Review of Pop Team Epic
It only took me the first episode to know what exactly in the god damn hell is going on in the start of our 2018. However, because I didn’t read the guidelines, my previous review was removed. Fair point, obviously. I originally thought I can give something for this community by creating a review for an anime that I found incredibly unique but I didn’t put so much effort into it and it made my review look more like a trolling rather than serious reviewing in the end. I’m not going to do the same thing with this one now. I know for sure aseries that has 12 episodes in average has to be reviewed after there are 4 episodes broadcasted, but I feel like I need to make this review even though there are only 2 of them airing right now, noted since Saturday, January 13, 2018. With that being said, here goes nothing.
There’s some real happening in the world of anime caused by a culture most famously known as ‘memes’,which came from our particular world of cyberspace called ‘The Internet’. Eventually, due to the massive interference of a certain society in the world wide web, it affects the society of real world. From such, it created what appears to be, which is the main point of our review, Pop Team Epic. Be wary of this anime, for this isn’t your average one. This anime is very absurd, if not surreal.
[MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD due to a lack of informations]
You might be confused by the first episode and dropped the whole show already with all your might. The first minutes of this Episode One we’re talking about doesn’t even show anything remotely close to the premise of this anime, which needless to say, is pretty much an act of ‘trolling’. It introduced us with the plot of an ordinary, average everyday high-school boy called Taira Daichi, who has a classmate of a girl called Hoshifuri Sosogu, which little did he know, is a celebrity idol. Judging from the animation and the decent 8/10 opening song, it looks like something quite promising. Lord were we fooled, because only a few minutes later, everything turns into a wreck.
Out of nowhere, the animation is completely changed. The characters, which were previously introduced are not there anymore, and instead being replaced by 2 Chibi girl characters wearing high school uniforms: the short one and the tall one, which both are ridiculously voiced by old men. The anime storytelling format changed into something like 2-minutes-per-episode show, where every single scene is played in every two minutes for no obvious reason. Unfortunately, Pop Team Epic doesn’t tell any particular stories whatsoever and just mocking any other anime references in the running while it got the chance; and even if the format looks like 5-to-10-seconds-per-story, the show is actually a 24-minutes broadcast. It generated another question for us: with the way Pop Team Epic goes, how did they manage to fill in the gap through the second half of the episode? The answer might shock you.
When the second half is running, they REPEATED the same scene where Daichi first showed up and introduced. They also repeated the same opening song. What we didn’t expect, however, is how they repeated the same scene where 2 Chibi characters showed up and goofed us up: they goofed us harder. They completely use the same EXACT scenes from the first half, only this time they used different voice acting, originally from a couple of baritone-pitched sailormen into a couple of adult voice actresses. They changed ONLY the voice acting. THAT’S IT. Nothing else. Wikipedia said that Mariana Trench is the deepest and lowest place where humanity can sink into. This anime show is evidently the living proof where we can sink even much lower and further than that.
Bob’s Epic Tea …… I mean, Pop Team Epic, is adapted from 4-cells manga. It doesn’t have that much of a premise, nor a point about the show worths to mention, apart from it’s just about 2 characters having fun. It doesn’t serve any purposes except for the comedy and the comedy itself. There’s nothing critical, philosophical and deep about Pop Team Epic. One must not expect anything from this, neither the viewer nor the anime producer, because it looks like even the anime producer is only doing this just for fun while being carefree about what they’re creating. Reminds me of that anime where the guy keeps parodying everything whenever he got the chance. The guy’s called Gin-san, by the way. That being said, here are my scores for the main elements of this show [to find out my opinion about this show, go to the Enjoyment section]:
Story: ?/10
Truth be told, there isn’t any form of storytelling here in this. As I mentioned before, Pop Team Epic is about 2 characters having fun, randomly and carefreely. Viewers aren’t meant to think nor are they to comprehend anything that’s going on in this show because this anime is doing everything randomly in order to create laughs. The story setting of Daichi and Sosogu called “Hoshiiro Girldrop” is a complete lie, but they keep telling in every episode preview at the end that it’s what we’ll get in the next episode. Also, even if it does tell any stories, it’s only 10 seconds long in average with the longest is variative. The last thing one would expect is for all of those stories to be constructed as a whole.
Character: 4/10
There are 2 characters you need to pay attention to, and the only ones that matters: Popuko, the yellow-colored ponytail-haired short-tempered short girl; and Pipimi, the purple colored long-haired tall girl. Both has the appearance of a high school girl and wear the usual high-school clothing of sailor-themed uniform, except for one thing: they both talked like sailormen. In episode one, we’re introduced to such characters voiced by such actors as the standard, but that’s not so. Because later on, in the second half, the couple of MC’s voice actors changed into a couple of MC’S voice actresses.
Although the lack of characters is to be said (mainly there are only 2 of it), both voice actors and actresses did a good job on the voice acting most of the time. They might sound pretty lazy and half-assed at some point while doing it, but for such a half-assed voice acting, I admit they did a good job because their voice-acting is genuine. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be considered notable at all.
Soundtrack: 6/10
It’s not to be expected. Surprisingly, Pop Team Epic has a small bag of good OSTs. The Opening song is incredibly catchy, whether it’d be the pop idol-ish song of the deceptive and misleading Hoshiiro Girldrop’s or the electronic ravish Pop Team Epic’s. The same can be said to the Ending song. The opening song of Pop Team Epic sounds like the beginning of something visually chaotic and remarkably unimaginable to be served as a form of comedic relief.
As for the rest of it, clearly they’re not doing anything desultory. Only the thing is, the amount of song tracks used here is quite a few, but when there is one, they composed and created it very well. Either because the anime doesn’t use background OSTs quite often so they wouldn’t have to create too many song tracks and they can focus in perfecting each and every single tracks (if it actually matters to them just as much, looking by the way this anime is presented to be), or they did it on purpose because they’re just so good at it that they’re lazy.
Animation: 7/10
Pop Team Epic has a diverse collection of animations. It’s been proven since the first episode where they played the opening song and introduced the arguably most despicable lie in the history of human, Hoshiiro Girldrop, in which the animation clip is beyond mesmerizing and unbelievable and it’d go without saying that each of the heroines in it have the potential of becoming a waifu material. So much efforts put into that opening that it doesn’t even look like anything remotely close to a farce. Not a lot of people know about this, but it also worths a mention that the people from Kamikaze Douga are the animators of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s opening clips.
From then on, every single one of their episodes features a variety of clips, Be it the weirdly disgusting animation skit of Bobunemimimmi or the French live-action skit of Japon Mignon. These kinds of efforts shown is Pop Team Epic’s way of telling the viewers how much they’re absolutely capable of doing in creating this anime by that of a smug. Allegedly, much like how it’s portrayed so far that Pop Team Epic looks like it was made by a group of jerkheads, their animation is primarily a professional-ish 2D consists of chibi-looking characters.
Enjoyment: 8/10
This anime is enjoyable subjectively. Some would despise it and spit on it, some would love it to the ground. It actually depends on the comedic taste of each person. There’s a name for the kind of comedy Pop Team Epic has, and it is called “Anti-Humor Comedy”.
As it is called, Anti-Humor comedy does not intend to serve anything humoric to the audience, which is the very intention of the comedy. It indirectly generates laughing materials to enjoy and thus becomes what considered to be a new type of humor for the audience. Mostly, this kind of comedy gives some particular sign of random surrealism in it. Much of it is incomprehensible and not easy to decipher. However, the audiences are not meant to question ‘why’. There isn’t anything behind it to find out about and there is no use in pointing out the details for the sake of the enjoyment itself. Instead, what they need to do is to question ‘what’, as opposed to ‘what is the purpose of them doing this?’ but to ‘what the heck are they think they’re doing?’.
Examples could be found in the infamous western TV shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Eric Andre Show. As it premises, almost everything in the show is a part of incomprehensible comedy skits instead of showing any tiny fabric of genuine reality. If we are to take examples from well-known anime, the closest one we could ever get would be Nichijou. The only thing that excludes it from being an Anti-Humor is how any elements in Nichijou is actually quite relatable to us, be it from the characters interactions to each other or the story settings, which makes it “Surreal Comedy”. The similarity of Surreal comedy to Anti-Humor comedy makes Surreal comedy the best foundation to relate to. Despite the similar absurdities, however, Surreal comedy is still understandable and easily laughable to the majority of audience due to the built associations between them and the show. Pop Team Epic obviously shows a huge gap between itself and that.
They also did many parodying. They parodied a typical pop idol anime by using fake opening song and intro of one , which is later on to be known as Hoshiiro Girldrop.It doesn’t just stop there, because they parodied many anime shows after that as if it doesn’t care how many 4th walls they break and the consequences of it. Just in episode one, they already parodied and made many references such as Kimi no Na Wa, Pokemon, Berserk, Totoro, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
These kinds of comedies are very minor and unpopular because of the incomprehensibility and the nonsenseness of it. Needless to say, Pop Team Epic created a very good one and I’m gladly willing to give this show’s rate of Enjoyment a strong 9/10, for its mutifariousness of anti-humoric jokes and liberties of parodying. However, I have to be objective for the readers of my review. Which is why I can give this 8/10. That's as low as I can get.
Overall: 7.5/10
In this modern society of 21st century, men-children and women-fujoshis, wherever they are, all participate in it. We live in the very age of raising awareness to infinite possibilities where everything can work. A businessman could become a leader in a country of power, nerds can have friends and become filthy rich, and people can trash each others and talk smack from far far away using the so-called "Discord Voice Chat" to establish a person as that of a lisped Ethiopian retard. Eventually, it created Pop Team Epic in the middle of it. This anime is created from memes. It’s stupid, unforgivable, unacceptable, nonsensical, idiotic, abusive, derogative, absolutely low, disrespectful, stupid, world-tier threatening, brain-consuming, carcinogenic, tumoric, hemorrhagic and a source of agoraphobic existential crisis. Have I mentioned that this anime is also stupid?
And yet, I’m feeling lucky and thankful.
I’m feeling lucky to start my 2018 with something out of the norm such as Pop Team Epic. It doesn’t want to follow other formulas of comedy anime like Osomatsu-san or Gintama. It’s not afraid to be different. It really wants to stand out as the center of attention like an attention whore it is. It holds a megaphone in hand while butt-naked, being watched by everyone including women and children, and shouts: “I’m f****** retarded!”.
I’m feeling thankful that, after many many ecchi-harem anime later (looking at you, To-Love-Ru and DxD), I finally can have something so special that I can personally look back to and said: “This is absolutely memorable and historical because it’s not like any others. I shall keep and preserve it”. I could never begin to imagine at any moment that it’d be something I’d grin to, smile to or laugh to.
At the end of the day, we all laugh to our stories and everything that’s around. Whether it’d be about the TV show we watched or about the times when we’re feeling down in high school. The real question is: “will it be a sad laugh or a heartful laugh?”