If I am to be
truthful, Pop Team Epic is as
scattershot as a musket round exploding from a gun, but that comment itself
even feels absurd knowing the creators of this made the series with this
intention, and that the work based on a manga mocks itself as being “shit”
throughout the first animated season multiple times. Already as time has
passed, until 2022 when the second series was unleashed, references this has cracked
have become more obscure or less current to that moment the show was released,
and the amount of censorship just of certain images, due to how Japanese parody
laws work, means there are some curious insights to be gleamed as a time
capsule, such as how in the first episode (for the Crunchyroll version) the Pokemon
parody stays intact but they felt blurring the My Neighbour Totoro (1988) one was wiser in fear Hayao Miyazaki might frown at them. By
now the parody in the first episode of Your
Name (2016), Makoto Shinkai's
blockbuster success of an anime film, is now a canonical hit rather than the
sudden shock surprise, and yet at the same time, even as a show with a lot of
parodies, it makes a joke about a viewer writing a disgruntled letter to Pipimi
and Popuko, our leads, about them relaying too much on parodies for the jokes.
This show always had the sense of being deliberately irrelevant, knowing the
jokes could be cheap, and this also, especially for the video game parodies,
gets really esoteric. How else do you explain a parody of Death Crimson (1996), one of the most notorious video game productions
for the Sega Saturn console, a
perfect example of the labour this show puts in for what is, to be blunt, a
thirteen episode shit post disguising itself as a sketch anime comedy like gdgd Fairies (2011-13).

Pop Team Epic, and its
school girl leads Pipimi and Popuko, closer to goblin personifications of ids
than teenagers, were birthed into the world in 2014 by Bkub Okawa, creating the
4koma manga for Takeshobo. Pipimi (taller and more sedate) and Popuko (shorter,
more prone to violence and flipping the bird) are less characters in a sitcom
than forces of misanthropy in a series of strange and even nonsensical gags.
Openly preferring surreal jokes or moments which are weird without an apparent
punch line, imaging these two with more "conventional" designs is actually
one of the jokes the series keeps coming back too. There is even a joke that,
set up in the first and last episode as the closest to a plot, the evil cabal
behind the show (parodying Neon Genesis
Evangelion (1995)) regret their moe schoolgirl show with more cute designs
for the pair turned into the equivalent of taking a dump on viewers’
television. In fact one of the funniest jokes, one I admire, is that the next
episode previews are not for Pop Team
Epic in season one but for Hoshiiro
Girldrop, a show which does not exist which is parodying a stereotypical
one, about a schoolgirl who is also an idol singer in her other life and has a
crush on her male senpai. [Spoilers]
The joke is funnier for the abrupt punch line, that this even has the abrupt
tonal shift out of nowhere for the final preview that our heroine died and the
male love interest resurrected her afterwards, as abrupt to what is a cute idol
programme as what may actually happen in an actual thirteen episode show or
two. [Spoilers End]

The first series
was divisive for me when I had first seen the episodes, and even now, it is a
show of what does not land, what does and what hits with complete success,
completely unpredictable in where it is in either of these categories even in
just one episode. The first episode, still, is weak, more of a series of
parodies which does not fully get to the weirdness the others from the second
get to quickly. One of its best virtues, which grow returning to the series, is
how to even depict the dumbest of jokes, this brings a murderer's row of
talented and imaginative creators and animators in a variety of formats, even crafts
with sewn felt dolls, to depict them. To mock itself as merely shit again for a
joke is not enough when this can parody Isao
Takahata's The Tale of the Princess
Kaguya (2013), his last film and an incredible animated production which
used incredibly lavish digital animation to depict watercolour-like images. Not
merely to pastiche it is enough for a joke but, knowing even for a minute or
two it would take a lot of resources, copy the exact animation style from that
film's lavish production.

The
collaborative nature is a huge virtue of Pop
Team Epic. Barring the first and last episode having a story, the episodes
baring one prominent segment, usually a parody, is a series of small skits of a
variety of different art styles and tones. There is also only fifteen minutes
of them including opening and ending credits, as one of the strangest touches,
which I was first pushed away back but watched properly finally, is how this
replicates the same episode to make up the full twenty plus minute length.
There are differences between them - usually tiny touches, some major one offs
which are different to the same scenes, and subtitles for the Japon Mignon
segments about French culture - but the biggest differences are is that
different voice actors in Version 1 and 2 are used for Pipimi and Popuko. And
they can be male and female, over the two versions of the same episode and
allowing a huge variety of prominent figures in voice acting to try even ad
libbing, not even taking into consideration the English dub took the same
attitude. For a great example, if you wished for the titular Madoka, of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), to
play Popuko, then Aoi Yūki is one such
figure here, in a parody of a high fantasy anime which has not even been
finished where Popuko/ Yūki is
forcing the voice actors in character to perform impersonations upon threat of
grievous implied harm.

There are reoccurring
segments, and one of the season's best aspects is that, even if jokes do not
land, this let anyone create idiosyncratic segments in their own ways. The most
infamous is the "Bob Epic Team" segments by AC-bu. The creators Toru Adachi and Shunsuke Itakura, who also do the voice performances, created these
garish and surreal splatters of visuals with carte blanche, and these works for
all their notoriety in their ugliness were intentional aesthetically. A duo who
was working in commercials and music videos since the late 1990s, they came to
this production knowing what to do, and getting some of the strangest and funniest
moments as a result even if also replicating material from the original manga. (Such
as finding an alien in the cat bed, posing as one, and having none of it.) The
parodies of numerous obscure video games (and some big hitters like Undertale (2015)) in exact pixel
styles, were done by an amateur pixel artist Makoto Yamashita who was still a
student at the time of the production¹, and UchuPeople, who use a variety of different multi-craft tools, are
stop motion specialistis responsible for the felt and knitted versions of one
collaborator provided coquetted versions of Pipimi and Popuko, used for music
numbers (including a Earth, Wind and Fire
parody) that usually are sweet sounding songs about wanting to kill the subject
being sung to. This becomes the best aspect of this deliberately scattershot
production, which embraces a variety of figures and allows them to be creative,
something attesting to how one entire reoccurring segment Japon Mignon, was
handed to French born 3D animator Thibault Tresca², living in Japan,
who was allowed to create (mostly) wholesome 3D animated stories with fluent
French speaking voice actresses about the clichés of French culture.

Its scattershot
nature is its biggest vice, as surreal comedy in anime is something that is
bountiful and in a variety, meaning that there are many others in this format
including with more elaborate stories to embrace and compare to. Its
scattershot nature however too, when it lands, leads to some brilliant moments.
“Hellshake Yano”, a talented guitarist and originally a joke character from the
manga itself, is probably the thing that will be brought up for Pop Team Epic’s first season, enough
that in 2022, Stephen Lee
"Thundercat" Bruner, a Grammy Award winning bass
guitarist/singer/producer/musician, is proclaiming his love for the show and
him by rocking out on a paper craft guitar designed like Yano’s on social media³.
AC-bu were tasked in season one to
use kamishibai, a form of street theatre and storytelling from between Japan in
the 1920s/1930s to the time television became popular, even as far back as
9th-century emaki (picture teller) scrolls⁴. Telling stories with
paper images, with a storyteller voicing the characters, this format even past
the growth of television in the 1950s found its way to continue. (Ujicha, the cult film maker of the likes
of Violence Voyager (2018), is
effectively doing paper theatre himself with his cult and sometimes shocking
work). AC-bu, when approaching this
tradition in their own way made an utter epic by itself which could even
outlast the rest of the show, the duo operating a painstaking put together,
drawn and cut sketchpad depicting Hellshake Yano having to appease the crowd at
a concert as they voice the performance onscreen. It was an incredible
production which won me over back even when I was cold to the series, and it
stands out still but as a gem in a show which had a lot of inspired moments.
Even then, I have to also credit that, returning to the series, countless other
jokes are just as funny: the ghost story parody where a group of young adults
rent a cabin which suspiciously have a pair of guns and axes mounted onto the
walls, and end up killing each other; the second version of this with a
seemingly random man doing audio commentary that, whilst not fully successful
as a joke, is bold and does have the hilarious moment where he finds them
having a watermelon out of season suspicious; that sudden attempt at a sad
ending, using the repeated episode format on purpose, which is resolved by Shōta Aoi, voice actor and singer,
looking like a cosmic pixie as he puts everything right again through his
dapper dress sense and ability to travel back in time; that one random time,
whilst acting out orgasm, one of the actresses uses “Marilyn Monroe” over and over, or the abrupt shout out by a male
actor to neoclassical metal guitarist Yngwie
Malmsteen; and way too many else to count.

There is one
which fully encapsulates the show and its entire attitude, which is that
aforementioned parody of Death Crimson,
faithfully recreating its entire opening full motion video even with a fuzzy
image of a red door. A game never released outside its home country, though the
sequel did, Death Crimson was an attempt by the company Ecole Software as part of their
transition into video game software as outsiders. A light gun game, it is held
as one of the worse games ever released for the Sega Saturn, but instead of destroying the company it was loved by
those who played it, sold very well when eventually the notoriety started to be
passed on, and developed a cult around them. Proclaimed “Emperor of Kusogē”⁵,
and something those who made the game are proud of in spite of its notorious
low production qualities, bear in mind “kusogē” does mean “shit game”, even if
the term is for notorious Japanese productions in the medium which are loved
even without irony; that in itself makes the perfect encapsulation, for good
and for moments which do not work, of Pop
Team Epic itself, proudly calling itself shit, made with complete love of
the art form of anime through the talented people in various positions on the
production, and spending its resources, including a large portion of the
climatic episode, parodying a notorious Sega
Saturn light gun game.

========

1) The
Alternative Faces of Pop Team Epic, or How a Shitposting Cartoon Became an
Experimental Animation Stronghold, written by KViN for Sakuga Blog,
published on December 20th 2022

2) The About
page for Thibault
Tresca's personal site.

3) Thundercat
Won't Let You Stop Thinking About Hellshake Yano, written by Kim Morrissy and published on Anime News Network on January 5th 2023.

4) Kamishibai
- A Brief History, written by Tara
McGowan and published on Kamishibai.com.

5) The (loving)
article on Death Crimson's production history and legacy,
including the Pop Team Epic parody,
from Bad Game Hall of Fame.