Back to Karasu994's Profile Karasu994's Profile

Popotan is an early 2000s anime which exists, it’s a strong contender for the most “literally made for me” anime I’ve ever seen, it’s a clusterfuck of early 2000s camp/aesthetics with a story about 3 girls finding a place in the world they live in at its core. I should acknowledge first that it’s an adaptation of a Visual Novel, although it heavily deviates from the source, essentially becoming its own original story, I have not touched the VN myself and doing so is not a top priority.

For 9 episodes, this series follows an episodic narrative and each one feels like a different self contained ... campy early 2000s anime. The production isn’t anything glamorous in the slightest, but I still really adore the type of aesthetic it’s going for, the show is set in a bright, colourful, surreal early 2000s video game world and as an enthusiast of the Denpa music genre, the OP and ED songs are among my personal favourites within the medium, each one being from a favourite artist of mine respectively. Popotan contains a lot of nudity, every girl gets naked at some point (even the underage ones) which can be off-putting for a lot of people, the way I see it is that it’s establishing a laid back, unsophisticated atmosphere, presenting its 3 main characters as very carefree people, I’d argue that it isn’t trying to be particularly arousing either, the ecchi scenes mainly existing for comedic purposes.

Popotan doesn’t have a clear goal to begin with and its characters don’t have a clear purpose they’re working towards, it follows an episodic formula in which its characters travel to a different location every episode, living their lives in each setting in a carefree manner at first, but gradually realizing how the world around them functions and the drawbacks that come with them living the way they do, the episodes vary between simple juvenile campy stories and more melodramatic ones (this may come across as a critical remark, but actually, I eat this shit up if its executed to my preferences), some of these episodic stories contribute more notably towards the central themes than others, the last stretch focuses on them facing reality and coming to a decision based on what they have learned. Popotan is ultimately about being confronted by reality, the series does have a fairly optimistic approach to this theme, the world it's set in is fun, happy, colourful and full of opportunities, the main challenge its characters have to face is the fact that chasing after one opportunity means missing out on another.

My interpretation of the series is that it contextualizes what it feels like to follow a path in life that is comfortable for yourself, but gradually be faced with the fact that you’re missing out on other opportunities by doing so, Popotan’s world is also presented in such an abstract manner that when its characters come to a conclusion, the show doesn’t feel like it's making any direct statement about which path in life is the correct one, it’s up to the audience to decide which path in this world looks more inviting and/or beneficial with the context they’ve been given.

I don’t like Vivy, Here’s why:

Vivy doesn’t have any interesting themes, it has the “robots rebel against humanity” premise we’ve seen a million times, I’ve asked people if there’s anything thought provoking about the series or if it so much as has anything exceptional about it, evidently not, this is aiming to be a fun action/adventure ride, and that’s okay, but it fails at that by simply just being incredibly boring.

Opening scene:

Ugh, for a start, I could narrate over the first 3 minutes of the first episode and just point out all of the things it does wrong in an attempt to make a good ... first impression, but I will try my best to explain in text form, the series has a pretty confusing beginning, just starting with a ransacked theme park and then eventually showing dead bodies and robots hunting down survivors, the show does not provide any character to connect to at the beginning, nor does it invite you to its setting before just slamming action in your face, the cinematography in this scene also sucks, not giving a proper wide establishing shot until 2 minutes in, and even then, having a pretty visually boring setting to show for itself.

Presentation:

Even the detractors I’ve seen for this show consider the visuals to be a redeeming quality, and I completely disagree, I hate the way this show looks, on top of the lack of visually striking cinematography which I mentioned before, this just has boring colouring, most scenes look hazy and monotonous with heavy use of either blue, white or green, I struggle to find shots in this series that I can call visually striking, it fails to map out any setting well, the colouring is is hazy and boring, the setting is boring to look at and has barely any wide shots to introduce itself properly. To “attempt” to give this show some credit, yeah, the fluidity is decent, and the CGI usage is serviceable, not awful at least. Also, I wouldn’t normally bother mentioning this, but a compliment of this series I’ve seen is that the main girl Vivy is hot, well she isn’t, OK, moving on. The soundtrack, specifically when I paid close attention to it while re-watching the first episode wasn’t really noteworthy, some tracks were fine, fitting with the tone of the scene was hit or miss, the bear’s voice is incredibly annoying to listen to, I will get back to this.

Characters/Dialogue:

Vivy is a brick, what else is there to say? Matsumoto (the bear) is annoying, he is an exposition dumper, I dislike dialogue reliant stuff (especially if it’s aiming to be a fun action series), the fact that so much of the plot is presented through dialogue while also spoken with an annoying voice is basically the majority of my issues with this series, I normally would just accept a ridiculously cheesy voice like this (I am already enough of a contrarian as it is and normally just accept cheesiness as a better alternative to just being insufferably boring), but in this case, I can’t help it as it genuinely made the series painful to watch. There is also little to nothing creative about most of the exposition scenes, I value exposition scenes that make themselves engaging through striking imagery (Made in Abyss is my golden example in this regard), but I can’t find that here.

Conclusion:

Watch this if you want I guess, I’m not here to tell people to avoid everything I dislike, just explaining why it doesn’t work for me, I don’t like anything about this series and don’t think it stands out in any way at all, no it’s not fun, no it doesn’t look great, I initially insta dropped this after ep 1 viewing it as yet another shitty seasonal, then I found a lot of hype surrounding it and decided to give it a second chance, I watched 4 episodes, I barely remembered what happened in them I recall the issues being consistent at the very least, I re-watched episode 1 before writing this just to refresh my memory a little bit.

I may even pick this back up after it finishes, especially if I hear that it improves, I don’t doubt that I may have missed out on something, but I re-watched the first episode and asked for a convincing defense on Discord and couldn’t find one.

Don’t expect this to “eventually get good” just because it’s an Original.