You know, I was in inch away of droppping Mawaru Penguindrum for good in the first few minutes.
The beginning with Ringo in the toilet was interesting and even funny (where the heck did the sparkly stars come from?) at first so I got my hopes a little bit higher compared to last time. But then the erratic shit happened again when the hat starts to scream its catchphrase out of nowhere. This leads to the complete, ass long transformation sequence and then the same shit happens all over again, even the same animation is recycled from the first episode. Heck, they even reused her cloth transformations which in other words means that it’s nothing else than a stupid gimmick. Or the fact that the other brother gets tossed down the fantasy toilet again. What amazes me about this sequence is that in all that animation and colors the princess doesn’t seem to care to shed some light on what the fuck is going on.
It’s amazing when you think about it: that Survivial Strategy Thing starts roughly at 3:10 and finishes at 5:20, which is more than two minutes. And the whole purpose of that ass long scene is one simple order to trail a certain high school girl. Man, we could’ve saved a lot of time if the alien hat would’ve used pen and paper.
Thankfully the episode gets a lot better after this. Not only does this episode finally have something we can call a consistent plotline but I can also say that it was a heck a lot of fun to watch those two brothers trail the girl with the help of their idiotic pantsu penguins. And boy, Ringo is one heck of a nutcase. Her constantly changing impression from a generic schoolgirl to a somehow “eccentric” girl to a crazy stalker girl was…well…I wouldn’t say genius but really intriguing and funny, especially with the penguins hanging around her and being stalked by two idiots.
Thankfully we also got some hints what the heck might be going on. Of course, I’m talking about her diary that seems to contain entries from the future and immediately reminded me of the manga Mirai Nikki (which I can wholeheartedly recommend by the way). Even if the diary does not predict the future its design and content are strange enough to raise an eyebrow (and the fact that it’s part of the opening), so I guess this is our main clue at the moment.
Besides the Penguindrum question we now also have the question whether Ringo might turn into the main antagonist of Mawaru Penguindrum or whether she’ll be an addition to the main cast. I seriously hope for the latter since this would shake up everything pretty well and add some seriously funny moments and character interactions.
As you might have guessed from the post above I’ll continue to watch and blog Mawaru Penguindrum for now. This series could become really awesome and the fact that over the course of a single episode my opinion changed from “I’ll drop this shit” to “Well, that was good” is a strong indicator for that.
