Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is a Young Adult Animated series produced by DreamWorks Animation Television, animated by
Studio Mir (스튜디오 미르) (
Voltron seasons 1-3, Animated Guardians Of The Galaxy, The Boondocks 4, and The Legend of Korra book 1 and parts of book 2), and
broadcast on Netflix.
If you have a NetFlix account you may
watch the series here.
The series begins with the young woman Kipo Oak being hurled by floodwaters into the post-apocalyptic ‘surface’ following the destruction of the underground burrow where she had lived her entire life. Wandering through the remains of human civilization and weirdly mutated plants and animals, she is so very far from home and spends most of her first day on the surface trying not to be accidentally crushed, or intentionally eaten, and trying to figure out if the sometimes adorable mutations she finds are possible friends or imminent horrific death.
But despite her many problems, the world of the surface also offers wonders and marvels, from giant slugs using rusted out cars as temporary shells, to decrepit vending machines full of perfectly preserved cheesy snacks and other treats that will never spoil, no matter how many centuries they might be past their “best sold by” date.
Also clothing stores still stand, so fashion is still a thing in the rotted future of our dead civilization, as we all knew it would be.
Also there are cute Hayao Miyazaki-style bunny rabbits that will hunt you to the end of the world and they
will kill you. Dead.
The series is already completed (there’s just 3 seasons) and despite its cute and adorable presentation, a lot of people … by which I mean both people and animals that talk and who speculate about the nature of dark matter … die. Sometimes horrifically. Sometimes in the arms of their relatives, slowly, describing the feeling of their consciousness slipping away as their friends and relatives scramble for any way to keep them alive just a minute longer and fail.
Seriously, the body count in this one is off the charts. And, not to make the series sound like it should be in the horror genre, but in this series I think it’s very arguable that in some cases the dead were the lucky ones.
Sure, it’s rated “Young Adult”, but if you include cute critters that CAN’T talk, the first pretty butterfly croaks by minute 12. Death ivy - it’s everywhere. And it’s littered with corpses of cute cartoon animals.
But don’t worry, by minute 13 Kipo’s found a new friend, and is enjoying a roast spider that they’ve just slaughtered.
I mean, this isn’t Conan The Barbarian, but let’s be clear here - one of the Kipo’s best friends wears the skin of her own mother.
So … there’s some ‘dark issues’ in this show, and although the show has a lot of bright moments, the show has no problems reminding the characters of the crap from their past that they’ve been trying to repress. And sometimes the solutions to the problems the characters run into aren’t the pretty happy ‘let’s talk’ solutions that you find in modern cartoons.
Sometimes the solution to a problem is murder.
And, for me, that makes the show much more real. And I have to admit that while some shows didn’t hook me, and I honestly just stopped watching the show completely for months because I couldn’t be bothered - when I did return to it I got hooked by the storyline and the characters really hard, and am very happy that I binged it straight through to the end.
If you’d like to talk about the show, or share pics, please do ^__^
And if you’ve seen the ending and like me are verklempt because you don’t know why THAT death out of all of the deaths in the show is the one you can’t get over, or because can’t figure out if the show a lesson in the value of redemption, or a validation of the satisfaction to be found in flat out homicidal revenge, let’s talk.
