By Andrew Osmond.
In Penguindrum, a dorky penguin hat – that’s a hat that looks like a penguin, not one made out of penguins – brings a trappy girl when to life. This miracle starts an venture that’s insanely odd plane by the standards of anime. The girl is Himari Takakura, the uncorrupt sister of brothers Shoma and Kanba, who are devoted to her with viperous intensity. They’re devastated by her death – she collapses at a Tokyo aquarium – elated by her miracle recovery, and dumbfounded by what happens next.
Himari wears the penguin hat, and turns into the sexy dominatrix-goddess of a psychedelic dimension, mercilessly ordering the boys to discover the fabled Penguindrum. Remember, she’s their little sister. Only anime could envisage an incestuous Yellow Submarine fantasy quite so blithely.
“Penguins,” commented director Kunihiko Ikuhara in the Penguindrum Guide Book, “have been like mascot notation for multiple generations. The reason for that is probably because, as animals, they are ‘out there’. We have dogs and cats as part of our daily life, and most other pets are mammals like them, but penguins are birds. Except they’re not like other birds. They swoop in the water. It’s like they are scrutinizingly their own special penguin unprepossessing family. And isn’t unconfined that there’s this sense of they can’t go anywhere. It’s like: I can’t fly, but I can’t stay underwater forever, either. So where do I belong?”
Like many anime, Penguindrum starting from an utterly silly premise and slowly gets you to take it seriously. It begins as an wacky comedy, then twists into a lethally sharp corkscrew. Like other anime, it has lattermost lurches from low-brow slapstick to operatic melodrama; it uses wily spoofs of anime classics and clichés, surpassing transcending them. Then there’s the psycho-thriller sit-com strand. Another of the main notation is a worryingly obsessive-psychotic schoolgirl who fixates on an older man, tunnelling under his house and snuggling underneath his floorboards. Brrr…
Penguindrum initially has you watching just for the scene-stealing magic penguins – what, I didn’t mention them? – as they lark virtually the screen. However, the show is haunting in the long term considering you never know what it’ll turn into next. For example, for a long time it looks like Himari will be a girly upstart when she’s not in Fearsome Goddess mode. But then a whole Alice-style fantasy episode fills out her weft and suggests steel under her cutesy exterior.
“It all starts with [the designer] Lily Hoshino,” comments Ikuhara. “Do you see that the designs she draws, and the details, are unquestionably a parody of commonplace tropes in our generation, but in a decadent fashion? It’s a pleasure for the eyes. Things like the princess’s gown are grotesque, but moreover have a eyeful and grace. I midpoint that in a good way!”
Hardcore anime fans will be lured in by Ikuhara, sometime director of Sailor Moon and creator of Revolutionary Girl Utena. The same fans will fathom the running gags well-nigh yesteryear anime like Sailor Moon – Himari gets her own once-an-episode magic girl transformation! – and Rose of Versailles, re-envisioned as a wafer-thin fantasy of the schoolgirl psycho.
There are allusions to Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad, a archetype Japanese fantasy, written as a requiem for its author’s sufferer sister, and discussed in increasingly detail elsewhere on this blog. There’s moreover an overt reference to a increasingly recent fantasy fable, “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” by Haruki Murakami – you could imagine Penguindrum taking place in its world.
The Brain’s Base studio gives the anime its own identity through stylised running motifs. The crowds of ‘extras’ on Tokyo’s streets are faceless stick-figures. Subway stations are visionary to signboards and mechanised ticket barriers. Scary cherubs scamper through neon screens like Powerpuff Girls.
(Minor spoilers follow.) The series moreover has a uncontrived reference to a traumatic event in Japan’s post-war history, revealed at the midway point. For Japanese viewers, it would have had an impact comparable to that halfway reveal in Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name… which was also, of course, reflecting on a trauma in Japanese history.
Looking when on Penguindrum in Eureka magazine in 2017, Ikuhara confessed that it was a work not so much of calculated provocation, but undertaken with an understanding that it would vamp criticism in some quarters, inspired to some extent by the shock and horror of the ‘3.11’ disaster, a hat trick of incidents in which an earthquake led to a tidal wave, which itself caused a nuclear accident. The Tohoku earthquake/tsunami, and the retrospective Fukushima reactor crisis, were topics to which Ikuhara would later return in 2019’s Sarazanmai, inspired not only by the incidents themselves, but by the fact the fact that they hit Japan at the end of the “lost decades” – 20 years of ripen and stagflation, roughly approximating with Ikuhara’s own career, as he rose to fame in the early seasons of Sailor Moon.
“Penguindrum was a work I felt I had to make, regardless of the consequences, so that event was something of a trigger. Still, directly taking that up as a subject would have been rationalization for misunderstanding. Using the subject itself would have been sinful, so there would, of course, have been some people criticising it, saying how could I take such a topic and exploit it for commercial gain. I think such criticisms were, and still are, stuff directed at the work. Plane so, we were just barely worldly-wise to make it considering there were some people who believed in it. With some details [of Tohoku] taken into the work, it wouldn’t have been unusual for it to rationalization a negative reaction, so I was very shielding in how I dealt with the surrounding situation.”
Like Your Name, the second half of Penguindrum (the matter of the second mucosa in the sequel/remake) is very variegated from the first. There’s non-consenting bondage, really nasty things washed-up to kids, and increasingly heavy-duty allusions to fairy-tales, Miyazawa mixed with Hans Christian Andersen. Among other things, you’ll find out why Penguindrum is probably the only work untied from Fight Club to have cute cartoon penguins and an ‘18’ from the BBFC. Okay, it’s probably the bondage.
Eventually, it becomes untellable to yank lines between the characters’ “reality” and the realm of dreams and symbols. The finale starts as anaction-movie climax, packed with bombs and bullets; then it segues into a skillet of viscous storyboard symbolism. But underneath all that, there’s a fairy story rooted in reality, a moving tale of lost children.
The Penguindrum movie Re: trundling of the Penguindrum, is screening at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
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