Penguindrum Anime Review

Four penguins.  Two high school boys.  One female stalker.  One female stage actress. One slingshot.  An uncountable amount of WTF?  What do they all have in common?  This anime.  It's Penguindrum.

Penguindrum is a bizarre and tragic anime.  There's a lot going on and you won't be able to piece anything together early on.  A girl drops dead, penguins stalk teenagers, and the girl comes back to life after putting on a hat that looks like a penguin.  Then, you have another teenager stalking a teacher, who herself is being stalked by the teenagers using the penguins that were stalking them before to help.  Indeed, you will be saying WTF until later in the first half of the series.

WTF is this?  You'll have to watch to find out.

As you can surmise, there is a lot of stuff going on.  A lot of twists, a lot of turns, and even a little murder.  There are a lot of characters, each just a broken and fucked up as the last.  You'll get to follow each of them as you piece together the mystery of the Penguindrum and more.

Our protagonists are this guy (yes, he's a guy)...

...that guy...

...and this girl who needs...

...this hat to stay alive after suddenly dropping dead.

It's easy to determine which characters are important.  The important characters have all kinds of details.  Semi-major characters have details, but you never see their faces.  The unimportant characters literally look like bathroom signs.  This may seem lazy to some, but I liked this style.  It really gave the major characters that "pop" they needed to stand out.

Notice how major characters stand out from everyone else.

As mentioned before, there is a nice mix of stuff happening.  You have disturbing stuff, tense moments, funny stuff, and some romance stirred in to balance things out...is what I want to say.  The romance is disturbing and confusing.  For example, one of the main characters falls for a girl despite knowing that she's a psychopath and baring witness to her doing some pretty messed up, all for the sake of destiny.  Yes, she's cute, but that's beside the point.  It's just weird.

This is pretty disturbing, but...

...there never a laugh too far away.

There's other noteworthy moments, too.  After one of the funniest moments in the series, a boy gets dragged around the city by a truck and somehow doesn't die.  A woman with a slingshot fights a woman armed with a ping pong paddle.  Yep, things get pretty goofy.  But things also gets sad and somewhat confusing.  You'll be engaged the whole time.

This is what a bad day looks like.

An epic collision between beauties.

There's cute stuff, too.

The music is nice.  The ending theme to the first season in particular is a head-rocker.  Put it on your MP3 or MP4 if you can.

I must say, the ending had me conflicted.  I won't spoil it here, but I will say that I was both satisfied and pissed off at the same time.  It had me saying WTF.  Not what the fuck, but why the fuck.  It was a headscratcher, yet still fitting.

On the whole, Penguindrum felt refreshing, especially early on.  The series had a lot of unique touches to make it stand out from similar shows.  There were times I was confused, but I was never bored.  The ending was kind of a damper, but it didn't completely ruin the whole experience (looking at you Bunny Drop).