I wasn’t sure if I would do a Saturday Note this week because of weekend plans, but I found some time and I decided to do it. I feel weird because I haven’t walked in the past two days, but on Friday it was so weirdly windy outside I was scared if I went out for a walk I would find a branch flying into my head or something.
And I do not want that.
Anyhow I just watched the first season of this show on Netflix and I want to gush about it. It’s a short little Note, but I had a birthday on Thursday and I have a trip this weekend so deal with it.
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Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Review
So apparently around the same time that Netflix decided to release The Witcher, the streaming service released Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, an animated series with only ten episodes in its first season. It’s a colorful cute little story about a girl trying to get back home to her family, and making friends along the way, except that it takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland where humans are persecuted by intelligent mutant animals that built their own gangs and subcultures.
Yeah, it’s like that.
I know that the cheerful and colorful post-apocalyptic story has been done before, don’t get me wrong. Adventure Time (which I’ve only seen snippets of so don’t hate me if I got this wrong), is also set in a world after the apocalypse. But this one’s less surreal than Adventure Time is. I mean, Kipo is weird, but it’s not that weird. There aren’t candy people or vampires. The creatures you meet are mutations of various animals. The strangest thing we see is the bees that light up and play dubstep.
The story goes a bit like this: Kipo is a preteen girl, daughter of a teacher single dad, who lives in an underground burrow society since humanity has lost the surface world two hundred years prior. The burrow is attacked, and she’s washed away by a canal to the surface. Deciding she needs a way back, she quickly makes friends with several other surface dwellers: Wolf, a young girl with a no nonsense attitude that’s kept her alive thus far; Mandu, a mutant pig that doesn’t talk but is very cute; Benson, a boy with a penchant for collecting old mixtapes; and Dave, Benson’s companion, a mutant bug that goes through his full life cycle in the course of a couple of days over and over again. Together, they set out to find Kipo’s burrow and her people, while a mute leader catches word of their presence and tries to capture them so that they can find the burrow and enslave more humans.
What made this series really stand out for me was its near boundless optimism. Kipo is an incredibly cheerful and friendly character; her whole schtick is being nice to everyone and everything around them, even when she has no reason to be. It seems like at first the dynamic will be Kipo trying to be nice to someone or something, and Wolf constantly having to save her from the ensuing mess. But instead that’s not what happens. Usually, Kipo tries befriending the creatures or people she meets, and it works. It gets them what they need and then some in order to keep pursuing their goals.
Here is a series that says: yes, we’re in an apocalypse where humans are second-class, at best… but the best option is still to always be kind to one another. In the long run, it’ll work out better. It’s a show about seeing beauty everywhere, even when life isn’t quite working out for you at the moment. And that’s fantastic.
And this series also has an amazing soundtrack? There is an astonishing amount of songs, given the premise. With what I described to you, maybe you thought the music would heavily skew towards typical showtunes, but there’s a surprising amount of hip-hop influence in the songs. The Newton wolves (who are described as huge science nerds) have a nightly rap composed of the collected knowledge they’ve attained in studying the universe.
It surprised me how much I ended up loving this series. It’s a fantastic setting, it’s got lovable characters, it has excellent art and animation, it has beautiful colors, and exciting music, and I can’t help but recommend this series to people.
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