Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am happy to announce that I have heard your fervent cries, and am at last prepared to answer your prayers. That’s right, it’s time for more Ganso Tensai Bakabon, where we’ll be enjoying more of the idiot adventures of Bakabon’s ridiculous father. Our dear Papa has endured missed fortunes, mischievous pigs, disappointing anniversaries, and all manner of other injustices, but he’s kept his head high throughout, and crucially maintained his sense of proud dignity.
Alright, yes, he has in fact done none of that, and is in truth more of a gremlin than almost any character I’ve met. It would not surprise me to see Papa literally swimming in a dumpster just to keep raccoons from stealing his trash, but I’m sure even that sort of adventure would be rendered beautiful by this generous production. As a commenter on my first Bakabon piece pointed out, this production’s art director Shichiro Kobayashi is one of the best the medium has seen, with art director credits ranging from Angel’s Egg to The Castle of Cagliostro to Beautiful Dreamer to Simoun. His artistic genius has enriched many of anime’s most beautiful works of all time, and with two Dezaki mainstays sharing directorial duties, I imagine the layouts will be impressive as well. Let’s dive back in to the dramatically irreverent and aesthetically entrancing Bakabon!
Episode 3
God, I love his serious, determined expression in this OP. One of this show’s greatest incidental sources of humor is the deathly seriousness with which Papa approaches each of his donkey-brained adventures
The relationship between top creators and TV productions was so different back in this era, too. It’s wild discovering just how many productions and episodes creators like Dezaki or Miyazaki had their hands on – there was basically no “prestige film pipeline,” and so someone like Mamoru Hosoda or Satoshi Kon would likely have been grinding away on annual daytime productions like everyone else. It was really only with the advent of the post-Eva late night paradigm that things changed, making someone like Mamoru Oshii and his extended Urusei Yatsura tenure one of the last examples of this particular dynamic
The late night era also seemed to largely spell the end of the “transformative adaptation” era, where someone like Oshii could reshape a work’s source material in their own image (and even Oshii got significant pushback for his choices). There’s not much reason to have top creators working on a manga adaptation if that adaptation is just going to be a panel-by-panel adaptation of the source material. The best adaptations reshape their source material into a format better suited to their new medium, something that audiences who can only parse loyalty, not artistry can’t really appreciate. The artistic preferences of modern fandom don’t really do the medium’s output any favors
Hah, apparently Dezaki himself directed these opening credits, which is no surprise
“I Was Tricked By The Newspaper.” Today Papa discovers fake news
“Oh my, the episode started already? Sorry, sorry!” Yeah, just leaning into the eccentricities of an adaptation’s own artists is basically always for the best. I will never understand the desire to have an exact copy of something you love recreated in another medium – I mean, the original still exists after all, and if it were any good, it’d be using the unique strengths of its medium in a way other mediums couldn’t replicate. I am always in favor of more new art, not more fading photocopies of prior art, which I suppose makes me an outlier in the era of sequels, adaptations, and cinematic universes
“I’m all washed up.” A clever double entendre referring both to his bath and his emotional state. Good job translators!
“Dear, the tatami cleaning is over. Go do something else.” Mama does her best with her gremlin of a husband
Bakabon’s sister is off to the university library to do research. It seems the brains stick to the female side of the family
“The paperboy brought a year’s worth of papers! I will accept this present and read a bit.” The comedy of Papa’s self-serious affectation even extends to his manner of speaking, a stilted, courtly dialect that the translators have taken great care to capture
“The founding of Sugar University? Only ants would appreciate a university made of sugar!” This is like two inches removed from that Zoolander joke
“The Dumbass Times: Today is April Fools!” Quite a periodical title
And thus, Papa declares that today is the day when lying is okay
We finally get actual full eyes with pupils out of Mama for the first time, in reaction to yanking off Papa’s fake arm
As usual, just casually gorgeous background art as Babakon rushes off for a doctor. The loose linework of these images seems to make them all the more inviting; it feels like he’s running down the lightly sketched avenue of a Takahata film, with linework more gesturing towards complete objects than rendering them in exacting detail. It’s a view of this neighborhood as a child would see it, welcoming and not fully distinct
The doctor hears that Papa’s arm has fallen off and smells business
Whoo! An ambitious little cut of movement out of depth as Bakabon and the doctor race home. By presenting the pair as running along the top of a hill that keeps curving back down behind them, the animator is able to limit the amount of background objects that need to be redrawn, but this is still a remarkably ambitious and time-intensive cut for such a minor moment
It’s in keeping with one of this show’s greatest tonal strengths, though: the way all this beautiful, complex background art design emphasizes the physical presence of the town around them. It never feels like these characters are performing gags on a soundstage, because the town is always a character
“What’s more important, a person’s life or your mustache!?” Nice to see Mama getting in on the nonsense for once
Papa successfully convinces the doctor to shave off his “scary” mustache, eyebrows, and head of hair. Papa’s actually kinda killing it this episode
“The only one stopping here is you, arm thief!” Considering this cop and this doctor, Papa might actually be one of the smarter men in the neighborhood. A terrifying thought
Papa’s markered-on facial features for the doctor are very effectively demeaning, and I have to wonder if they have some specific cultural resonance I’m missing. Dots around the mouth, cat-eye extensions, and a cap of black rings – it’s a pretty specific combination of features
“Reflect on your actions!” “I’m reflecting nothing! Now, time for some smokes.” Papa knows how to live
One more phenomenal neighborhood background as Papa heads out for smokes. Love the way this composition uses irregular angles to create a sense of all the houses almost purposefully huddling together. Perfection of form in angles and linework is one of the biggest reasons digitally produced backgrounds lack a sense of personality or texture; in contrast, a background like this conveys a sense of cozy, familiar imperfection, a place that has been defined and worn down by human hands
And the thing is, this sense of personality and texture doesn’t require extreme detail! Abstraction can actually work better, in the same way that abstracted human forms feel more universally relatable
“Good Meowning, Mr. Ghost!” Ghosts and cats, a promising combination
This show’s external layouts frequently seem designed to further emphasize the physicality of the neighborhood. Rather than flat mid-distance shots, Papa’s examination of the night sky is framed from above, with the light from the door casting him as a tiny intruder in the vast darkness of the night. A shot that inherently sets the emotional stage for the ghost story to come
That’s swiftly followed by a shot that sees him wandering from the house and around a fence without cutting, further emphasizing the contours of these neighborhood streets
Papa discovers a snowman made out of shaved ice
The father and son shaved ice salesmen each have a kanji character written across their faces, which I assume just means “ice”
Excellent drawing of a frozen Papa after he eats too much ice
And then a clever trick used to represent his lingering chill, with the rate of new drawings dropping tremendously to simulate his staggered movements. I always appreciate how children’s anime are willing to embrace such ostentatious, non-naturalistic tricks for dramatic effect
Papa runs into Shinta and Myouda, two friends from university. I am amazed that Papa attended any secondary education whatsoever
All the secondary characters in this show have such wonderfully warped designs. Love these two’s sagging eyes, unkempt hair, and generally pear-shaped heads
The two tell Papa that they’ve heard a rumor he’s dead, which he of course believes instantly
“It’s no joke, I’m dead serious!” Point to the translators once again
“A dead man can’t say that he’s dead!” A rare moment of lucidity from the neighborhood police officer
A trip to the graveyard provides more opportunities for richly detailed backgrounds, and at last Papa finds an actual ghost
It seems Papa is simply too stupid to be intimidated by this ghost, and instead offers him a place to stay
Papa’s scheme is as fiendish as it is pointless: he is intent on seeing the ghost’s weird little wisp-tail
“His tail is like an octopus!” “What the heck. This isn’t as interesting as I’d hoped”
“Eating the corpse of a ghost-octopus was a bad idea.” One of those delightful sentences that has probably never been uttered in any other context
And Done
Ah, what wonderful, delirious nonsense. That second segment might have been Bakabon’s most delightfully absurd sequence so far, somehow migrating from the relatively coherent “Papa’s chilly temperature convinces his friends that he’s dead” to the utterly inexplicable “Bakabon and Papa face off against a ghost octopus.” And all the while, Kobayashi’s gorgeous art design ensured that each new turn in the road offered its own inviting treasures, with Bakabon’s neighborhood rendered in exquisite visual shorthand. Our current anime production paradigm may be in a wildly unhealthy state, but shows like this remind me that anime’s history is overflowing with talent and beauty, often found in places I never would have expected.
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