Fall 2009 First Impressions: Kuchu Buranko (Trapeze)

This is the last of the fall 2009 impressions series of posts.

Is calling Kuchu Buranko pretentious fair? Is calling Kuchu Buranko interesting fair? Is calling Kuchu Buranko fun to watch fair? Hmm, I have mixed opinions on all three.

Fansub group: gg

Things I liked:

• Nice use of background music. The classical music choices were fittingly fanciful, and the original BGM was fun to listen to.
• Once you get past the ridiculous animation, strange visuals, and non-sequitors, I thought the story was actually pretty interesting. It was just hard to weed that out of all the random crap.

Things I didn’t like:

• Did they rip off a Gloria Estefan song for the ED or are my ears playing tricks on me?
• Shinbo on shrooms, is that a fair way to describe the art direction? Either way, it was too damn busy, too damn random and most of the time, too damn ugly for my tastes.

Random other thoughts:

People are going to either love or hate this show. Kuchu Buranko is sort of like that kid in school who’s pretty likeable, but tries way too hard to hang with the popular kids. Or in this case, with the art school nerds. Watching Ichirou "treat" the trapeze artist’s sleeping problem and failure to trust his teammate was legitimately interesting. However, that made up about 5 minutes of the episode. The other 15 minutes seemed like it was filled with all sorts of random visual effects and "symbolism" to make the show feel like it had more depth than it really did. Take all that away and you’ve got a pretty interesting premise for a show, but likely not something you’d rave over.