Popee the Performer

Popee the Performer
Series logo
Romaji title	ポピーザぱフォーマー (Popīza pa fōmā)
Genre	Comedy, slapstick
Director	Ryuji Masuda
Written by	Ryuji Masuda
Art Director	Wakako Masuda
Character Design	Wakako Masuda
Produced by	Kids Station, Zuiyo Co., Ltd., Nippon Columbia
Music	Osamu Tezuka (composition), Tsuneo Aoyagi (vocals)
Original network	Kids Station
Original run	January 3, 2000 – December 28, 2001 (special aired January 1, 2003)
No. of seasons	3
No. of episodes overall	39 + 1 special

About

Popee the Performer (ポピーザぱフォーマー) is a series of 3DCG shorts produced for Kids Station, one of the all-anime satellite stations in Japan. The show was produced by husband-wife team Ryuji Masuda (writer, director) and Wakako Masuda (art director, art design and character design). The music was composed by Osamu Tezuka, and the vocals within the main theme song, New Years' Special, and OST belong to Aoyagi Tsuneo (青柳常夫). The series was created in Kumamoto, Japan, where it's director, Ryuji Masuda, is from.

Each episode of the show is self-contained. The show frequently features violence and typically one or more of the characters die per episode, which has made it somewhat controversial. Episodes feature characters being impaled, electrocuted, stabbed, cut in half, set on fire, exploding, etc.

Despite the content, the death and violence featured in the show is not especially graphic, meaning they're typically without gore or excessive blood. An exception to this is the episode「SWALLOWER」, which featured blood and excessive violence to the point where it was banned from being rebroadcast after its initial airing.

The show was born after Ryuji Masuda decided he wanted to make a CG animation. There happened to be a 5-minute airing window for Kids Station at the time, so he asked an acquaintance with the station to connect him.

Ryuji Masuda hadn't actually watched Kids Station himself, and was unaware of the target audience for the station. He states that if one of the executives had thought the show was bad for children, they wouldn't have approved it's airing.

The show was done on a very limited budget (only ¥100,000 per episode). The budget was so low, according to Shohei Murai, one of the animators, because Popee was an "experiment". Due to the budget and the limits of CG animation at the time, the show started out with only two characters (Popee and Kedamono) and a desert was chosen as a background due to the simplicity. They tried to keep as few characters in a scene as possible. Popee's three "fingers" were also the result of such a small budget. Ryuji Masuda himself only received ¥100,000 (USD $668.21) per month. Even with such a small salary, Masuda wanted to do a CG animation so much that he didn't think about it, despite being married.

Production started three months prior to the initial broadcast.

In 2017, Kids Station contacted Ryuji Masuda about a sequel, but he thought it was better not to make it because he didn't want it to feel cheap.

CG animation was done by Shohei Murai and Takayuki Ito.

A manga drawn by Wakako Masuda was published in Kodansha's Magazine Z in 2002 and was later released as an anthology.

Plot

The show follows Popee, an apprentice clown, and his assistant, Kedamono, attempting various Circus acts and going about their daily lives as performers. Things have a way of going wrong, however—whether it's a blinding rage, burning jealousy, or even something as simple as hunger. Their mentor, Papi, is little help to the chaos they tend to find themselves in.

Related Media

• Phaeton & Me
• Chinchikurin

Trivia

• There are a total of 73 deaths throughout the entire series.
• Episode 11, 「SWALLOWER」, was banned from being rebroadcasted due to excessive violence in the episode.
• Episode 27, 「KNIFE GAME」, was never broadcasted on Kids Station during the show's airing because they were concerned that children would try to imitate the knife game themselves. It was distributed on DVD and the POPEE THE MANIAX boxset.
• The show was originally intended to be only 14 episodes, but because of its popularity, it was extended twice. The reason it wasn't extended a third time is because the director, Ryuji Masuda, wanted to go on to do other things, and felt he had completed everything he had set out to do on the show.
• After finishing work on Popee the Performer, Ryuji Masuda and his wife moved on to create Ga-Ra-Ku-Ta: Mr. Stain on Junk Alley
• The font used for the episode titles is Matisse ITC.
• During the planning phase of the show, Wakako Masuda wanted Kyoko Kishida to do narration.
• There are fan-made dubs of the show in Japanese that can be found on YouTube, you can watch it here.
• This show is often compared to the internet cartoon series Happy Tree Friends, as both shows are noted for being seemingly innocent but really violent and characters dying only to come back in later episodes just fine with no explaination. A difference being that Popee is a kids show while Happy Tree Friends isn't.
• In the 1999 pliot the show was originally called Popee the Clown