Comments on: Kuchu Buranko (Trapeze), your weekly noitaminA shot

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:58:15 +0000

@Hanners: there are great episodes and less great ones, but I’m glad I took the advice from you and others that I shouldn’t judge it off the first one alone. By the end I think we’ll look back on it as one of the most interesting and innovative offerings of the year. Your Irabu theory is duly noted…time will tell if you’re right or not!

@kadian1364: absolutely. Irabu and Mayumi are fun to watch but what it boils down to is the patient somehow reaching the resolution themselves, which is much more rewarding for me too. The way their heads are depicted may be significant or it might not…I recall odd imagery used in ef that eventually turned out to be significant…

@Peter S: yeah, clinical sharps (used needles, etc.) are supposed to be discarded in specially-designated yellow containers (I only know this because I work in a hopital and know to avoid them!). Dunno what Japanese hospitals use but I’m guessing they’re a similar thing. I loved the way Mayumi kicks back with a book all the time though – it’s as if she’s going against the airheaded bishoujo cliche somehow. Irabu is still a nutter!

By: Peter S

Peter S — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:58:53 +0000

As I said somewhere before, I’m not a big fan of “disease-of-the-week” shows, and because of this I wasn’t enjoying the stories, at least at first. Oh, I was dazzled by the sheer style of the thing, but it felt like a formula show wearing a glaring neon coat and disco boots. But I loved ep5 even though it was more of the same. It felt like everything they were trying to do with the story and art and music came together for the first time. Ep6 dropped, but only slightly.

I’m learning to enjoy the ways the patients make their realisations about themselves. As for Irabu, it appears his favorite treatment is to simply shake the character up, prod him, nag him, cause him trouble. This bugged me at first, but now I’ve grown to like it. His strategy in the “Cell” episode fit into this pattern, but he could do it from his cell phone! Excellent!

I agree that it’d be nice to see how the patients do later, but at least they’re tossing out references to previous eps, like Bandoooo! in ep5, and Mayumi reading that “serious” book by that author/patient in ep6.

Is that what they’re called? Clinical sharps? Interesting …

By: kadian1364

kadian1364 — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:11:40 +0000

Well, from my completely unprofessional perspective, Irabu is a total crock. It’s like he does the exact opposite of what the patients need and forces them to arrive at the solution themselves, but that would be giving him way too much credit. But it’s a very entertaining, fit for TV kind of methodology that keeps us guessing and coming back every week.

As I mentioned before, I do like how the show makes the patients work through their problems themselves. At least a couple of them first came to Irabu looking for a quick fix, a pill or drug that would solve everything with a snap, but when they only got a bogus “vitamin shot” and a useless doctor, that forces them to dig deeper and really understand that their ills are not so easily fixed. This soul searching immediately gets us to the core of each character in a surprisingly short amount of time, and I’m finding myself a bigger fan of this series and its style with each new episode.

I guess there could be some speculating about Irabu’s different forms, maybe like Hanners said the Id, Ego, and Superego, but at this point it could very well be just the animators’ whimsy as well. There’s also the patients with their regular anime head, an animal head, and live action head, and I’m not really perceiving much of a pattern there either.

By: Hanners

Hanners — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:23:44 +0000

I have to confess that I wasn’t too sure about this series from its first episode – It seemed like it was trying too hard to be different without any real end goal. Thank goodness I persevered with it – Although it’s slightly hit and miss in terms of the quality of each story arc, generally speaking its served up some fascinating and entertaining fare that has actually proved to be pretty thought-provoking on occasion.

As for Irabu’s multiple identities, my guess is that this is his personality demonstrated as a Freudian ego, super-ego and id arrangement. Irabu’s mouse suit is his id, his “normal” appearance is his ego and his child-like self is his super-ego. And that’s about as far as my knowledge of psychology can take me. :p