Ten year old Poemy Watanabe is an aspiring voice actress named Kobayashi. Her father is the director of the anime, and her mother is the woman who once chased him around the world trying to feed him soup. One day, while she’s at school throwing herself at the octopus boy she loves and ignoring the sapphic advances of her best friend, her parents and robot dog are slain by a purple alien pimp with one dangling spike-ball between his legs. She winds up staying with her friend’s family, consisting of seven sisters with useless superpowers, and when the aliens attack Earth again, she finds out she’s secretly Puni Puni Poemy... The magical girl who’s destined to protect the world! With the Aasu sisters, a dead fish and a mute musician by her side, she’ll have to strive against the impossible to become a voice actress!
Puni Puni Poemy was produced by JC Staff, a studio that’s had a long and prosperous history in the anime industry. I’ve talked about them before, and while they’ve used a number of different styles over the decades, I have reviewed a few of their titles that bore a similar style to Poemy. There’s a line of titles in JC Staff’s library that use a bright, vibrantly colored aesthetic as the backdrop for characters that are realistically proportioned, but still cartoony in their movements and expressions, and Poemy is one of the titles in that line that take those cartoony properties to an extreme.
At any given time, the characters are either still frames with flapping mouths, or flailing noodles with no recognizable bone structure, or sometimes both in the same shot. This is when they’re not taking on a more serious aesthetic, purely for the purpose of making fun of dramatic anime tropes, of course. This gives the animators unlimited freedom in how to make them move, and with just how fast and random the humor is, they put it to good use. I can’t say I like this kind of style in general, but it’s used really well here, and it was clearly the right choice for the material.
As for the music, well, most of it was lifted straight from Excel Saga, so check out that review for more details. Hilariously enough, the voice actress for Poemy, who is playing herself half the time, sings her own opening and closing themes, and it’s pretty clear she was told to do so deliberately like it was awkward karaoke... I’m basing that assumption on the fact that I’ve heard her sing in other anime before, and she’s way better than what we get here. Still, it works.
The English dub is from early ADV Films, and what more do I need to say about that? ADV ate this kind of material for breakfast in it’s heyday. Puni Puni Poemy is an example of what I like to call a Screwball Dub, the kind of effort that results from source material that allows dub writers to do whatever the hell they want with it, either because the property owners just wanted to turn a profit(like with Ghost Stories) or because the source material already didn’t have any fucks to give(like Excel Saga). As such, the dubbers of Poemy threw everything at the wall, sticking mostly to the already kooky material, but also adlibbing to their hearts content and adding their own cheeky jokes wherever possible.
I was a huge fan of ADV films when I first started to get into anime, and to my limitless joy, the cast of this dub is a who’s who of ADV talent. Cynthia Martinez, an actress who was at one point a staple of the company before disappearing from the industry almost entirely after ADV went under, plays the title character Poemy. She has a voice so unique that I haven’t heard anything like it until I found out about Veibae from Vshojo. She does an admirable job keeping up with the motor-mouthing Poemy, screaming with raspy enthusiasm, but... Remember in my Excel Saga review, how I said that Jessica Calvello and Larissa Wolcott both had the hardcore vocal abilities to play Excel, but only Calvello had the acting chops to do it perfectly? Martinez unfortunately errs closer to Wolcott. I actually found myself enjoying the original Japanese portrayal even more, just because Kobayashi’s delivery was so much funnier.
The rest of the cast is solid, but much like with Poemy, I find the original seiyuu had enough subtlety in their performances to make the jokes in their dialogue way more effective. It’s to be expected, since the original product featured a perfect balance between the straightforward and absurd, whereas ADV took every opportunity to add their own jokes to the existing jokes, resulting in a kind of sensory overload that’s not there in the sub. That’s not to say anyone did a bad job... They were clearly having a blast with this title, a few of the adlibs genuinely elevated the material, and hearing Brent Weaver play the recurring character Nabeshin as a white Richard Roundtree(his words, not mine) is always a treat. The only exception is Mark X Laskowski, who plays Poemy’s primary love interest Kei, and I’ve just never liked this actor. They would have been better off giving the part to Chris Patton, who had a few small roles in the show already.
I honestly enjoy this show in both languages, and I’ll heartily recommend either one, but I still think the sub is slightly better. Speaking of subtitles, I should also mention that if you have the official DVD, there’s a subtitle track that’s literally just pig-latin. Do with that information as you will.
In order to talk bout Puni Puni Poemy, we have to take a few steps back, as it’s history predates it’s very conception by a considerable amount. Director Shinichi Watanabe, who should not EVER be confused with Shinichiro Watanabe, is someone I’ve discussed before in my previous reviews. His MO for a good long while was to take popular manga, shit all over them and fill them with lazy sight gags and obvious genre parodies. To this day, I stand by my assertion that the only reason he caught more of a backlash for Hayate the Combat Butler than Excel Saga or Nerima Daikon Brothers is because Hayate had a larger and more defensive fanbase. Also, remember the ‘recurring character’ I mentioned earlier? That’s his self insert avatar, the afro-bearing Nabeshin.
Anyway, Puni Puni Poemy’s existence can be traced back to a series of three jokes in Excel Saga. The first, but arguably least important, is Nabeshin. The second was that at a certain point in the series the actresses who sung the opening theme, called Excel<3Girls at the time, started to get acknowledged in the story itself. For the third, two fictitious in-universe anime were improvised, an action parody called Samurai M, and a magical girl parody named Puni Puni Poemy, a joke that was probably related to the fact that their dating sim parody was called Love Puni. Puni Puni Poemy came back later in a post apocalyptic Fist of the North Star parody, where Excel’s punches would turn her enemies not into blood geysers, but into tiny magical girls.
Good God they did that manga dirty.
Anyway, Puni Puni Poemy would soon be fully realized as a full fledged two episode OVA spin-off of Excel Saga, and while I’m not a fan of Nabeshin at all, this is easily my favorite title he’s ever been attached to. To start, there are two glaring issues I have with Nabeshin’s work and the genre in general that Poemy managed to avoid. First off, it’s short. I’ve mentioned before that, at least in my opinion, random nonsense anime has a very short shelf life, and the longer it goes on, the more the method behind the madness gets exposed, making it more passé and predictable. I know there are people who would argue this DIDN’T happen to Excel Saga, and while I disagree, I do respect your stance. A better example is probably Hare+Guu, a show that plays so many of it’s cards up front that it becomes dull before the half-way point.
My other issue, and this is the one that’s more relevant to Nabeshin himself, is when he’s adapting a manga. I can’t say I’ve never liked an adaptation that totally reimagined the source material... Some pieces of media are either too difficult to adapt faithfully, or they need serious changes to even become viable in other forms of media at all... But I can’t stand when it’s done disrespectfully. There are several names in the English dubbing scene whom I’ve never liked because they have a history of rewriting the material they’re given in order to better suit their own styles, and Nabeshin’s approach to adapting manga is no different. He keeps the barest outline of the original manga’s plot set-up, and then just loads it with wacky gags, manufactured insanity and genre parodies.
Puni Puni Poemy is only two episodes, which is coincidentally the perfect amount of time me to watch random bullshit, and it was an entirely new IP, meaning Nabeshin didn’t have to waste any time pretending to be loyal to an existing fanbase. Poemy was the perfect blank slate for everything people love about his work... The fast paced humor, the adult jokes that just barely skirt Japanese censors, inexplicable WTF jokes, sight gags that range from subtle to over the top, and of course, more anime references than you can possibly count. Hell, the cold open of the first episode features Poemy, in her magical girl form, beating the shit out of nearly a dozen caricatures of previous magical girl characters to confront a Leiji Matsumoto character design who’s preaching over and over about how easy it would be to conquer the world. And then the credits roll and she’s just a wastefully energetic genki girl, going through what we assume is an average school day while every variety of joke is thrown at your face.
It’s difficult to review pure comedy, as at some point you’re basically just spoiling all the jokes, but if I could tell you just some of the anime conventions Poemy makes fun of, I would list useless villain masks, classic alien design, fanservice bath scenes, transformation sequences, anachronistic accents, lovesick best friends and gimmicky side characters. In the same vein, a list of all the different anime it parodies would be pages long on it’s own, so I think I’ll just call out the two titles that get it the worst. Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure takes a massive spotlight when the aliens first attack Poemy’s home, with a lot of the action that you’d expect from Jojo being ruthlessly parodied, and the characters at one point even calling upon heir stands. The other highlight is Cardcaptor Sakura, as it’s the magical girl show Poemy borrowed most of it’s aesthetic from, and her friend Futaba is an equally ruthless parody of Tomoyo Daidouji.
There are so many jokes flying at you all at once in this show that you’ll probably discover something new every time you watch it. I saw it for the first time somewhere around fifteen years ago, and I didn’t notice until just today that in one shot in episode 2, for half a second, we see a table lamp whose on/off switch is a brass dick-and-balls hanging from a chain. Some of the jokes have aged more poorly than it's aspect ratio, like this show came out in 2001 and I swear to God there's a Y2K reference, but it's damn near timeless compared to the Ghost Stories dub. I know I’m not giving you a whole lot to go off of here, but it’s a two episode gag anime, give me a break. It’s junk food, but unlike a lot of titles in it’s genre, it’s junk food in a responsible portion.
Puni Puni Poemy was originally available from ADV Films, but I’m pretty sure it went out of print way before that company went under. It was not sold to Funimation in the ensuing years, and as far as I’m aware, the rebranded Sentai Filmworks has no plans to rerelease it. That kind of doesn’t really matter, since it’s really easy to find the entire OVA on youtube, but if you’re an old school ADV fan, or just a voice acting nerd in general, then I would highly recommend tracking down a copy of the DVD on Ebay, as it contains an on-camera commentary track featuring over half a dozen ADV veterans joking around with each other and playing with stuffed fish. Much like the Super Milk Chan DVDs, this is a gem for voice chasers.
I can’t guarantee you’ll like Puni Puni Poemy. Humor is subjective, and different kinds of comedy appeal to different people. Maybe you’re not like me, and you actually like your random gag comedies to have a pretend plot behind it for the sake of structure. Maybe you hate random gag humor in general and just find something as loud, fast and nonsensical as this to be annoying. These are both solid takes. I’d be lying if I said there was anything deep or meaningful about it, but if you’re looking at what an auteur director can make when he has no restrictions to work under, or if you’re looking for a bite size chunk of zaniness that doesn’t over-stay it’s welcome, or if you’re just looking for a bizarre WTF anime to pull out when you have your drinking buddies over, it’s an hour well spent.
I give Puni Puni Poemy a 6/10.
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