Kemurikusa episode 1
Tatsuki is back... with a vengeance!
The rise, fall and (hopefully) rise of Tatsuki
The stories around Tatsuki, the director of Kemurikusa, are as odd as the stuff he produces. And I think it's worth noting here, so before going on to my thoughts on Kemurikusa, here's an quick detour into Tatsuki's "adventures". He previously directed a little something called Kemono Friends which aired in 2017 winter anime season. It was born from an extremely cheap multi-media project and, honestly, it was destined to fail. Just a quick search on it suffices and one can see that it doesn't look inviting. What you see is shitty high-school level Blender CG models of anthropomorphised girls ("Oh not agian, Japan!") that move like someone hand baked the animations in Unity or something. For the first few episodes they didn't even have enough budget to make the wheels of a car in the opening spin for goodness sake! It's all colorful, full of energy and high-pitched voices to top it all off ("Haven't seen that before in anime!"). Seems like a stupid morning cartoon for kids (Well, that's technically correct...) or some moe otaku bait, eh? Well I'll let this graph speak for itself...
anime-stats.net 2019
Even the shittier shows of a season start at an average score of around 6. And that's right, from 4.4 average score right up to 7.4. This underdog (an understatement if i'm honest) really blew the community away and won the hearts of many that definitely didn't fit into the projected target demographic of 6-year olds. The graph more so represents the western opinion of it, but after the show ended there were quite a few articles about Japanese zoos being saved from bankruptcy because suddenly, for some unknown reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, people wanted to go to the zoo. Even many of the animals were named after the characters from the show. It's safe to say that it managed to do something special. Few months later, the show got to 7.7 on MyAnimeList thanks to the Twitch Anime Marathon that took place on 2017 summer, which is where I discovered it. And man am I glad for that Marathon, if it weren't for the Twitch chat's shenanigans I probably wouldn't have touched Kemono Friends with a 10-foot pole. In the end, not only did I finish the whole thing, but I gave it a flippin' 8/10 and that's a huge score in my books.
BUT, then disaster struck and the director was fired- WhAT?! Yep, the passionate dude who'd done the lions share of the work out of the total 5 or so people working on the destined-to-fail-project got fired out of the blue for some hazy reasons. Well, i don't know the details well enough and it's more depressing than interesting, but here's a nice recap. In the end, he was dropped out of the Kemono Friends 2 project and he decided to say fuck it and do his own thing knowing that there are people who love his work.
Kemurikusa Episode 1
It's weird. In the best way. Once again!
Back with the same CG style, but now with a little more refined animations at least! Actually i think the CG works for the show. Same for this and Kemono Furenzu, it gives it a very personal and heartwarming feel. There's an actual heart to these projects and a real passion behind its team and it shows through the design visual and sound design choices. Continuing with the similarities, once again there aren't needless exposition dumps like there usually are in anime. The show really takes it's time to explain things and sometimes let's the viewer figure it out themselves and it's oh-so-nice to not be treated like a total idiot even when it's possibly a children's show.
But actually, Kemurikusa seems very different from Kemono Friends when it comes to the story so far. Kemono was super light-hearted for most of the show and it shows that the real target audience for this were children and not the 20-something males on r/anime (Me included lmao) that got a kick from the surprising dark lore hidden in the subtext. I suppose Tatsuki realised that his fanbase was more than just kids and went for something a little darker than the constant TANOSHIIIIII this time. Kemurikusa is pretty dark from it's color palette and mood to it's hints at the coming themes. It's not gonna be very cerebral, that's for sure, but as a short expressive show from the passionate people that put their hearts into this to remind me of simpler times? I sure as hell am gonna enjoy it if the first episode is anything to go by!
