Yuri Kuma Arashi

In the past, humanoid bears coexisted with humans. However, a meteor shower that fell onto Earth had a strange effect on bears throughout the world: they suddenly became violent and hungry for human flesh, spurring an endless cycle of bloodshed in which bear ate man and man shot bear, forgetting the lively relationship they once had. The "Wall of Severance" was thus built, separating the two civilizations and keeping peace.

Kureha Tsubaki and Sumika Izumino are two lovers attending Arashigaoka Academy, who, upon the arrival of two bears that have sneaked through the Wall of Severance and infiltrated the academy, find their relationship under a grave threat. The hungering yet affectionate bears, Ginko Yurishiro and Lulu Yurigasaki, seem to see the bear-hating Kureha as more than just another meal, and in getting closer to her, trigger an unraveling of secrets that Kureha may not be able to bear.

When their relationships provoke the Invisible Storm, a group that keeps order within the ideological school, the girls must stand on trial with their love, embarking on a journey of self-discovery en route to attaining true love's "promised kiss."

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yurigasaki, Lulu Main

Ikuta, Yoshiko Japanese

Yurishiro, Ginko Main

Arakawa, Miho Japanese

Tsubaki, Kureha Main

Yamane, Nozomi Japanese

Life Sexy Supporting

Suwabe, Junichi Japanese

Yurizono, Mitsuko Supporting

Yuuki, Aoi Japanese

Hakonaka, Yuriika Supporting

Inoue, Kikuko Japanese

Life Cool Supporting

Saiga, Mitsuki Japanese

Yurigasaki, Milne Supporting

Kugimiya, Rie Japanese

Izumino, Sumika Supporting

Ogura, Yui Japanese

Harishima, Kaoru Supporting

Hikasa, Youko Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Maeda, Toshihiro Producer

Kaneko, Hayato Producer, Planning

Hayashi, Youhei Producer

Reviews

Jul 22, 2024

ScarlettSkone

Recommended

This anime is a really cute story about two very close friends!
It was so touching how they crossed the divide just to be with each other, and even gave up what they treasured most! I wish I had friends this close.
My favorite wholesome and platonic moment is when they bite and undress each other!

Jokes aside, I think people's inability to recognize gay people, as, well, people who can exist, is one of the phenomena commented on in this anime!
This anime offers social commentary on a variety of issues in a way so blunt I felt like I was getting hit by a brick. I thoroughly ... enjoyed the lack of subtly and would recommend this to people... that I know are fine with sapphic things.
Sha da ba doo.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 4, 2024

lastnameEver

Mixed Feelings

Though there’s little to like, there’s plenty to admire in this particular Ikuhara series, usually in the aesthetics, occasionally in the writing too. Everything’s set at angles in Yurikuma, which tie in with the dividing lines made quickly apparent between the bears and the humans outlined in the opening narration. Despite carrying around a reputation for being obtuse, Ikuhara is as subtle as a sledgehammer here with his themes – pretty clear pretty early on what’s being implied with the divide between human and bears, and the devouring and so on, and in case it isn’t clear Ikuhara will make the character repeat the same ... thing about six or seven times, just to make sure that you understand, just in case you didn’t hear it the first, or fourth, or fiftieth time.

Ikuhara’s characterization here though is terrible, but he’s always been very weak at that in all his shows. He eschews realism in favour of having his characters represent some sort of idea, and he will twist time and space to make sure that they act in such a way that adheres to this idea, using whatever justification necessary for having a character act in a certain fashion regardless of whether or not the justification itself makes any common sense. Results in a lack of relatability, and a lack of personal connection to any of his characters beyond the idea they represent. Putting it another way, you like Ikuhara’s characters not for who they are but rather what they represent. By extension the same logic applies to his works as a whole. There’s very little, in my opinion, for the viewer to latch onto as something relatable, some situation that’s grounded in reality.

Take the main girl, an orphan who lives alone, is ostracized by her peers, is bullied – can’t care. No attention is drawn to her plight beyond what is necessary to the core message of the show, so none of it seems real, there’s no chance for any sympathy to form between you and the character, because Ikuhara doesn’t allow her to have a life outside of the story. Broadly this applies to everyone in the show. The resulting lack of an emotional attachment to the characters naturally leads to the adoption of a very indifferent attitude to the majority of the events which unfold in Yurikuma’s story.

Like the characters, the story is a farce. There are bears who want to eat humans, bears disguised as humans, bears who want to kill other bears disguised as humans, all very grizzly. The bears are lesbians, the humans don’t like lesbians, but some humans do like lesbians, but those humans are excluded, by the other humans, because they don’t like lesbians, because they think lesbians don’t like them, because they’re lesbians. Something like that. Ikuhara uses this circular irrational line of thinking as a baseline for circling around the various reasons for the irrational hatred of lesbians and draws some pretty obvious though nevertheless valid conclusions which the show explains in obvious fashion.

Personally not a fan of these open-and-shut social/moral questions with obvious right answers in fiction because it makes the story very predictable and also very rigid, with very little to interpret beyond what Ikuhara wants you to interpret. Granted, there is more to Yurikuma than that theme of loving what/who you love regardless of what other people think, but its nothing that Penguindrum hadn’t covered already from another angle. It’s all very agreeable but merely being agreeable isn’t really anything noteworthy.

With Ikuhara, you never really get the feeling you’re getting what’s been promised. He’s someone whose works I admire but never personally like. His shows never really seem to come together when they should, they’re always aesthetically pleasing but uneventful, always lacking in concrete action. Things seem to happen in Yuri Kuma Arashi, and they do happen, but it never really sets in and leaves an impression in the mind. Watching it is like witnessing a dream, but a really bland dream, where you just sit in a room, on a chair, and stare into space, and then wake up. And then you go about your day as usual. And then maybe in a few days time you think about it again in a vague sort of way. Not hard to believe that it happened, it’s just hard to really care. But in the end, I suppose it’s bearable.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Feb 16, 2018

Pur3adrenaline

Not Recommended

This anime had some nice art and some decent episodes but honestly people talking about how theres "soooo much symbolism and it has such deeper meaning " are totally misleading you. The symbolism is so heavy handed a monkey could understand it and the characters and plot are incredibly simplistic and predictable.

Yes there is something to be said about telling the story in an intricate and finely crafted way. But this story sucks. And it's not like some Homestuck level stuff where 10 hours later you see something from the first 5 minutes and suddenly something new comes to mind - it's incredibly predictable ... and literally anyone can see what the point is. The metaphors for lesbian culture in the real world are NOT SUBTLE , they are so freaking obvious it's like i'm being hit with a brick. The dialogue is incredibly dull and straight forward and the characters may as well all be 5 years old. Please do NOT let the over exaggerated reviews on here sway you into thinking the writing is something it's not. I might have thought this was deep in freshman year of high school

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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