Sarazanmai

Ikuhara got his groove back with his seventh crown chakra, and he moved on to another animation studio, introduced his new collaborators to his new psychedelic-LGBT-allegorical shambles, and went berserk with it ticking off hundreds of thousands of animation boxes. However, who gives a flying crap if he delivers? Just do not expect any of the characters to have any hints of normalcy, instead imagine them all as walking inferiority-complexes and various fetishes. You can also have a good time ticking each box by unravelling the sex symbolism and being prepared for anything, including gay dragons and Ashtar Sheran’s space fleet. For the first five episodes, you will be treated to a remarkable show displaying the result of saving production costs sophisticatedly hidden behind artistic expression, supposed to make you understand the rules of Ikuhara's game, then the repetitiveness goes away and a lethal cocktail comes in the form of... an unexpectedly lucid story that, with its unprecedentedly high level of transparency, will shockingly make you finally start looking forward to and enjoying future episodes! So if the first episodes do not resonate with you, but you still feel that you could stand a certain amount of exposure to the balls pulled out of the anuses of supernatural beings, try to keep on going and you will see that you will not regret it. As the episodes roll in, everything starts to fall into place unexpectedly well, and as a result, a completely unprecedented four stars have emerged from my anus, which I hereby happily throw in! (2019.07.13)

Each of us is longing for something, we are all hiding something (and as House, M.D. would add - everybody lies)... Well, the director Ikuhara just does not know how to communicate this! Thanks to FilmBooster user Starletka I get that some people just have to try and shove as much symbolism as they can into a show, and so sometimes bears are not bears, at other times a penguin is not a penguin, and in this show, a kappa is not a kappa and boxes are not just boxes - because after all, in that show with the bears, the wall was not a wall either... In other words, this show is way too complex, it comes over as cluttered and over-elaborate, has more layers than Shrek’s onions, and above all, it is always full of rather shocking scenes and insane use of color filters. Well, I guess all this will be a stumbling block for me because shocking scenes and subject matter I cannot relate to was something that also put me off Revolutionary Girl Utena. I have now (as I found out) largely forgotten about the penguins, I could not understand the bears and abandoned them after the first episode, and I only made it through three episodes of the kappas. So I have made my mind up about this show - this is just not for me. Even If the narrative may be another "masterpiece" and the characters are complex plus each episode reveals some more of their shocking secrets - I am still not going to watch it. Sorry - Dropped after the third episode, and yes it has its merits, however, at the same time it is not my cup of tea, and I still cannot get my head around a lot of it! 5.5/10. (2019.05.23)