IMAGINE!

Imagine a setting where nothing makes sense. Something that blends the irreverent bombast of an early Trigger production like Kill la Kill with the philosophizing fakery of an “important talks” heavy show like RahXephon or Aquarion and the extreme visual coding and glaring technique of a Shaft production like Bakemonogatari. And there are penguins.

You don’t have to imagine it. Mawaru Penguindrum exists, in all its stunningly pretentious glory. Well, for a definition of glory, at least.

I’m going to get this out of the way at the start: I think Mawaru Penguindrum is possibly the most pretentious show I’ve reviewed on this blog to date. Haruhi as my witness, it even manages to outdo Texhnolyze  on that score. It’s close – there are different ways and means of being pretentious, and I just happen to find Texhnolyze’s art student hatred and spite for the viewer to be marginally more tolerable than Penguindrum’s variation. I will get back to this at the end, but as I summarize what happens in this show, I want to color it with the idea of how it happens: Long, rambling speeches. Strange visuals. Important-sounding talks about important-sounding words that sound like a student who was half asleep in class trying desperately to pass Philosophy 101 by regurgitating terms. It is all over this show.  Usually, pretentiousness is a bad thing, but it’s also seldom fatal on its own.

So, plot. There is, all things considered, a rather constrained cast of characters. In one of the show’s few examples of restraint we’re concerned with a girl, her two brothers, their teacher, the teacher’s fiancee, and two crazy girls. That’s who is active and present for the vast majority of this show, and not all of those have equal weight and time meaning that, when we’re dealing with a 24 episode show, the ones who get focus really get a lot of focus.

So starting off we have the girl, Himari, and her brothers: the brash Ladies’ man with possible siscon overtones Kanba and the generically nice and kind Shouma. Himari is sick. She doesn’t let that bother her, but it’s clearly eating her brothers alive. They take her to the aquarium where her unspecified terminal disease decides to go terminal. All is not lost, though, as there was some magic in that penguin hat from the gift shop. It revives Himari and possess her body in an absurd and over the top roller coaster strip tease outside time and space to tell the brothers if they want to keep their miracle, they need to find and acquire the Penguindrum. She refuses to elaborate.

Also, some Penguins are mysteriously shipped to the kids. The three penguins take on traits reminiscent of their three masters (Himari’s Penguin is domestic, Shouma’s likes food and hates bugs, Kanba’s always has dirty magazines). These penguins never contribute anything to the plot, can’t be seen by most people, and are rarely even acknowledged by the people who can see them. But, they’re on screen a great deal of the time doing visual gags like the Minions from Despicable Me, so I guess they’re in the show. Let it not be said that Penguindrum failed to have penguins.

Eventually, the boys are thrown a bone in the form of being directed to a girl named Ringo. Ringo has a psychotic stalker crush on their teacher, Keiju Tabuki. She also has what appears to be a Future Diary, which the boys assume must be the Penguindrum. Since they really need the Penguindrum, they set out to get it by… Kanba skulking around on unrelated side projects, leaving dealing with Ringo to Shouma, who pretty much agrees to help her crazy schemes in the hopes that she might just give up the diary maybe.

In a show that’s full of characters and ideas trying to sound deep and missing the mark, Ringo is probably the one character who actually lands, where her strife feels legitimate and understandable. But by Haruhi you would not guess that from the first stretch of this show. I do suspect that Ringo landing is a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, but I’ll give it to this show anyway and discuss her somewhat out of order.

You see, it’s not revealed for a bit, but Ringo has some serious hangups about her dead big sister, Momoka. Momoka was the original owner of the diary, and it details a romantic future with Tabuki that Momoka, who was his peer and not his student, hoped to have. However, Momoka died tragically many years before the show proper, and thanks to Ringo’s parents not taking to the death of their eldest very well, she’s come to believe that she must become Momoka in order to put her family back together. Thus, she pursues Tabuki, diary entry by diary entry, believing that living out the destiny written therein will allow her to stop existing as Ringo and start existing as the Momoka that everybody seemed to care about to her exclusion.

Naturally, as she seems to start having a thing with Shouma, this becomes much more complicated. Her feelings as Ringo don’t align with what she believes she needs to do, and we slowly see more and more through the first half of the show how what drives her isn’t love or even yandere obsession, but rather this bitter need to fill her dead sister’s shoes. Pretty much the only thing she seems to have for herself, that she actually allows herself, is the friendship she forms with Himari.

This is especially interesting when, after Shouma becomes involved, it seems the Diary’s predictions are either coming true for Tabuki and his new fiancee, or else for Ringo and Shouma.

And there are a lot of problems with how this is presented. Now is not the time to get into the continuity madness of this show, if there even is such a point, but they really do start out playing Ringo far too much as simply Yuno Gasai with a fresh coat of paint, like one time in an early episode when she, seemingly guided by the diary, shoves a random woman down an escalator. This act of attempted murder, the likes of which will never come up again, with a target who does not matter in the least, brought to you by the writers clearly having no idea what they were doing.

Ringo is also, while not fully dumped, essentially sat in the corner after the first half so we can’t really engage with her growth for a huge chunk of show despite her being the arguably most important thing earlier.

And this highlights, to an extent, one of the biggest problems I think is behind Mawaru Penguindrum: it feels like it was a “write by the seat of our pants” affair. I honestly believe that the first parts of the story were concepted, written out, pitched, and even fully produced without anybody knowing where this thing was going or how the mysteries were going to resolve. Nobody did ground work, or made an outline, or tried to craft a logically consistent setup. I think when the early episodes were put together, they really did think that Ringo was going to be this scary Yuno-type character, but then a little ways in somebody wrote “sister issues!” and they just sort of ran with that and scrambled desperately to re-contextualize her former behavior. It’s an effort that met more success than their attempts to do similarly elsewhere in the show, but it still leaves certain scenes of hers bizarrely orphaned.

While the whole chain of events with Ringo is going on, mostly played for wacky hijinx, we do have a side of Kanba. He has to deal with making some sort of shadowy deal and, initially, his many exes having it out for him. This segues into a different issue as we have a second crazy obsessed stalker to deal with. This is the redhead femme fatale (or so she appears at first) Masako Natsume, who seems to be another Ex of Kanba’s who wants him, except she has a wrist crossbow that fires penguin-pattern paper BBs that erase peoples memories, which she uses to eliminate her rivals. She even has her own useless visual gags penguin, which of course prefers to sexually assault Kanba’s penguin whenever able.

The main conflict of early Penguindrum is, of course, Ringo’s obsession. Most pointedly, it is the hazard posed by that whole “Tabuki has a Fiancee” thing, a famous and gorgeous stage actress at that. Shouma helps Ringo with her stupid schemes like moving in under Tabuki’s house or trying to use magic frogs to make a love potion (it happens), and the two slowly grow closer together until we finally get to the halfway point, delve a little of Ringo’s tragic backstory, and reach a breaking point with her quest.

In said breaking point, she successfully drugs Tabuki with that magic frog love potion, only to realize she’s conflicted and not really ready and able to be taken. Shouma tries to save her, and the entire mess ends with Ringo and Shouma out on the street and Ringo’s diary torn in half, with half of the pages claimed by a mysterious biker who is clearly that fiancee.

We then enter the second half of Penguindrum, which is the point where it starts to panic and spin its wheels.

Himari goes and dies again, but this time a weird creepy doctor who we’d previously seen in some sort of extradimensional library is able to save her. His introduction is about that abrupt. However, once again Himari isn’t going to stay saved, and this time the doctor seems inclined to squeeze Kanba for more and more funds for treatments, which forces Kanba to get more involved with whatever weird shady stuff he’s getting involved in. Meanwhile, the whole diary thing remains the closest thing the show has to an A plot, with plenty of people wanting that MacGuffin and the original MacGuffin of the unexplained Penguindrum largely dropped as a concept.

And, unfortunately, I need to get into the backstory, which is dropped pretty arbitrarily through the back half, in order to properly get to the climax.

Let’s start with the sudden introduction of a concept known as the Child Broiler.

Yeah, there’s a Child Broiler in this setting. The visuals are so weird that you might think for a moment that it could be a metaphor. There are no metaphors in this show. Whether they might be stand-ins for something in real life in a metaphorical fashion or not, they all seem to be entirely fact within the narrative itself. So the Child Broiler is a real place, where unwanted kids appear to be sent in order for… something evil to happen to them. You’d think they’d be broiled, but the imagery looks more like there’s some sort of conveyor into a mincer going on, and the dialogue talks more emphatically about “vanishing” in a way that really doesn’t sound like it’s anything as clean or basic as mere death.

As best as I can put it together, the Child Broiler seems to be a literal, physical place that does via some sort of torture magic what would, in a lesser manner, be accomplished by the realities of living in a society, especially one with a high pressure to conform. The children who go through the Child Broiler process are most likely, in essence, rendered into NPCs for the world or something like Torches from Shana. This involves a good deal of guesswork on my part, but the show just throws this at us.

The Child Broiler is introduced to us to get more backstory for Himari. It seems that Himari is not, in fact, actually related to the boys. Rather, she was a street kid who they befriended and who was eventually spirited away to the Child Broiler. There, she ended up being rescued by one of the brothers (or so it’s implied: they play coy with who for a while and it really does not matter) who shared the Fruit of Fate with her in order to make her their real sister and rescue her from the Broiler.

What, you haven’t heard of this Fruit of Fate before? Well it’s here. There’s a Fruit of Fate. It has unspecified magic fate and destiny powers and can apparently foil the Child Broiler system, whatever that is.

Haruhi help me, I’m still not through this mess.

Sort of connected to this and also important is the pile-up of everybody’s past. The parents of the brothers were, apparently, terrorists! And somehow this makes the brothers, who were little kids, culpable for their crimes in some sort of cosmic moral sense. I can get having hangups, but it goes above and beyond. One of those crimes, the big one, was an attack on a subway. That terrorist attack is where Ringo’s big sister and Tabuki’s original beloved, Momoka, died. Thus, Shouma has some serious hangups about being interested in Ringo when his parents were sort of the cause of all of Ringo’s woes (not that her parents helped).

This also gets into the fact that time is… a suggestion in this show. Ringo and Shouma are peers. Even if Ringo is younger, she’s certainly at least peers with Himari. Himari was adopted by the brothers with the fruit of fate magic while they still had terrorist parents which seemed to not last after that subway attack, and all the kids involved are seemingly at least in grade school. But at the same time, we’re kind of told that the day Momoka died is the day Ringo was born. At first I thought that just meant that the attack happened on Ringo’s birthday, but there are points that try to have it come across as the original day of her birth. Also, it was that very day Shouma and Kanba were born. I think things make a lot more sense if you assume the former, but I wanted to express how easily this show can just sort of lose the plot.

Speaking of Momoka, we get to see some of her time alive, learning that her Diary (the Future Diary Ringo inherited) contains a magic spell that allows her to transfer one entity’s destiny to another, at the cost of suffering backlash proportional to the scale of the fate she’s trying to change. Her use of this is a big part of how she got close to all the people whose lives she touched (like Tabuki and his future fiancee), and it also plays a part in her death, since she went out using her fate spell to ensure nobody else died in that terrorist attack, presumably getting messed up in an esoteric fashion by the spell backlash. It’s this spell that is why everybody wants the diary, which is now in two parts. This includes a treacherous Tabuki, his treacherous fiancee (everyone in this show is at least two-faced. Except Shouma.), Masako, the creepy doctor dude… you get the idea.

On to Masako, we arbitrarily get some more story out of her that starts nowhere and goes nowhere, seeing that she has a little sibling who is also kept alive by a magic penguin hat presumably setting her to seek the Penguindrum. She’s the scion of an insanely rich family that was lead by her abusive and insanely eccentric old man. Oh, and Kanba is actually her brother by blood. Yeah, he’s not related to Shouma either. At some point they were being held in underground cages and slowly starved, presumably in the Child Broiler, but then the Fruit of Fate appeared and allowed them to become family. Except Masako seemingly knows who Kanba was originally, as does he.

Does the show think it can get away with saying whatever the heck it wants by retconning the world in character any time Momoka or the Fruit of Fate does anything? Maybe that’s why everybody has so many inconsistent and incompatible backstories.

So, with my apologies for jumping around the timeline like a grasshopper on LSD (in my defense the show does it too), I think we have the moving parts for the present tense climax and this show’s excuse for an ending in position.

We start with the aforementioned treachery regarding the teacher and his fiancee, who want the diary and its power for themselves because Momoka. But, they aren’t really the point. No, the point is the creepy doctor. He’s some sort of ghost. He also worked with Shouma’s parents on that whole terrorism thing when they were born and yet also somehow several years old, but I’m not sure if he was a ghost then or if he became one due to clashing with his archenemy, Momoka, around that terrorist attack. Oh, yeah, Momoka is also his archenemy. And two halves of her are the two magic penguin hats. The penguins themselves? Still unexplained, but the hats are Momoka.

Because of the doctor’s manipulations, Kanba has been doing shady things for money. These shady things involve working with a shadowy terrorist organization. The shadowy terrorist organization does not exist. One moment we see Kanba meet them in a bar, the next moment we see the bar as a run-down ruin that has been abandoned for some time and everyone Kanba was dealing with is disappeared or dead. But somehow Kanba is still running with these shadowy figures, reckoning that it is his destiny to carry on the work of his parents to be a terrorist or something.

Thus, all fates converge on the subway, which may also be outside time and space. We get a number of final confrontations, some of which don’t make a lick of sense, but the general idea is that the Doctor wants bad stuff to happen. Momoka’s ghost wants to prevent it. Kanba wants to help him because that’s how he thinks Himari will be saved. Shouma wants to save Kanba. Ringo wants to save Shouma. Nobody else really strongly matters.

Also, the Fruit of Fate is still somehow critical and also the Penguindrum.

We get some very trippy scenes with Kanba and Himari, where Himari is naked and nothing has to exist in normal physical space because we gave up on that a long time ago, and it seems as though Kanba gives up his existence to save Himari. It’s all very esoteric.

Down in the final showdown against the attempt to recreate the old terrorist attack with Monobear dolls (it happens), Ringo has learned and is prepared to use the spell of fate to set things right, even knowing that this will subject her to the “Scorpion Fire”, which sounds a lot like hell but is actually a reference to a specific story that indicates it’s more just a term for an absolute self sacrifice (involving a scorpion who, regretting preying on weaker creatures, immolated itself and became a constellation to forever guide living things with its light). However, as she invokes the spell, Shouma takes the payment for her, much to her horror, finally telling her he loves her before he burns out to go to esoteric annihilation.

Thus, we get a reset ending where Himari has a happy life, Ringo is presumably fine, and the boys don’t exist except maybe as weird ghosts like the creepy doctor. Did you follow that? No? Too bad! The end!

It occurs to me that, throughout this review, I’ve been rather hard on Penguindrum. This is because its macro storytelling – that is, how it weaves the bigger picture of its plot – is damn near impenetrable. I’ve dealt with hard shows before, most notably Serial Experiments Lain and I’ve gotten out of them okay, but Penguindrum was something else. On the highest-order level of storytelling, it makes Neon Genesis Evangelion look sober.

But the micro level is actually quite a bit more watchable and easier to follow. That probably hasn’t come across thusfar because this is a review of a 24 episode show that I try to keep to a reasonable length. I can’t go into depth on every episode and all the fine conversations and little turns that work. The first half is stronger about this, before it starts to go off the esoteric rails, but even in the second half you get a lot of episodes that work. For every Child Broiler reveal, there’s something more like Masako’s history and relationship with her family patriarch. Which, while still presented with some classical Penguindrum weirdness so you don’t exactly know how literal the imagery and events are, but it’s able to be followed and even a bit funny in how absurd and bombastic it is. Penguindrum may be difficult, but it’s not difficult the way Texhnolyze is. Texhnolyze wants to filter its audience, so only the “worthy” can gain its substance. Penguindrum still tries to entertain you.

And that also brings me to the idea of that substance, or meaning. It’s easy to see if you know a little modern history that the big terrorist event referred to in Penguindrum is the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, carried out by a doomsday cult with some insane sensationalist membership. This is (or at least was by Penguindrum’s 2011 release) a pretty heavy cultural trauma, and that does inform a good deal of what’s going on here.

More than that though, there’s the question of what, if anything, Penguindrum is trying to say. It looks and talks a lot like, if not message fiction, at least heavy philosophical fiction that’s supposed to have a meaning somewhere in there. For all the talk, there is the very real possibility of nothing. This was ultimately the doom of Yurei Deco which I still hold is a Rorschach Blot and despise for how manipulative it tries to be on that scale. Penguindrum… I do think the creators had some solid ideas, and that the people who divine meaning from the overwhelming noise of this show (you can find many an essay to that effect) aren’t just projecting. There really is something here.

The themes that are most loudly on offer are those of fate, destiny, and change. There’s the idea that destiny is not a perfectly set track, but that it does have inertia, and that it takes something really exceptional to throw something off the rails. Learning the cultural reference behind “The Scorpion Fire” so you know that’s not just a fancy name for Hell (which it totally could have been. Child Broiler.) and is instead more of a sacrifice that functions as a guide to others, helps tie this together.

But… it’s still very scattered, and occasionally bowls gutterballs. One very notable one is the ending itself. Ringo stands where Momoka stood, and is prepared to offer herself to the Scorpion Fire. This is one thing. Shouma comes in and… takes her burden for her. And you could argue that this is a great display of love, but we already had that with Kanba and already had a perfect sacrifice set up with Ringo. Throwing the fire onto Shouma seems senseless as it makes the second ending sacrifice more standard. Perhaps I’m underestimating that cultural trauma I mentioned earlier, but to westerners the guilt Shouma feels for his parents’ deeds feels very overblown, considering he was supposedly only born that day and thus had no actual hand in any premeditated misdeeds. Perhaps if you were Japanese in 2011, there was some way in which he needed to atone for things he didn’t actually do, but Ringo did a lot of spooky stuff so having her take the ending, as herself and for her own reasons rather than as imitation Momoka, would have been stronger in my opinion.

That’s hardly the only point in the show, however, where the writing is too muddy or the setting too esoteric for its own good. I could call back to the Child Broiler and the “what does it actually do?” sort of deal, or any number of things that didn’t amount to enough to mention individually. There are strong, meaningful parts here, but they’re distributed in a chaotic plum pudding of nonsense that makes them take on an aspect uncomfortably similar to the Yurei Deco blot.

I do maintain the idea that Penguindrum is pretentious, and incredibly so at that.  It doesn’t have to be as empty as Yurei Deco or as difficult as Texhnolyze for that: it certainly believes, with every molecule of its being, that it is important.  Even when Penguindrum is being funny, it has this air of trying, and trying too hard, to also be meaningful.  I think Penguindrum legitimately wants to be a life-changing show, not just entertainment even as it entertains… but the pieces of media that stick with a person, that change a person, are generally not ones that think that’s what they’re doing or that set out to do it, because that sort of reaction is an incredibly personal thing.  Shows with no ambition will rarely do it, but there comes a point where the artistic ambition that enables such connections becomes mere vainglory, and Penguindrum sails past that mark.

Before I fully close the book on Penguindrum, I will say this: there exists another version, a movie edition called Re:cycle of the Penguindrum that acts as a compilation. I have not viewed the Penguindrum movies, having had more than enough of this property just getting through the original for the purpose of this review, but had it been a relatively full remake, I would actually give it a fair chance to have improved on the macro-scale presentation at the cost of the micro, since it could keep its messages more tight in a shorter running time. What research I’ve done into the topic suggests that’s not what Re:cycle did, but I know if I didn’t mention Re:cycle at all, I would be remiss.

So, the verdict on Penguindrum.

Penguindrum is a curious piece. On one hand I want to call it a mess, but there’s enough legitimacy to how it can be read into that I can’t write it off entirely. Its visuals are stunning… except when they’re abjectly beyond basic, like having everyone who isn’t a real character be represented by essentially stick figures. Its individual episodes are fun, characterful little head trips, but they sum into a trainwreck that only gets harder to parse the longer you look at it. The context can make the show shine a lot clearer, but the text itself is doing no favors.

I took my time on this verdict. At the end of the day, I need to apply a letter grade and move on to the next thing. That’s what I do. But I do want to get it right. And Penguindrum, critically, lingers on the line between C and D. At C-, I would be saying that while it’s got a lot of problems, it is still ultimately watchable. At D+, I would be saying that while it has a fair amount of good to it, it’s ultimately broken.

I’m sorry Penguindrum fans, but I’m going to have to go with D+.

Either one of these options would hurt me to do. As it is I feel like maybe I’m not giving the heavy material enough credit, that maybe there’s still some reference like the 1995 Sarin gas attack (which I was aware of going in and noticed the connection to) or the Scorpion Fire (which I learned later) that I am missing that helps stitch this bizarre piece’s conceptual wounds, letting it heal from its self-inflicted damage. But if I went the other way, I would grouse forever that I was too much of a sucker, and let it smokescreen its way past the basic fact that by the end of this show I badly wanted to be done with it. It overstayed its welcome, and left me desperately wanting to part ways with it at long last.

In the end, this way was more honest. I’m going to say, if any of this madness has you interested, it might be worthwhile to watch one episode of Penguindrum, just to soak in the unique visual style, but that for an average viewer it does not justify its running time and shouldn’t be given any more attention.