The Cutprice Guignol

Picture the scene.

It’s the turn of the millennium in Japan. You, a young child, have returned from a hard day of study to enjoy an afternoon watching cartoons on Kids Station; a channel dedicated to gentle, child-appropriate programming. In between shows, a five-minute short called Popee the Performer fills the time. And, out of nowhere, you’re faced with this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BngiyN-ZfNk%3Fsi%3D3jnYQgysxCX8uLD9

When I first heard about Popee the Performer, I assumed it was some kind of urban legend – there was just no way that a show with a reputation as profoundly horrible as this one could have actually broadcast on a children’s TV channel. But a little research soon revealed that it could, and, in fact, did – and that the episodes might actually be more disturbing than their reputation makes them out to be.

The show follows hapless circus performer Popee, who tries to master a variety of circus skills alongside his long-suffering friend Kedamono. Sounds innocent enough, but it only takes a cursory glance over the episodes (available on YouTube, for those curious) to see why the series developed such an infamous presence online.

Take the episode above, Swallower. Yeah, seriously. Though I would really encourage you to watch this short to get an idea of just how profoundly horrible this show is, to surmise: Popee shows off his sword-swallowing skills to Kedamono, increasing the size of the blades until he impales himself on a huge sword. Panicking, Kedamono tries to remove the sword by attaching it to a truck and dragging a bloodied Popee around by a rope; when this fails, Popee swallows Kedamono and then swallows another sword, apparently killing Kedamono inside his own stomach. And it’s not just this episode that features shocking and clearly child-inappropriate content; in the episode Gunman, a maniacal, cackling Popee sprays Kedamono with bullets from a submachine gun, and in Knife Thrower, he uses Kedamono as target practice for his less-than-stellar knife-throwing skills, resurrecting him over and over again after he repeatedly throws a knife straight into his friend’s face. It’s almost jaw-droppingly strange in its own right, but add in the fact that this was originally broadcast on children’s television? Yeah, I have some questions.

Popee the Performer was created by Ryuji Masuda and his wife Wakako Masuda (who would later create a manga adaptation of the series) to fill a five-minute slot on the Kids Station network. For Ryuji Masuda, usually credited with the lion’s share of the series’ production, this was his mainstream debut, and a pretty impressive one at that – Kids Station was one of the most popular children’s channels in Japan at the time, and even a short slot would be enough to garner attention to a new creator if they played their cards right.

Popee was produced on a shoestring budget of about 100,000 yen (a little less than $1000 or £600) per month. A skeleton staff, made up of Wakako and Ryuji Masuda and a 3D animator hired from an unnamed video game company, began work on the series. Inspired by the surreal stop motion animation style of Czech artist Jan Švankmajer and the violent slapstick of cartoons in the Looney Tunes vein, it would eventually reach thirty-nine episodes spread over three seasons. To save money, the series didn’t use voice actors, relying on sound effects to create an ambience, and re-used backdrops and sets frequently. Even the desert setting was designed to reduce the cost, with the barren, bleak backdrop as much of a practical choice as it was a stylistic one. Each episode took around ten days to animate, an exceptionally quick turnaround for a show of this nature. It used a 3D CGI animation style, with a focus on facial expressions to convey emotion and storyline with the lack of dialogue and voice acting that would normally fill that void. Three months after production began, the first episode broadcast on Kids Station in 2000.

But the question is: how did a show this violent, disturbing, and downright weird end up broadcasting on a kid’s channel? According to Ryuji Masuda, he had no idea while producing the show that it would be broadcast in a slot meant for children. Recently married and getting by on a small salary, he claimed that he couldn’t access the station’s content, and it wasn’t until the show was broadcast that he discovered it’s target audience. Which doesn’t explain why so much of the series created post-broadcast was so violent and unsettling – if anything, the realisation of the target audience led Masuda and the production team to double down on the more distressing elements, with Masuda reportedly responding to positive feedback from some parents by including more explicit and disturbing storylines (such as Popee eating cockroaches). It’s not clear if those working at Kids Station watched the show before it’s release, but Masuda claimed that he heard nothing but good things about the show’s reception after the first few episodes for release.

Of course, the show did garner some controversy – understandable, given the subject matter depicted. Kin Obuchi, writing for Vice, reflected on his parents’ disapproval of the show, and it began to garner complaints as a result of its violent, gory, and surreal storylines. Several episodes, including Swallower, were only broadcast once, and the 27th episode, Knife Game, which featured Popee and Kedamono along with new character Papi eviscerating a frog, was never broadcast for fear of children recreating the titular game in real life.

But, despite the abject hideousness of a lot of these episodes, the series earned a cult following in the years following it’s original release. As those viewers who’d seen it as children began to grow up and reflect on the media they consumed as kids, Popee the Performer earned the nickname “trauma anime”, and a renewed interest in the show brought it back to the outskirts of the mainstream once more.

As Kin Obuchi commented on in his article, Popee the Performer offered a temptingly transgressive form of media for children to enjoy. It’s no secret that kids often seek out media that’s “too” violent or disturbing for their delicate sensibilities (the enduring appealing of Looney Tunes serves as a testament to this), and Popee certainly fell into that bracket. As far as I’m concerned, it was kid-friendly horror that served as my entrypoint into the genre I love so much today, and I can easily see how Popee might have served a similar purpose for many of the kids who watched it growing up. There’s also no doubt that the show’s bizarre reputation as a genuinely disturbing series produced for children has created a cult following in the era of haunted or otherwise unsettling children’s media: the mix of cheery children’s animation and gory surrealism is a potent one, and I can see why the show has developed a contemporary fandom.

As far as Ryuji Masuda is concerned, Popee might not set a good example for child viewers, but it served as a chance for children to express stigmatized emotions such as anger, hatred, fear, or disappointment. “Perhaps the more repressed the children are, the more liberated they feel,” he suggested in an interview “as if Popee’s explosive emotions are speaking for them”.

A sequel series to Popee the Performer was discussed in the late 2010s, but Masuda declined to pick up where he’d left off, preferring to let it live on “in your traumatic memories”. I think this was the right choice – the early-2000s CGI animation style is so central to how odd the series looks now, and any modernization would serve to take away from this, in my opinion.

Sequel or not, Popee has survived as a curio of the new millennium – a mix of horror, slapstick comedy, and cheap, stylised animation, it’s distinct and instantly memorable. Did you see this series when it came out, or did you encounter it in the years after it developed a cult following? Let me know in the comments!

If you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or buying my books!

(header image via YouTube)