Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

Okay, I just watched the last episode, and now I have to rethink the whole post. Which is hard because I'm crying.

I'll return tomorrow (because it's late and I have to work tomorrow. I'm the kind of adult that stays up late and watches cartoons that make me cry)


Okay, I'm back! I want to write this before I watch any Youtube videos that analyze the show. Also, I've only seen this show once, so I may have missed a few things. I need to watch it again.

So, Nicole recommended a series to me: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts


Spoilers

I love Kipo. She's one of those characters that can make friends even with the must unlikely people. Like Steven Universe, or even Natsume Takashi.
I always like characters like that. Steven and Kipo show us that violence never solves the problem.
Plus, she's a jaguar. Since my animals is a clouded leopard, we match XD. Her jaguar arms are awesome.

 

 Also, we share a birthday!

I also love Wolf.
She had me crying some, but that's not why I was crying last night TT^TT

Kipo and Wolf are two of my favorites. Along with the character I'll discuss at the end.

As you may have gathered, there are very few romances in fiction that I like. And I have this really strange (and probably really annoying) way of laughing very hard when I'm watching a romance that I think is cute. Fortunately this has always been when I'm alone, so no one has had to witness it. But Benson and Troy triggered that.
I'll share an embarrassing moment. During the show, Kipo says that she likes Benson. And he says that he's gay. I started laughing so hard that someone literally looked into my room to ask what was happening. All I could do was gasp, "I'm watching cartoons!" Why was I laughing so hard? Because that same thing happened to me! Except it took me several years to find out XD

Benson also really has Kipo's back. He goes so above and beyond to get Wolf to forgive Kipo for keeping that secret in season 1. I was really confused when the TheaOtters said that Benson was a coward. I mean, look at how he's first introduced!

I really like Lio and Song too. And their whole family's relationship.
Seeing Lio mind-controlled is the worst :(   It's bad for Song too, but we don't know that it's her for the first chunk of the series, so it doesn't hurt as much. 

It's interesting seeing Kipo protect her dad. Part of me thinks "Dad, you're supposed to protect your daughter!" But Scarlemagne was trying to take him apart. And he wouldn't have had any trouble doing so. The other part of me is like, "Yeah, Kipo! Protect your dad!"

Before I get to what will be the longest part of my post, just a couple little things to comment on.
The show has some weird stuff that I could do without, but the rest made it well worth it.
I guess they never found a cure for the "cured mutes." I always assumed they'd be able to get Yumyan and the others back, so I didn't really mourn them properly. So we definitely get a lot more bittersweet to the ending.
We also never found out where the mutes originally came from.
It was also never really explained why Doctor Emilia attacked Kipo's burrow. I guess she was just looking for Kipo to destroy her?
I love how much faith Jamack has that Kipo is going to rescue him and the other prisoners from the doctor.
Okay, I know the narwhals are a parody. But it's really strange to see a buff narwhal.
I'm not sure how all the little bits of old technology still work. Like Benson's tape deck. I had some cassettes of the Harry Potter books from when I was kid and they just degraded over a decade. Let alone 200 years. But little stuff like that isn't as important to me as characters.
Dude, Song spent months with a hand covered in gold. How?
Also, when we first met Fun Gus, he had bones hidden in him. Wouldn't that hint that he'll end up digesting Emilia?
And Emilia is a very bad scientist. Even Lio and Song point it out. She's giving poor Hugo three formulas a day. How does she expect to figure out what triggers the mutation when there are literally thousands of formulas he's taken? 

Where is Mandu's family? Pigs keep their babies close when they're little (random thought from an animal nerd).  

And another animal nerd thought - baby Hugo makes chimpanzee noises. Wrong primate XD  (Everyone uses chimp noises for monkey noises though @_@ )

Dave's story of the fan war felt really weird. Benson became the last of his people because of a fan? Are we supposed to take that story literally?

Why does Wolf let Kipo call her Wolf? She hates wolves! 

I like all the ways they introduce the "KIPO" logo at the beginning of each episode. 

I love how they draw the night sky.


And now on to the main thing. Did you see it coming?
Scarlemagne.
Oooh, I love that name. I'll probably switch between the names Scarlemagne and Hugo, to fit the context. 

I love how his theme song is so menacing at first. But then it also has the gentler versions, for when he's younger (And also at the end).

He only appears once in the first seven episodes. Though we hear plenty of rumors about him.
When we found out that Lio knew Scarlemagne, I knew that he was going to have some sort of tragic backstory.
I also knew that I would fall for it. After all, I am a huge sucker for animal-like people. Especially if they have tragic backstories. And this sort of backstory in particular gets to me (It dates all the way back to the first Pokemon movie.)
I also understand why a non-human might want to destroy humans, considering what bad humans are capable of.

That being said, I fell for his backstory far harder than I expected.
After all, there's a family of mandrills at the zoo. I've been watching the baby mandrill grow up. He's so entertaining. And such a little stinker!
Here he is, being goofy

And now he has a baby sister too!
Mandrills are also a really good animals if you want something intimidating. They're the largest monkey in the world. I've never been close to one, and it's hard to judge sizes of animals from a distance. But I would not want a mandrill angry at me! Look at these fangs! These are from the dad mandrill at the zoo.

And Scarlemagne is far larger than this guy. He's like the size of a gorilla. Probably bigger, actually. 

His design seems like Beast, from the Beauty and the Beast animated movie. Did they do that on purpose? Because I think his voice actor is the same guy that did Beast in the live action version. Either way, the voice actor does an awesome job. The crazy laughs, the threats, the different tones, and of course the sweet little Hugo.

Young Hugo was so precious. He immediately reminded me of Paddington from the movies XD 

In the piano song he plays for himself, he says he can't play music because he might get found out. But he keeps playing anyway. I guess he's caught up in his fantasy and forgets where he is. And as he says, he's very bored. Of course he is. A smart little guy locked in a room and having to hide his smarts from all but two people. His song about not playing the piano gets him caught.

And it's true - Lio didn't even try to find Hugo when they ran. I get it. Lio has a new baby, and those parental instincts are strong. But it's still so sad. I like to think that Song was going to go back for him. Except she obviously wasn't able to. 

How old was Hugo supposed to be then? If he were an ordinary mandrill, he'd be about four or five. But he turned into a mute. So who knows?

Kipo, thank you so much for hugging Scarlemagne after hearing his story. I also wanted to hug him.

I bristled a bit when Scarlemagne called out against zoos. But he has no way of knowing that zoos are an attempt to protect injured or endangered animals. And maybe the zoo at Las Vistas wasn't one of the good zoos. 

When Scarlemagne tried to flee the stadium and got knocked out, I was relieved when Lio went back for him. He wasn't going to make the same mistake twice, even after everything Scarlamagne did. Go Lio!

At the end of season 2, I kept thinking that Kipo would work on befriending Scarlemagne. So when season 3 started, I was shocked to find that he'd been kept in an empty little glass box for months. They didn't even give him a piano! Not until a lot later, anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I know. He'd just tried to kill everyone and broke Kipo's trust and everything. 

But his prison is shockingly similar to the little box he was kept in as a kid - when he was forced to run on the treadmill. And he slept alone, curled up on the floor. They'd better bring him blankets or something at night (A great twist that Emilia ended up in that box, if only briefly. Though I was surprised that no one else protested that Scarlamagne suddenly had free reign when the box was destroyed). 

He didn't even care at first whether or not he got "the cure."

My favorite part was when he wasn't really evil anymore, but he was still such a little a**hole. Breaking everyone's stuff, and running away with that crazy laugh of his.
(It's like Regina, from Once Upon a Time, where she wasn't the villain anymore but she was still a snarky jerk) Anyway, I love it!
And it's even better because Scarlemagne couldn't stand up to a little kitten. I guess he can't handle crying children.

So I liked him more and more through season 3.
During the last episode when he said farewell, I got super upset. I kept telling myself that they'd save him at the last minute, or something.
But they didn't. And he sacrificed himself to save his baby sister.
And that's why I was crying.

And I get it. As a storyteller, I really get it. After all, I killed one of my favorite characters in the story I'm working on. I had to.
But I still wanted little Hugo to have a happier ending TT^TT

I just watched that scene again to help me write this post. And I'm crying even harder this time around. Oh jeez.
Okay, I've gone through a couple tissues, and now I'm ready to edit this. Now that I'm all emotional again.