First things first: the title is fun to say. Try it. “KABUKIBU.” It means “kabuki club,” but it sounds, to my ears, like it’s meant to continue going. Kabukibukibukibuki...

The premise is basic: excitable 10th grader loves kabuki, sets out to create a club with his more stoic-seeming but loyal best friend. They meet and convince a number of students to join, including ones with backstories like “classically-trained in Japanese dancing,” and proceed to put on some small performances.

It’s 12 episodes, and there’s really not a ton of drama. The stakes here are pretty low: teen wants a club, needs people, gets people. People who mostly don’t know much about kabuki, and must be converted either emotionally (to see kabuki as interesting and the club as a worthwhile activity) or just artistically (to be able to put on decent kabuki performances). Interestingly, Kurogo himself could be included in the latter group, because it turns out that just a love of kabuki, and having watched a lot of it, does not automatically a kabuki actor make.

Incidentally, I didn’t know much about kabuki, either. The show does a pretty good job explaining it. There’s no English-language equivalent I can think of, but if you can sorta imagine Shakespeare in the original, most hard-to-understand language, spoken by people with adolescent voice cracking, with costumes inspired by mimes, you might get close. (This is not a criticism, it’s just very different than anything I’ve ever seen.)

The story is driven by small things: will they find enough members? Will they have enough time to learn their parts before their first performance? Will that one classmate stop being such an elitist asshole long enough for something nice to happen?

And because the scope is kept small, it works well. No worries about going to a large competition, this is just a really enthusiastic teenager who wants to have a school-sanctioned reason to learn about and perform kabuki with other people for the next 3 years. That’s it.

It was just plain enjoyable.

Verdict

English dub? No

Visuals: Nice, often bright. Character designs are distinct, and the highlights are always when they’re in costume. Japanese writing in the background is subtitled extremely well in my opinion, as seen in one of the screencaps above, making it easy for me to read. It’s more realistic, though, so no designs are super memorable (despite designs being famously done by CLAMP).

Worth watching? Yes! It’s a great, low-stakes show that explains things pretty well. No stress, not weird stuff going on to cause plotholes.