Pupa

Have you ever felt that itch in the rims of your ass crack that happens when you don’t wipe long enough? If there were ever an anime to signify that horrible itchy feeling in the most monstrous example of that region, Pupa would no doubt fit that description.

Never has there been hype so decimated after a rocky development schedule, season after season. It will go down in the books of how not to screw up your production schedule, or it will bite you and your credibility. People like me were curious to see what Pupa had to offer in the horror genre in anime because it’s not often we get to see much horror-themed anime come out these days. Then all of our expectations suddenly dropped when this was announced only to be three minutes long. Judging by how I viewed the 36 minutes of content through the whole show’s run time, this was something that was just not finished.

Why may you ask? The art style looks inexcusably low-budget, even for three-minute show standards. Hell, Ai Mai Mi looked like it had quality production compared to this. Especially the background artwork, where the colors look almost like an elementary school student painted it with a thin paintbrush. The characters' designs are at least slightly tolerable, considering they look like actual people in most cases.

Now the animation part is where it gets hilarious. There is one instance where an ambulance car is driving, and you can tell, even from the crappiest quality stream imaginable, that the wheels are not moving whatsoever. It almost looked like the animator didn’t bother to put any frames on any part of the car, so he dragged it with the mouse. These are only a few of some of the glorious hilarity that transpires from the lackluster animation. Unfortunately, the networks airing it felt embarrassed to bother showing the animation, so they decided to censor almost 80% of it.

I usually don’t discuss censorship in the shows I review, only because they’ll eventually release the uncensored Blu-Rays later. But considering how universally panned this show is, I can’t see this ever having that kind of royalty shortly. It is often a cringe-worthy experience to sit through censors in a horror anime that covers up the disgusting gore and blood, but with Pupa, the way they censored certain aspects felt disjointed. For instance, there is one scene where Yume eats her brother’s flesh, and obviously, they edited this outright. Then in another episode, we are shown a room filled with dismembered bodies scattered in a hallway, badly drawn by the way, yet it isn’t censored. Why? Was it because it wasn’t in motion? Or was the animation so horrible from Yume’s flesh-eating that they demanded that no one see it fully? Either way, it felt like an unnecessary decision.

Pupa’s plot leaves a lot to be desired, which is the understatement of this entire review. I would complain profusely about how unfocused the whole structure is and how each episode does not feel connected to each other in the slightest. Reading these negatives might leave the impression that it is poorly written. However, it almost feels like an unfinished product once you watch Pupa. Almost as if they were initially going to go for a standard 23-minute episode show, but somehow their work got corrupted halfway down the line. Considering they had to delay this for another season seems like the most logical reason for this.

Could Pupa have been a great show had they been more careful with their development schedule? Who knows. That other reality is all but shrouded in mystery from our own, and we may not ever see that happen if they decide to remake the entire adaptation and make one that is more faithful to the source material. I would put this up as a grand cautionary tale for people who want to get into the business of TV production. Will this be considered one of the great classic bad anime alongside Mars of Destruction or considered an avant-garde masterpiece like Tsui no Sora by trolls? I would argue that the latter would be the most likely scenario. God help us.

Grade: …………