the series from having moments of heart and strange cuteness. While Kotaro/Rotaro may act like a spoiled brat and give Liquid no end of trouble (constantly refering to him as a ‘maid’ and making him do demeaning things), he still has his moments where, despite the large doses of weirdness and gay snails, he proves that he’s just trying to be a normal kid with his new friend Papuwa. A normal kid in exceedingly abnormal surroundings, but hey, what do you want from an anime you probably need to smoke up to coherently get.

While watching the series, you will have to take some time to wonder if you accidentally sniffed some glue sometime during the day. The first few episodes can come off as downright disturbing, and it seems that with each additional episode things become more and more freaky – in one episode you find out that Ito, the gay hermaphrodite snail, gives birth every few hours, and his babies are promptly gathered up by Liquid and the crew and eaten. I wish I were joking, as it would mean I’d come up with something so cracked-out that I’d need to be hospitalized for the sheer abnormal genius of it. The sexual innuendos thrown about, without anyone so much as blinking an eye about the matter, just make things that much better and honestly more smooth.

I recommend this series for one thing – getting together a group of your friends and waiting to see when their brains break. Even better would be if alcohol is being consumed.

Want a Piece of the Cracked-Out Goodness?
Papuwa Vol.1 DVD