Mawaru Penguindrum 5: "This is What Drives Me"

Ah, the flashback. It's a device used very commonly used and one frequently derided. At the root of the flashback is the humanist/liberal assumption that the roots of a person's character and/or present circumstances lie in the past, and therefore through viewing their backstory we can come to understand them. Lost went so far as to include a B- or C-plot in every episode constructed entirely of flashbacks, with the assumption that this would help us to know the characters involved.

There are, however, a lot of good reasons to doubt the way this device is deployed. In addition to the idea that revealing a character's past by just displaying it is easy and perhaps lazy, the concept that learning a character's past necessarily sheds more light on them is kind of an ideological construction as well – see IOZ and Mark Fenzel on this topic.

Flashbacks are also a big part of Mawaru Penguindrum and are even marked off by their own signature device, the blinking subway sign. They are even diegetically (at least in gg's translation) described as flashbacks.


But the flashbacks we see in “This is What Drives Me”, that even begin the episode, don't quite fit into the Lost archetype. These episodes simply illustrate what we already knew – Kanba is loyal to Himari and desperately wants to protect her, and that at one point the siblings had parents. This raises the question – why include this event at all? Is it just lazy writing, or is there something deeper going on here? [1]

The idea of fate or predestination has been presented as central to Mawaru Penguindrum, evident from the opening of episode 1. The repeated subway motif seems to depict an essentially linear and restricted plot structure. During the eyecatch the train moves from one stop to the next, as the plot moves from one episode to the next. There's no doubling back or going off in an unexpected direction – fate has one path for you, and it's not a path you can deviate from at all. By contrast, the central motif of Kunihiko Ikuhara's previous series Revolutionary Girl Utena is the spiralling staircase that Utena climbs to every battle. The show is structured like that staircase – it progresses, but in a way that brings it back around in circles a lot.

So under the Penguindrum subway model the flashback, in which Kanba and his father help a sick Himari through a typhoon, is just an early stop on the line. We may have “got on” after this stop, but that doesn't stop it from being the inevitable predecessor of where we are right now. There isn't the humanist point of “this is what made Kanba who he is”, which has the corollary of “if this hadn't happened then Kanba would be different”. Under this model there is no if, this could never not have happened and Kanba could never be different. This is the deterministic model of time, and it's a somewhat bleak one. The episode is entitled “This is What Drives Me” -- on the surface a normal bit of modern self-help-book-talk but structured as a disturbingly passive sentence. The characters are like the train – driven by an external force, not their own will. Even in the explicit plot Shouma and Kanba are simply forced into following the hat's orders instead of having their own free choice -- if this were a RPG campaign the proper term would be "railroading".

In this episode, however, the train model starts to break down. For the first part of the episode, the plot is a mechanistic extension of what we've seen before. After the flashback opening we begin in the hospital, where Himari is undergoing follow-up examinations after her miraculous recovery. This is a natural progression from what's previously happened, an almost beauraucratic next stop on the line. We also see Natsume discussing things mysteriously with Asami, who appears to be her minion. These two are in a different type of plot, the mysterious-people-talk-mysteriously puzzle plot (see my Kamisama Dolls review), but one that also adheres to a pretty linear structure of inductive reasoning. The promise (one that may or may not be fulfilled) is that as the series continues this plotline will slowly progress by having more and more information revealed until the big final reveal, presumably towards the end of the series.

So far, so straightforward. The first half of “This is What Drives Me” consists of exploring the past of these characters, through the arrival of the older generation that they have a tenuous relationship with. Ringo's lunch with her father and Kanba's meeting with his uncle are both examples of this, and are directly juxtaposed. In one way this is simply more of the backstory-revealing that the flashbacks started. We're learning where these people came from, the part of the linear journey that we didn't get to see. But there's also a friction between past and present. Ringo fears that she's being replaced in her father's life, and Kanba's uncle wants him to sell the family house and risk splitting up the three siblings. Suddenly the past is not just a set-in-stone part of the linear story: it's actively in danger, possible of being erased and twisted. Of course, what's at stake is not the actual past but the objects that represent it. Still, it's a bit of a challenge to the linear progression the narrative has followed up until now.

(I also love Ringo's distress over her father's phone charm. Mawaru Penguindrum has been using Ringo to satirize the cute craze that has swept anime in the past decade and all its materialistic trappings, from her homemade bento boxes last episode to the cell phone charm which is apparently as significant as a royal banner in proclaiming alleigance.



There's a lot to love about this shot – the framing device of the cell phone camera, the zoom-in function that looks at first to be extradiegetic, and the interesting idea that Ringo can only see the ugly truth when it's mediated by technology. Her reaction to discovering that her father is no longer using their signature cell phone strap is also telling: she immediately starts thinking about her imaginary storybook romance with Tabuki, retreating back into fantasy.)

The dinner scene is, however, where things really start going off the rails. (I know I'm dragging this train metaphor out, but bear with me.) Shouma tries to convince Ringo to let him see her notebook, and through his insistence they both end up revealing their secrets to each other. The covert stalking plotline has been ended in a surprisingly nonviolent way – both characters learn what's happened without any sudden discovery or climactic fight. All it takes is two people who can't keep their mouths shut, and we are far away from our presumed destination.

Then Himari enters her penguin-head mode, and things get really crazy. We have the same introductory sequence as the previous three times, but still something is different – namely the presence of Ringo instead of Kanba. Penguin-Himari tries to go about things as normal, lecutring her captured peons and eventually dumping one into a pit. But she isn't aware that the internal logic of these sequences has already been broken by the presence of Ringo. When Ringo pulls herself up out of the pit, we know that the order this show has spent the past four episodes developing has been completely disrupted.



Ringo is the X-factor -- she doesn't know the rules of this sequence, as can be seen by her shock at Himari's sudden foul-mouthed cruelty. This is contrasted with the resigned head-shaking of Shouma. At first we think that Shouma is the wise on in this situation, knowing what's going on, but it's precisely Ringo's ignorance that lets her do what Shouma has never even tried to do and break the exact script (definitely a kind of fate) of this sequence. She runs up the stairs, violating the linear and almost class-like structure of this strange space where Himari always descends but the brothers can never ascend, and then whips off the penguin hat and throws it away.

This is the first time we've seen the snap from this fantastical sequence back into the real world, which is sudden and abrupt, and marked by a shift from symbolic consequences (the violation of the normal sequence) to real ones (Himari's collapse in the absence of the hat.) We end up with a great sequence of Kanba chasing the hat through a stormy city that has a kind of Chuck Jones-esque humour while also creating serious suspense as to Himari's fate. Moreover, the chase directly paralells the earlier flashbacks, with Kanba braving a terrible storm for the sake of his sister's health. Ringo's intervention has disrupted the linear sequence of the story, causing it to loop back on itself, the past repeating.

Both events -- the flashback and the present-day chase -- are structured in a similar way. Kanba goes after Himari, while something stops Shouma from doing the same. He gets hit by something midway through, but is rescued by intervention of another (first his father and then his penguin). In both cases, we never see him actually achieving his goal, only the aftermath. This is one of the major ways Ikuhara uses repetition -- after seeing something repeated so many times, a difference (minor or significant) is always meaningful.

ANN doesn't list episodic writer credits for Mawaru Penguindrum, but just has Ikuhara and Takayo Ikami as writers for the whole series. If this is actually the case, then it makes sense -- with such a thematically intricate and firmly serialized story, having a strong singular creative presence creates the necessary cohesion. However, Ikuhara is listed as doing the storyboard here, which suggests an extra degree of attention paid to what I beleive is a pivotal episode. The episode is directed by Koichiro Sohtome, who seems to be a relative newcomer, and he mostly follows in the footsteps of previous episodes. He continues the stylistic devices of previous episodes, but doesn't really bring anything new, even when that might have been useful -- some more shot-by-shot paralells between the two storm sequences, for example.

There's an image in this episode that's been getting a lot of attention from bloggers lately. During the dinner conversation we see one Shouma's penguin spraying down some roaches, as we've seen the critters do in a previous episode. However, instead of getting rid of the roaches, this causes a whole bunch more of them to descend on him, and the penguin is quickly overwhelmed.



This has been interpreted as signifying Shouma's fecklessness in the conversation, as well as the rottenness hidden in the cute Takakura house. But I think it also reflects the breakdown in linear logic. Eliminating bugs is, at least our erstwhile penguin assumes, a linear task -- you eliminate one, there's one less, and if you do this enough they'll eventually be none. But here eliminating one creates a whole bunch more. Straightforward logic no longer applies.

It took most of the series to reach this point in Utena, where the logic we'd been learning for most of the series broke down and left our heroes stranded. In Mawaru Penguindrum it seems to be happening very early, which should make for some very interesting developments in the weeks ahead.

[1] There's an intruiging theory that all of the main characters in Mawaru Penguindrum are actually dead and in some kind of purgatory where they have to repeat their lives until they find peace. I don't really want to go into plot speculation in this blog, but it's put forward pretty clearly by a day without me. If this theory turns out to be correct than the flashbacks have an obvious purpose, subtly showing the point where Kanba (maybe) died, but I think there are more interesting explanations here.

Next Week: Another wildcard entry. We'll have fun fun fun until our daddy takes our T-Birds away.

Mawaru Penguindrum 2: Risky Survival Strategy

A lot of the shows I talk about here are ones that you have to work to read things into, to notice the more symbolic meanings that lay at the centre of what are ostensibly ordinary genre shows. Mawaru Penguindrum is not one of those shows.

On a pure plot level the show is hard to make heads or tails of, except as an absurdist comedy. All kinds of weird things happen – Himari revives from the dead at the price of being occasionally possessed by a magic penguin hat with mysterious motives, penguins appear to serve every whim of our three main characters and are invisible to everyone but them, and then there are the sequences where the brothers get whisked off to some kind of pocket dimension and receive bizarre instructions from their possessed sister as she strips off her clothes.

All of this follows the reputation of director Kunihiko Ikuhara, creator of the surrealist magical girl series (and anime masterwork) Revolutionary Girl Utena. Like Penguindrum, Utena is so full of sequences unrelated to plot or character and strange stylistic choices that it practically begs for interpretation in the same way so many modern literary works do. This is I suppose another variety of the “puzzle anime” I discussed last week: the viewer is charged with deciphering not what is happening but why it's happening on a metafictional level. (Some shows, such as Evangelion (or Lost, for an American equivalent), demand deciphering on both the narrative (i.e. “what the heck is going on”) and symbolic levels.) Penguindrum is the first show Ikuhara's directed since Utena, which ended (if you count the movie) in 1999. As you might expect, the twelve-year gap has expectations quite high for this show, and the reputations of Ikuhara and Utena cast quite a long shadow on the new show.* So I'm going to try to avoid a head-on comparison between the two shows, although they do have similarities that deserve being called attention to.

On the surface, Mawaru Penguindrum is sweet and innocent. The colours are bright pastels, the central three characters all love each other in a warm-fuzzies sort of way, and much of the action (at least in this episode) revolves around cute penguins doing cute penguin things. The design of the siblings' house (which is notably differentiated by the more mundane dwellings around it) reflects this kind of gumdrops-and-lollypops atmosphere.

(The above screenshot is interesting because of just how crowded the shot is, especially in a form that is known for artistic simplicity. And in amidst all of these distractions, Himari has quietly put on her penguin hat again. This is just snuck into the background of the scene. Mawaru Penguindrum is asking us to pay close attention to even its backgrounds, or else we'll miss what's about to happen.)

Even the girls' bathroom is sparkly and fantastical.

So this is a world where cute little girls literally shit stars. But the cute world of Mawaru Penguindrum also has its seedy, base and depressing sections. After all, the first episode includes the sweet little girl at its centre dying of a terminal illness. And in “Risky Survival Strategy” we begin in the toilet, travel through a lingerie store, and end up under the baseboards with a crazed stalker.

We open in the above-pictured girl's bathroom, with a shot sicklingly cute pink toilet flushing. The opening, pre-credits scene is a mirror of the one from the first episode, featuring a previously unintroduced character (in this case Ringo) going about their daily business while monologuing in voice-over about fate. Whereas Shoma (at least I'm pretty sure it's Shoma) hates the concept of fate, relating it to his sister's terminal illness, Ringo has a more positive idea of it, viewing it in the lens of the romantic “fated meeting”. Ringo's idealized view of the world, gleaned from popular depictions of romance, is set up aside Shoma's jaded perspective based on his own experiences. This leads them to opposite conclusions: for Shoma fate makes everything pointless, and for Ringo it makes nothing pointless. (Day over at Gar Gar Stegosaurus has a good post up about the nuances in translation in these two speeches, and the fansubbers' decision to render “umei” as “fate”. Given how disastrous my attempt to learn Japanese was, I'll leave the question of translation to her and encourage you guys to go check out that post.)

This contrast between cynicism and romanticism holds true to their characters even outside of the question of fate. Shoma is the cynic, refusing to accept the occurences of the supernatural (and cute) around him, which is contrasted with his brother Kanba's easy acceptance of the inexplicable. On the other hand, at least as seen throughout “Risky Survival Strategy”, Ringo is a born romantic who refuses to accept the negative – she cannot see how surrendering her future to fate could lead to anything bad, or how her love could possibly be unreturned. It would be a bit facile to say that both characters are equally in denial, refusing to accept the parts of the world that do not fit their worldview. Shoma's perspective is at least informed by a part of reality and not a fiction, and all it has lead to so far are a couple of freak-outs and not a stalkerish obsession.

“Risky Survival Strategy” then turns to light comedy about taking care of the mysterious penguins. For most of this episode's runtime it is in a distinctly comedic mode. The jokes are unusually broad – see the gags that involve the penguins in lingerie – but I don't think that makes Mawaru Penguindrum any less worthwhile or thematically interesting.

After that we have another “Survival Strategy” sequence, where Himari is posessed by the penguin hat and sends her brothers to some kind of strange otherworldly place in order to give them orders. It's hard to tell since we're only two episodes in, but I'm assuming that this is going to be a bit of repeated animation like the “transformation sequences” of many shows a la the stair-walking prebattle sequence of Utena. These sequences started out, like so many signature anime techniques, as a practical measure to save time and effort – if you could use the same ninety-second footage of the giant robot transforming in every episode, that was thousands of frames of animation you didn't have to worry about. (Lengthy credits sequences are another anime trademark that may have originated this way.) However, I have to think that this isn't the main motive here. After all, in this digitized day and age the savings of chopping out a small amount of the animation work has to be smaller, and it doesn't really suit an animation studio like Brain's Base who has begun to attract a reputation for quality.

Rather I think it's a conscious stylistic trait of Ikuhara. These kinds of repetitive sequences have shown up in every anime he's directed (Utena and much of Sailor Moon), and especially in Utena they're thematically linked into the show, representing the repetition Anthy is forced to go through as the Rose Maiden. In addition to whatever meaning it may have in the context of the show, it's also a nod to the history of the medium, drawing on its history in much the same subversive way as Utena draws on the tradition of the magical girl genre and Mawaru Penguindrum draws on the current cuteness craze (but more on that later.)

Here's the sequence, which really deserves to be watched in its entirety, starting at around 0:20:

It's kind of hard to decipher this scene, if only because it has such a surplus of random symbols – and I mean that literally, as we see little icons fly past the screen faster than we can keep track of them. To a certain extent, it's meant to be indecipherable -- which is to say that a major point of the sequence is just this postmodern rush of simulacra, a submersion into a chaotic world with endless layers of referents. Then again, there are other aspects of the sequence with hard-to-ignore symbolic meanings – the blatantly phallic rocket-thing slamming into that pink thing definitely calls attention to the incestuous undertones to the series.

And then there's the dialogue after that sequence. In the three episodes of Mawaru Penguindrum released so far, the visual aspects of this scene are more or less the same – Himari stands on top of a stage while her brothers are below in handcuffs, she dictates things to them while slowly walking down the stairs and shedding clothing, and then Shoma gets dumped through a trapdoor – although the dialogue is different each time. This is similar to how the repetition worked in Utena – similar, but slightly different each time. I also have to wonder at the significance of Himari's movements during this sequence. Given that she is (in her normal personality) sort of subordinate to her brothers, being the object they look after and protect, this sequence represents a reversal where she is elevated and they are at her mercy. (This leads to a weird bondage-y vibe to the scenes.) However, she then comes down to their level – perhaps a sign of the iminent restoration of normal family relations. Interestingly, so far there's no indication of how this weird trance ends – in all three episodes we've just abruptly cut away to something else. This may simply be another way in which these sequences are established as breaking the laws of time and space, or there may be some greater significance to this revealed later.

Himari instructs her brothers to find the Penguindrum, which besides being in the title is completely mysterious to both characters and audience. This continues the absurdist nature of the series, with the brothers searching for something while having no idea what it is. Anyway, Himari says it's in the possession of Ringo, the girl we met at the start of the episode. This leads to them stalking her, using their invisible penguins as scouts.

In this way the penguins are coming to represent the pure id of their associated characters, able to get away with their owners' forbidden desires. This is hinted at early on in “Risky Survival Strategy” with the penguins' insatiable appetite for fish and sardines. In the first episode the penguins simply aided the characters in fulfilling their immediate, banal desires – cleaning the house, providing an umbrella in the rain, etc. However, they've already escalated to more sexual desires, and are out doing them themselves instead of simply aiding the characters. As invisble and somewhat magic, the penguins can do things that the humans can't, without shame or fear of repurcussion. In this episode alone they engage in voyeurism, wearing women's underwear, and bisexual ass-groping. The lingerie store in particular is the perfect example here – this is a place that the boys cannot go but that doubtlessly holds a spot in their inner desires, and the penguins allow them to enter this area.

(To be fair, so far these deviances have always been framed as accidental or essential for the plot, but it's hard to ignore how often the penguins seem to do these things.)

The final reveal of this episode highlights the inappropriateness of the brothers' behaviour. They use the penguins to rifle through Ringo's belongings and stalk her around the city, following her eventually to the home of her teacher, who they discover she's been psychotically stalking. “She's doing the same thing we're doing,” says Shoma. Of course, the brothers have the excuse of following the orders of the spirit possessing their sister – but we have no real basis to say that these visions are more real or sane than Ringo's “diary” which she believes predicts the fate of her and the teacher. The penguins seduce our protagonists down these roads, and it is only at the final beat do they realize what they've turned into.

With that said, in the world Ikuhara constructs there's every reason to believe in the supernatural. Things are presented stylistically instead of realistically. This involves both minimalizing details extraneous to the plot – the blank restroom-sign shapes that replace the “extras”, the subway stations replaced by white voids – and adding on a sheen of enchantment, as can be seen most clearly in the romanticized bathroom at the start of the episode and the weird lingerie store with its floating bras and technological slickness. Reality is subjugated to the will of the plot, lathering extra focus on what matters to it and less detail on what doesn't. It's difficult to tell right now whether the characters see the world like this, or whether this is a visual representation of their psyches, or something even further removed.

Of course, there's all kinds of interesting stuff that I didn't get to in this review – the weird underwater motif, the importance of subway trains, literary allusions, the uncertain role of real-Himari, not to mention the normal plot questions of what the penguin drum is and what Ringo actually has to do with it. Mawaru Penguindrum is one of those shows where the more you look into it the more you constantly find new dimensions, and so for the sake of time and my sanity I'll stop here. I would, however, encourage anyone to watch this unique and (so far) high-quality show, through whatever illicit means you prefer.

*For the anime-illiterate, think of how much difficulty Treme has had getting away from the shadow of The Wire and being judged on its own merits, and then add in over a decade of anticipation.

Next Week: Our first wildcard slot. I delve into the wider world of television and hope to come up alive.