The Ultimate Pupa Review

Despite the show being pretty gorey, I’ve gone out of my way to take screenshots that don’t show any excessive gore! I know, I’m the best.

Pupa is a TV short anime that aired in the Winter of 2014. It’s about two siblings and was somewhat infamous at the time it aired for being a pretty bad, gorey show. There’s many ways to review an anime, and in this post, for once I’ll be taking a very methodic approach where I look at various ‘elements’ of the show.

Story

There is no story in Pupa. There’s clearly no intention of world building as we get a short exposition in episode 1 about a virus, and then it’s over. After that, I’m not exactly sure what the creators of Pupa have done. The episodes are sort of structured like they are meant to be watched individually. There’s always some kind of narration that introduces you to something that’s at least loosely related to the main plot, and then we see some gorey shit and the episode ends. But it’s all so short, and when it ends you think, “…..eh? And???” If the point of it was to present various shocking or tragic stories, there’s so many better cases of it elsewhere.

Artstyle

Bizarre is the best word I can come up with. The character designs are very generic and there’s not much to say apart from that. The color design is also pretty normal, but there’s some weird

You should be able to tell from this photo. It’s like they tried to emulate watercolor(or maybe it really is watercolor) but due to the really boring and dull color scheme, the show looks generally dirty. But it doesn’t add to the atmosphere, it just feels… disgusting? But not in like a gorey way like I imagine they wanted.

Censorship

I imagine they have a bluray with no censorship…..? I really don’t know, but it’s so god damn blaring that it’s hard to see any of the stuff that is going on.

Voice Acting and Fetishes

So I’m not going to talk about the voice acting in general, but instead the girl, particularly when she’s ‘eating out’ her brother. It sounds so fucking sexual man. So what are the fetishes we have here… incest and gore? Fucking hell.

Episode 6

This episode is like a great embodiment of the show, at least in my eyes. As I said before, the majority of episodes start with some kind of narration. But this episode just has the girl say “onii-chan” from the beginning til the end in a sort of sexual tone, with her voice echoing. I swear, if you cut part of this episode’s audio where she’s repeating “onii-chan” and the guy grunting in the background, someone will think it’s just some hardcore porn. The entire episode is just her eating her brother’s guts. Now to some people that will sound disgusting, and to some people that will sound hilarious(ly bad). And yet when you watch the episode, it’s not particularly that gorey, and not just because of the censorship. It’s just… boring.

Episode 12

Wha….. what????

I strongly encourage anyone who has not seen Pupa to watch just this episode. Skip the opening, it’s 30 seconds long. You will be shocked, for all the wrong reasons. I promise you that you will feel some kind of emotion that is not disgust.

Final Impressions and Overall Stance

Recently I’ve been feeling sick a lot, but wasn’t able to actually get the vomit out of my system. It really troubled me until today! Now I just fire up Pupa and can throw up easily! Thank you Pupa!