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The Winter 2015 Anime Preview Guide
Yurikuma Arashi



Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 4  (out of 5)

Yurikuma Arashi has Ikuhara all over it. From the use of elaborate staircases to the patched-together feeling of the city the girls live in, this is pretty classic even as he tells a new story. Or is the story new? In a lot of ways, Yurikuma Arashi is simply “Little Red Riding Hood” with female bears instead of a male wolf. There's constant reference to “eating” the human girls, and while we can make educated guesses as to any double-meanings there, we absolutely see that there is a sexual undertone after the trial scene, when beargirls Lulu and Ginko lick honey from protagonist Kureha's body. “Honey” itself can be a pretty loaded term in the world of romance fiction, and the positioning of said viscous fluid is more than merely suggestive. It might also be interesting to view the bears, who pose a threat to Kureha's and Sumika's lesbian relationship, as more masculine figures trying to steer the girls away from each other – after all, if they can disguise themselves as humans, why not change genders as well?The fact that it is food that triggers the bear attack on Sumika, with she and Kureha sharing a meal after Kureha has wandered the school in search of her, also lends itself to the fairy tale interpretation, as does Kureha's Disney-princess-style bedroom, all fluffy pink bows and swags.

Whether or not Ikuhara is retelling a known story remains to be seen. The episode itself, when we don't try to ascribe a particular symbolism to it, is very disjointed, with everything and one defined with a word following their name - “place” or “yuri” are two examples – and a visual theme of things falling. We mostly see this in gentle spirals of lilies descending from above the characters, though it is worth noting that Kureha also falls down some stairs at one point. The backgrounds form a contrast to both story and action, with the school and Kureha's home being the sole places of beauty in a city that otherwise has a skyline of cranes, looking perpetually under construction. That the only male characters we see are bears is probably important; we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Unfortunately all of this makes Yurikuma Arashi feel a little too deliberately symbolic, making it the sort of show that you don't just watch; you have to analyze as you go. While there is nothing wrong with that, the clear intent to make you analyze it feels heavy-handed, taking away from the enjoyment of solving the puzzle. Were its first episode just a tiny bit more down-to-earth, there might be less of a feeling of coercion as you unpack the meaning behind the story and visuals. As it is, the show lays it on a bit too thick, sadly marring an otherwise fascinating experience.

Yurikuma Arashi is available streaming on Funimation.


Theron Martin

Rating: 3 (of 5)

Review: The Winter 2014 season saw the debut of what would easily prove to be the year's most bizarre new series (i.e., World Conquest Zvezda Plot). Looks like we could have a repeat of that this year, as I find it had to imagine anything coming along that will prove to be weirder than what the first episode of this original series is.

Here's a simple test: Does the phrase “lesbian bears” at all intrigue you? If it does, then that is just a taste of the strangeness that goes down here. The premise – a meteor shower has transformed the bears of the world into a force formidable enough that humans have built the Wall of Severance to shut them out from eating humans – sound like something stolen from a B-grade monster movie, and indeed, bears eating people is enough of a threat that even with the wall Arashigaoka High School has banners at hand warning about bear attacks. Two female bears take on human form to infiltrate the apparently-all-girls Arashigaoka to look for dinner targets while posing as transfer students. One of them takes an interest in Kureha, a girl in a devoted relationship with fellow student Sumika, to the point of nabbing (and possibly eating?) Sumika to draw Kureha into something called Yuri court, where individuals called Sexy Life, Cool Life, and Beauty Life preside, and there's something about an Invisible Storm and a lily flower coming out of Kureha's chest which the two bear-girls want to lick which seems like it's going to form some kind of three-way pact, and. . . well, I'd be lying if I said I made enough sense of it to give a more accurate description than that.

One thing that is clear is that lily imagery imbued with multiple meanings is pervasive, and referring to lesbian relationships is only one of those intended meanings. Another is that the visuals are going to be just as eclectic as the storytelling; most of the artistry is simplistic and barely-animated, but yet it has fabulous CG-enhanced buildings reminiscent of the Monogatari franchse. The style has a distinct shojo flavor, but yet it also has mild male audience-oriented fan service. And it has cute scenes of cute bears apparently eating girls – and yes, I know how strange that sounds, but you have to see it to appreciate it. The music also does everything it can to enhance the mysterious side of what's going on.

Really, one episode is far from being enough to get a bead on what, exactly, is actually going on here, so the middling rating reflects inability to define the series as “good” or “bad” at this point rather than a series which is mediocre. Yurikuma Arashi is absolutely anything but that.

Yurikuma Arashi is currently streaming on Funimation.com.


Nick Creamer

Rating: 5

How do you even describe an Ikuhara show?

Well, first, Ikuhara shows are basically all jigsaw puzzles. The show dumps out a bunch of puzzle pieces, you get maybe a dozen new ones every episode, they start off as mysterious but compelling fragments and eventually assemble into a complex, breathtaking picture. In this first episode, Yurikuma Arashi introduces us to a world where humans have built a giant wall, the “Wall of Severance,” to keep out man-eating bears. The humans include our protagonist Kureha and her apparent lover, Sumika. The bears include Ginko and Lulu, who disguise themselves as humans to eat delicious girls. The puzzle pieces including things like that word, “Severance,” as well as its alternate title, “Isolation.” That puzzle piece connects to at least two others - the way the girls in the class announce “we have to stay in the herd,” and the way the bears deliberately refuse to “be invisible,” a direct contrast to the episode's first line “I think we can be together here without anyone seeing us.” Other puzzle pieces would be the incredibly, ridiculously overt lesbian sex metaphors, the sirens and walls that dominate their world, and the word “love.”

Yes, Ikuhara likes his puzzles. He also likes his theatrics, and Yurikuma Arashi has plenty of those. From the melodramatic musical cues, to the gorgeous, stage play-esque backgrounds, to the way scenes are introduced through title cards and spotlights, this story exists in as heightened a reality as it possibly could. Thus girls are bears, somehow, and those bears go to Bear Court, somehow, and “eating humans” means sex but also eating for real, maybe?

It's complicated.

Yurikuma Arashi makes no apologies. Its story barrels through the gates with all haste, it's utterly in love with its own (wonderful) visual aesthetic, and its metaphors are constant and overpowering. Metaphor isn't just an illustration of narrative, here - metaphor is narrative. Whether things are actually happening or not isn't very important - this is a story, stories are allowed to do weird things in service of their higher purposes. Higher purposes like talking about human connection, or illustrating common themes in disparate character arcs, or maybe just having lots of gratuitous nuzzling. This first episode is very funny and very passionate and utterly surreal, essentially a straight-to-the-vein injection of the sort of shenanigans Penguindrum and Utena spooled out over far longer stretches of episodes. Ikuhara doesn't have time to mess around, apparently. It's time for the lesbian bear storm, and these bears aren't backing down on love.

Yurikuma Arashi is available streaming on Funimation.


Hope Chapman


Rating: 5 (Ikuhara fans) 2...? (everyone else)

Episode 1 of this intensely hyped new Kunihiko Ikuhara project (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum) is titled "Never back down on love." If only the show's leading ladies had known the unspoken parentheses after this title was "(or else you'll get eaten by bears.)" Kuma Shock indeed!

So, attempting to describe the plot of Yurikuma Arashi is not only pointless, it's completely beside the point of anything director Ikuhara has worked on since Sailor Moon. I can try to explain it. There's an all-girl school, attended by adolescent lovers Sumika and Kureha. It's behind the great Wall of Severance, erected to keep all the bears out. They have to keep the bears out because ever since Planet Kumalia exploded, the earth's bears have started eating people without remorse, and if any bear gets anywhere near human civilization, they'll eat and eat without stopping. Unfortunately, two such bears, named Ginko and Lulu, have gotten past the Wall of Severance in disguise as humans, and the young lesbian schoolgirls are their next target, presumably because they've "given up on love." See! It makes perfect sense!

The plot is not the point. This director has made it crystal clear with his last two projects that he works in crazy-pants surrealism with a narrative pinned up around it in order to touch on deeply disturbing and complex societal issues: the unjust tyranny of gender being reinforced in children transitioning to adulthood in Utena and the emotional turmoil suffered by many children raised during Japan's "lost decade" in Penguindrum. (And these are just one theme each in two works of many ideas.) The divide between strange and often silly imagery in his stories juxtaposed with their dark subject matter allows his work to yield truth in a way exclusive to its chosen medium of animation. So he's a true auteur and his name is basically the only reason people have been anticipating a show called "Lily Bear Storm" to such a great extent. There's plenty of reason to believe that it's not literally about a hurricane of lesbian bears.

On the plus side for longtime Ikuhara fans, Yurikuma's first episode is already much easier to follow than Penguindrum, which started out the gate with much denser imagery, layered composition and intentionally bizarre editing choices. All of these things, along with the use of language and stable of metaphors, are much simpler and tighter in Yurikuma Arashi so far, and the show's short runtime will probably also ease the focus and clarity of the experience. The conflict here is simple and its imagery is already centralized around a clear theme, with things like honeypots and fish salad and the consumption of little girls...oh. Wait.

There's the downside: while Ikuhara's work has always starred "the pubescent youth" and been steeped in sexual imagery, the sex is usually not the main attraction. This is not the case with Yurikuma Arashi, where metaphors of lesbianism completely fill the runtime, many a lily-flower is licked in slow motion, and the "predatory lesbian" archetype is illustrated front and center in the form of a literal woman-eating bear. (It's important to note that this idea is illustrated, but not demonized or even fetishized so much as just "depicted, surreally.") It's a tricky tightrope to walk, and if Ikuhara hadn't engendered so much good faith with the LGBT community through Utena, and followed it up with a brilliant bait-and-switch of "incestuous" ideas in Penguindrum, I'm not sure even I would trust him with the material shown in Yurikuma Arashi. If I had never heard of Ikuhara's work before, I might reject this first episode as really weird and maybe in bad taste, and that's a completely fair response to have. At the same time, I'm so familiar with his work at this point that I already feel like I know where it's going, and in reality I'm not offended in the least. I trust him as an artist, and so do his fans. This is going to be a divisive work, and it should be.

Basically, what I'm saying is if you are not a prior fan of Ikuhara's work, I can't imagine sitting through this without being either horribly confused or grossly offended, so even though I loved the experience, it's hard to recommend it to the uninitiated. If you're interested in the prospect of a show starring lesbians that fully explores them as characters (which I am 99.9% certain this will,) but trepidatious about the shocking content, start with Revolutionary Girl Utena. It's a must-see for the artsy-fart-loving anime fan anyway.


Yurikuma Arashi is available streaming at Funimation.com.


Zac Bertschy


Rating: 5 (for Ikuhara fans)

Kureha and Sumika, two students at Arashigaoka High School, are in love! While sharing a tender embrace by the flower bed, there's a sudden alert: bears are invading! It seems two bears have crossed the Wall of Severance, a barrier constructed to keep humanity safe from the girl-devouring bears that rained down from the heavens when the planet Kumalia exploded. Two transfer students - Ginko and Lulu, the two bears in disguise as humans - show up the next day and quickly chomp down on Sumika, but it isn't long before they wind up in front of the Severance Court, a bear house of bear judgment presided over by three bishonen bears: Sexy Life, Cool Life and Beauty Life, and...

Alright, hang on, I'm going to take a quick break here to try and get my head around this.

Okay so Ginko and Lulu are set free by the court to indulge in a Yuri Life, and quickly go to work on Kureha, luring her up to the roof with the promise of returning her beloved Sumika, but it's all a cunning trap, you see - Kureha is going down!

So devotees of Kunihiko Ikuhara's particular brand of mind-bending weirdness (myself included) have been looking forward to this show for a while - he doesn't produce things very often - and he certainly isn't letting us down this time. All his regular hallmarks are here - painfully cool architectural tricks and fashionable design sense in the backgrounds, a sumptuous and sophisticated color palette, a boatload of aesthetic allegory that all probably means something other than whatever is immediately obvious, and, thankfully, a sense of humor a mile wide. The entire first half of this show is nothing but wall-to-wall cunnilingus jokes, with the climax (hurr) of the episode maybe breaking the land speed record for most obvious visual metaphor in history (two bear girls licking a honeyed lily that's protruding from Kureha's nude pelvis). The music is pretty fantastic too - I loved the hushed opening theme and the more frenetic closing number; it's awash in a confident, appealing visual style, but we already knew that was coming. Beyond all that ridiculousness, though, Ikuhara is clearly setting something bigger up here - there are a load of audio and visual clues to larger themes at work, but it's likely we won't be able to piece together what he's saying with this until the end. Normally Ikuhara plays around with sexuality as a thematic component of the stories he tells, but this time it appears to be the direct focus, and I'm fascinated by what he might do with this gorgeous piece of insane, surreal weirdness.

There's going to be a lot to unpack with this show - as there was with both Utena and Penguindrum - but hopefully it'll keep the goofy tone on display in this first episode. It should be mentioned that this show in particular - much moreso than Utena and surprisingly moreso than the dense, difficult Penguindrum - is for fans of Ikuhara's style and execution almost exclusively. The two bear girls, insofar as it's suggested metaphorically - sexually assault Kureha, presented in the same way such a shocking story turn is presented in old fairy tales and classical paintings (I'm surprised Ikuhara is staying away from pomegranate imagery). I have faith - based on his previous work and a mountain of evidence from this first episode alone - that this element is in here in order to articulate a complicated theme, presented using surreal, indirect imagery that is further confused by later events (at the end we see the two bear girls "assaulting" another girl, but they're in bear form, shown in the shadows consuming her collapsed body as bears would, but it still isn't clear what's actually happening to anyone). The first episode of Penguindrum ended with implied incest and then went on to explode in a kaleidoscopic rainbow of complex messages about all sorts of difficult ideas. I have no reason to believe that Ikuhara is getting less obtuse, or shocking, or crazy over time. This is no different.

Yurikuma Arashi is available streaming at Funimation.com.


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