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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Watch | 6 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:3470#1552] |
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Based on the gag comedy four-koma manga series, Pop Team Epic focuses on two middle school girls, Popuko and Pipimi, dealing with mundane and bizarre situations that they respond to in equally bizarre and exaggerated ways. The series is set up in two quarter-hour segments per episode with various skits featuring the two girls, with both segments playing out the same skits with the girls being voiced by male or female seiyuu in each one and usually have slightly different dialogue between segments. To my understanding, this is a deliberate choice by the show's creators as each pairing voicing Popuko and Pipimi have some sort of real-life relationship with one another involving friendship or being involved in prior projects together. The anime is mainly reliant on its absurd format with the two girls to carry things having pop-culture parodies, non-sequiturs, occasionally bizarre animation for skits, and fourth wall awareness as the main types of gags it milks. As often the case with gag comedies for me, the humor they milk can either get me enjoying it, be hit-or-miss, or I largely feel indifferent with it. Indifference is my feeling toward the comedy offered up with Pop Team Epic. I'm not often a fan of the comedy offered up with anime adaptations of 4-koma titles as they will often milk the same type of gags throughout their run without offering much variety. Granted, the pop culture nods and fourth wall humor of Pop Team Epic gives it a bit more variety in the types of gags it can offer up. Popuko and Pipimi's comical chemistry reminds me of manzai routines featuring a tsukkomi (Pipimi) and boke (Popuko), and appears the chemistry of this comical act is usually played out in a number of the skits within the series. But in spite of its absurd humor, it does feel like there is a restraint on the amount of energy projected in its gags and this isn't helped by the rather limited and minimalist animation depicted throughout Pop Team Epic's run. I get that some of the skits deliberately use the limited animation as part of their humor. But for a series that tries relishing in absurdity, it doesn't project the energy to reflect how manic and over-the-top its humor can be between its visuals and voice acting as anything like Excel Saga and FLCL could pull off. In short like many anime comedies, I'd say your mileage may vary with enjoyment of Pop Team Epic. In spite of its attempts with absurd humor, I just couldn't get into the comedy of the series as I felt it lacked the energy to project its absurdity with its voice acting and rather limited animation. But what I may feel toward this may not necessarily reflect your reception to its humor, so I'd at least say sample the first few episodes to see if this may be your cup of tea for a comedy series. Last updated Tuesday, August 24 2021. Created Tuesday, August 24 2021. | ||||||||
| Unevaluated |
 Stretch
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[series:3470#628] | ||||||
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(Two episodes watched): Nothing if not bizarre; here we have a show which seems to open in a pretty conventional manner with a premise about a guy who is being given free reign over a house while his parents go on a trip. But the show procedes to warp into a high speed comedy about two superdeformed girls doing strange things on a whim. I was going to describe this as two girls with the voices of men, but apparently the VAs were women after all, so this would be better described as two female VAs imitating the voices of men for female characters. Everything from alien abduction to a talking pink hippopotamus is hurled at us in rapid succession. It's as if the theme is to take all established rules about how to make an anime and hurl them out the window. I did not 'get' most of the jokes and experienced far more confusion than humor. And then the show replays itself, apparently unchanged, a second time. Is this something I would want to watch? In the end, I decided that this show was just too crazy for me; the effect is sort of like inserting an egg mixer into my brain and scrambling it each time I watch. Last updated Sunday, February 25 2018. Created Monday, January 08 2018. | ||||||||
