What’s Pupa? More like…poopa. Here we have a five minute horror short from our good friends Studio DEEN. There’s almost nothing you can really accomplish in five minutes, and I mean that about anything. Be it anime, work, eating, sleeping, showering…anything.
Now, I have no qualms about horror anime, especially the psychological ones. Pupa is supposed to be one of those horror series that’ll strike you because of the whole sibling connection and whatnot. From what I have read it has a similar feel to Saya no Uta, where the main character associates himself with a monster companion – in this, case his sister.
Episode Breakdown:
The focus of Pupa is on two characters: Utsutsu and his younger sister Yume. We find out that their father was abusive and their mother upped and left them when they were young, leaving them now orphaned. The older brother makes a promise to his sister that he’ll always protect her, which already signals a bunch of oncoming problems for our protagonists. Yume, while walking home from school, comes across a rather shady woman explaining to her that she should avoid the red butterflies. Since our female protagonist is rather dim and slow, she sees them and then notices a rather rabid dog. She then proceeds to look at it, and then the dog transform into a hideous monster and attacks her. We see her lying on the ground next with her brother running to her and trying to help her, but then suddenly something grows on her and then a huge spike comes out of her chest. After this we see her transform into a monster herself, with her brother staring at her in disgust and awe. From here we can see that Yume is infected with the virus they all try so hard to avoid.
For five minutes, it seemed way too rushed of a concept. Does DEEN have no budget? Is that why they decided to make this five minutes long? They could easily have made this similar to the show Another or something of the sort. Horror anime typically do well, so even for DEEN it shouldn’t be an issue. Because it is so short, there’s not enough time to fully gauge the quality of what was given nor can we fully appreciate what we were given. I almost feel as if this series gets no justice, so I might pick up the manga for a bit to see how good it actually is.
The animation was alright, nothing too special. I can’t tell if the quality I was watching was bad (which I’m 99% sure I wasn’t) or the animation style made it look a bit faded. Content was obviously lacking. And overall, for just a five minute show, it felt like a waste of time. That’s pretty sad.
