I don’t necessarily like juxtaposing Sarazanmai and Carole & Tuesday, because I fundamentally believe every series should be judged on its own merits. But dammit, it’s very hard not to. Two shows airing in close proximity, by two of anime’s most legendary directors, neither of whom makes a new show very often. And by nature Ikuhara Kunihiko and Watanabe Shinichirou are so different – never more so than with these two series – that I find it very difficult to watch one series without seeing the other as a sort of framing device.
To be blunt, I have problems with both series, though each of them is certainly a fascinating conundrum. I went into some detail about Carole & Tuesday in yesterday’s post, so no point in rehashing it here, but I do think it’s fair to say that show could use a little more of what Sarazanmai brings to the table. Ikuhara is many things but he’s never bland, and his series never feel like they’re smoothed out all the rough bits to appeal to the widest possible audience. Ikuhara may well care whether his shows are popular or not (I very much suspect he does) but he does an excellent job of writing and directing as if he doesn’t.
I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t cut both ways, though, and over the course of a career for me Watanabe is clearly the more accomplished figure. If C & T comes off as rather sanitized and corporate, Sarazanmai is already showing the trademarks of Ikuhara – self-indulgence and lack of narrative focus. Oh, for some of Watanabe’s precision here – not too much, or Ikuhara wouldn’t be Ikuhara, but just enough to make everything feel like it’s connected to everything else and not just here because Ikuhara thought of it and it seemed cool at the time, or during some late-night freakout the symbolism blew his mind. Or worse, because he’s actively playing the provocateur.
I’ve heard rumors that certain staff members on Sarazanmai have said you have to wait until after Episode 4 to really understand what the show is about. I can see it (or at least hope it’s true) because frankly not everything makes sense right now (and I don’t mean the random Ikuhara acid trips, but mundane stuff like character motivation). There is a basis for something engaging and approachable here – both Kazuki and Toi are in this for their brother, and Enta is (as I supposed last week) in this because he’s into Kazuki. But so far at least, the devil is in the details.
What we know: Kazuki has a little brother named Haruka, who’s played by Kugimiya Rie. He dresses up as Sara and takes selfies because his brother is a fan (I guess?), and if that weren’t enough, he stole somebody’s cat and made it a “neighborhood cat” (yeah, that’s a thing here) because Haruka loves cats. I’m not really sure yet why any of this is necessary – Haruka doesn’t seem sick or anything, and the boys’ parents don’t seem evil. It seems like a strange length to go to just to make your little brother happy (especially because Kazuki doesn’t act particularly affectionate towards him as himself), and it makes me wonder if he cross-dresses because that’s just who he is, and Haruka is an excuse.
As for Toi, we now know he has a big brother named Chikai, and he’s played by Tsuda Kenjirou. He’s in the crime game too, and Toi is apparently in it to try and help his brother, but there’s more to this than meets the eye – Chikai is in some sort of trouble, clearly (debt?). Ikuhara isn’t pulling any punches with Toi – he tortures people, he grows and sells weed (which is a huge deal in Japan, seriously), he pulls a gun on Kazuki and Enta to get what he wants. And what he wants are the special magic wish plates Keppi tells the boys they’ll get if they do his bidding, which is to steal the shirikodama from the zombie kappa.
That’s where Sarazanmai kind of loses the plot for me – for now. Why are there zombie kappa (OK, the cops)? Why does Keppi need eighth-graders to steal their shirokodama? And what’s the deal with the two cops, who randomly seem to have the power to create zombie kappa? There’s also the cat-shaving felon (from last week) who’s murdered, two more song and dance numbers, and a bunch more of Ikuhara’s grossness for its own (well, his own) sake. Frankly the whole anal fixation thing is already a bit disgusting and tiresome and we’re only in the second episode.
Where Sarazanmai does salvage some much-needed clarity is with Enta. What he wants is very straightforward – Kazuki. As odd as it may seem, off the top of my head I can’t recall Ikuhara doing an overt male-male romance storyline in any of his series, though I could be forgetting one to be sure. It seems as if he’s being uncharacteristically straightforward with this one (and there seems no doubt about Akutsu and Shinsei either), which is a breath of fresh air with all the incomprehensibility permeating everything else. As with Carole & Tuesday I really want this to work – visually this series is really stunning, and it packs an energy like nothing else on the schedule. Maybe Ikuhara-sensei will surprise me by managing to bring everything together – and hold it together – but experience commands me to be skeptical.
JJ
April 19, 2019 at 11:13 pmForgive me if I’m stating the obvious – although that is never a safe bet when Ikuhara is involved – but I thought the cops turned the ailurophile (who was introduced at the back end of last episode) into this episode’s zombie kappa. How Akutsu & Shinsei connect to the boys is anyone’s guess at this point.
Guardian Enzo
April 19, 2019 at 11:19 pmHey, you’re probably right but it didn’t strike me as obvious as I was watching it. Does make sense though.
Marty
April 19, 2019 at 11:42 pmThis feel like the kind of series that will either be made or broken by its final few episodes, where either everything will come together or fall apart.
Either way, things are almost guaranteed never to be dull.
Guardian Enzo
April 19, 2019 at 11:56 pmYes, Ikuhara is rarely that.
animealex
April 20, 2019 at 2:30 amThis show is making me uncomfortable, but perhaps this is the intended effect? My problem right now is that the main three are not very sympathetic, but kinda realistic characters if you ignore all the psychedelic and gross stuff happening thanks to the Kappa connection. They are all in a sense typical 14 year old boys, but the way they show their self-centeredness and lack of empathy towards others while growing up and pursuing their dreams is, to me at least, quite disturbing.
Kazuki takes his “desire” to make his little brother happy and connect with him way too far. Also, like Enzo points out, why doesn’t he just talk to him? His little brother wants to spend time with him, so why steal a cat (and cut (!) its ear to make it seem like a neutered stray cat) or go to such lengths as pretending to be his female idol pen pal?
Toi goes from incompetent, juvenile delinquent in episode one (which was kind of endearing tbh) to drug pusher, torturer and perhaps even dumping the body in the river with his older brother kind-of-guy. I mean, in some series this isn’t treated as bad as it should be (for example the Zoldyck’s probably call it “quality family bonding on a typical Tuesday afternoon”), but here it is very damming.
And finally, Enta. The fact that he is gay and has a crush on Kazuki isn’t all that surprising and is (or should be) the tamest secret of all the main three. (Side note: As a gay guy I’m quite aware how problematic it is even today to find out while growing up, that you’re part of the “LGBTQ+” crowd, but in the context of the other outlandish secrets shown so far? Yeah, pretty vanilla.) But the fact, that he kissed an unconscious Kazuki, is something I really didn’t like. Not even a little bit, because why was he even there when Kazuki fell asleep? Was it coincidence or is Enta stalking him?
Despite all of this (or perhaps because all of this?): I think it’s the best show this season.
p.s. Sorry for the wall of text, but this show fascinates me and I hope it goes somewhere.
Guardian Enzo
April 20, 2019 at 8:42 amNo apologies needed, interesting thoughts.
I generally find Enta the most sympathetic of the three, but I agree all of them are creepy and irritating in the way 14 year-old boys often are (so maybe that is intentional, LOL). But I confess the question of why Enta was there at the end hadn’t occurred to me, and it does paint what seemed like an innocent (relatively) moment in a somewhat sinister context.
TheYepMan
April 20, 2019 at 9:44 amMaybe that’s kind of the point, to start off with characters very deeply flawed and then try to tackle those flaws gradually until you end up with much more sympathetic and decent versions of the main cast… at least, unless Ikuhara loses the plot again, either deep within Symbolism or just out of “well we were moving towards this spot but then I lost interest and went here instead”.
DP
April 20, 2019 at 4:35 amI just want to go on record as saying that if not “bland,” I frequently find Ikuhara to be boring, as there’s just so much navel-gazing involved with his almost religious reliance on SYMBOLISM. To me, other than the first half of Penguindrum (which ultimately degenerated into nonsense), he hasn’t done anything truly brilliant since his work on Sailor Moon – which, to be fair, was seminal, at least in my book.
Rita
April 20, 2019 at 6:57 amSo it’s ironic that, usually after the show has aired for a while and the dots finally connect like they did in Penguindrum later down the line, you need to turn on your brain and hyperfocus to pick out little details to connect the plot points for most Ikuhara shows after the fact.
But for the initial viewing, especially when it’s only been two episodes and the plot isn’t coming together anytime soon (heck I’d argue even with Penguindrum the big ideas and early scenes that made no sense only started to connect like a good 8 episodes in), I find I actually enjoy his shows best actually turning my brain off. Just letting it all kind of pass through in a sort of psychedelic stream of conscious. Because like you said, even when he’s doing too much navel-gazing or going off the rails, Ikuhara’s shows are almost never boring.
Rita
April 20, 2019 at 7:00 amOh, since I forgot to mention, there’s actually a prequel manga about Reo and Mabu (the two cops) which, uh, is basically just as silly as most Ikuhara things (imagine if Ikuhara wrote a slice of life revolving around two policemen raising a baby together) it does offer a little bit of extra info. Maybe it’ll help contextualizing things later, who knows.
leongsh
April 20, 2019 at 10:35 amSo far, it’s all about building up the plot and getting more insight into the characters. The overall theme seems to be coming together for those who pay attention but Ikuhara may just yank the carpet from under us. I’m going to use a cooking analogy here for what I see happening – this is like Ikuhara preparing to cook a complex Chinese stir-fry dish. For such a dish, a lot of preparation needs to be done on the ingredients to be used and the various sauces and condiments mix. What we see now is a lot of the preparation – the setup. Towards the end, he needs to start to heat up the wok and stir fry his prepared ingredients. As to whether he can properly execute the cooking is where we hope he doesn’t produce a jumbled mess of a dish that is either pretty but foul tasting or messy but decent tasting. If he executes it well, we could get a pretty dish that also tastes good.
The fascination with butts and such is all just him fully using the kappa mythology to inject the story into. That’s why my comment on the first episode that the visuals and antics were distracting but once you understand and strip that away, it is fairly straightforward to me for now, per my complex Chinese stir-fry analogy.
p.s. I always have fun reading reactions to Ikuhara’s shows. I find it at times more enjoyable than the shows. Reactions to Sarazanmai have been fun to read. Reddit has been a good source for it.
Scampi
April 20, 2019 at 3:29 pmThere are speculations floating around that the cops are reference to the Aichi standoff, because the date the anime pair’s info was released coincided with the incident date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aichi_Prefectural_Police#Recent_events
Guardian Enzo
April 20, 2019 at 4:20 pmIkuhara’s obsession with tragedy, especially mass murder, is profoundly disturbing.