Yurikuma Arashi

I consider myself a pretentious artsy bullshit type. I like things like The Tatami Galaxy, Psycho-Pass, and Mushi-shi, where there's a heavy intellectual and/or artistic level to them. So I went into my first Kunihiko Ikuhara show with fairly strong expectations, since it sounded and looked like I would get both of those from this show.

The first few episodes absolutely hooked me. I loved the idea of an anime actually exploring the idea of sexuality rather than using it as a punchline or fanservice. I loved figuring out what all the symbols and motifs meant. I loved finding the little bits of repetition and seeing how the usage was the same or different each time. It was like watching a puzzle, and it was fascinating.

Unfortunately, when the pieces of that puzzle started falling into place and the bigger picture came into view, I found myself saying "this is what I devoted all that time and energy on?"

Yurikuma Arashi (translatable to "Lesbian Bear Storm," but probably more accurately "Lily Bear Storm") tells the story of girls, bears, girls who are also bears, and girls and bears who are lesbians. It's a tale of love, exclusion, jealousy, revenge...well, basically, it's a tale about the emotions and relationships of a bunch of high school girls. There's all sorts of imagery and motifs of lily flowers and bears and birds and freedom and judgment that tie into the themes of the series. Those are the important parts of the show. What's that, you say? I've forgotten to actually talk about the plot? No, no, I covered the important parts of the show. Those parts, unfortunately, just don't include a plot.

This is Yurikuma Arashi's greatest failing. In all the visual imagery and repeated phrases and thematic focus, it neglects to tell an actual story. It's as if Ikuhara started with the theme, in this case, "romantic relationships between girls and how they're perceived by society," and then came up with symbols he wanted to include and points he wanted to make and built the story around that. Each episode is so concerned with artistic flashbacks and compelling repetition that the narrative becomes a scattered mess that moves far too slowly. It devotes so much time into making sure the show has substance that it fails to connect on an emotional level. There is no payoff. No moment that makes you go "oh, so that's what the bears represent!" The symbols are something that you'll be trying to figure out the entire time because as soon as you think you know what something represents, you say "well, it could also mean this other thing, too." The consequence is that, even the biggest draw of the show feels like it stalls out with no purpose.

Perhaps the most apt idiom to describe Yurikuma Arashi is that it misses the forest for the trees. It gets so bogged down with all the little details that it fails to be cohesive, haphazardly jumping around so that scenes go where the symbolism demands rather than the narrative. It's a real shame, because the show would have had a ton of potential had it managed to pull its head out of its ass. Maybe if it were half as long, it would have had tighter pacing and been more cohesive. As it stands, it's artistic, and it's even artistic with purpose--but it's not artistic with direction. It is art for the sake of art, and that unfortunately doesn't make it inherently good. Three stars.