The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Butareba: The Story of a Man Turned into a Pig

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I am a dull otaku who lost consciousness after eating raw pork liver. When I awoke, it seemed that I had been reincarnated into another world... but I had also become a pig! As I was rolling around in a pigsty covered in mud, Jess, a kind, angelic, beautiful girl, came to my rescue. "Oink!!" "Um, you don't have to force yourself to talk. I'm able to... understand you." This girl who was devotedly caring after my pig-self was a member of the Yethma, and her people have the ability to read minds. "This is bad! That means she can see through all of my lustful delusions!" Now in Mesteria, a world run by swords and magic, a pig and a mind-reading beauty set off on their lovey-dovey fantasy adventure!... Or do they?

Butareba: The Story of a Man Turned into a Pig is based on a novel series of the same name by Asagi Tōsaka. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

I'll say this for Butareba, they absolutely killed it with Jess. Not only is her character design great but it's constantly given an incredible level of detail whenever she's on screen. She is genuinely eye-catching—especially in contrast to the super simplistic design of the Pig (which I'm sure is intentional).

As for the episode itself, it's largely built around a single joke—namely that he's a pig of a man inside the body of a pig. As she's telepathic, she can hear his every passing thought—including his constant stream of perverted ones directed toward her. We get a situation like in Jim Carrey's Liar Liar where he's a guy who has no filter—so everything just keeps tumbling out. That's the source of the humor.

What's interesting, though, is her reaction to it. Rather than being put off by it, she finds it oddly comforting. While his thoughts may be a bit perverted, there's no hate within in. He's not once cursed his situation or her part in it (though he still clearly believes it all to be a dream at this point). This utter lack of negativity seems to be a first for Jess which raises the question: what kind of people does she usually interact with? Add to this incongruity the fact that she wears a collar, is utterly subservient, and is on a mysterious mission to the capitol and, well… I spent the whole episode waiting for the other (potentially grimdark) shoe to drop—which it never did.

So with all that said, it looks like this show has hooked me—at least for another episode. The comedy may be hit-or-miss but I find Jess to be a captivating enough character and I want to learn more about both her and her world.

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James Beckett
Rating:

"The animals looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and they could not tell the difference...but Chris Hansen could."

Little-known fun fact: George Orwell originally included that line at the conclusion of his landmark work of anthropomorphic political satire, Animal Farm, but his publishers made him cut it because nobody on Earth knew what To Catch a Predator was in 1945. Orwell was a forward-thinking man, however, and the original intent of his work now rings true more than ever before. He was clearly criticizing this specific anime as much as he was the dehumanizing terrors of Stalin's USSR. What is Butareba, after all, if not a gulag for the human spirit?

Here's the thing: I genuinely don't care what kind of perverted little fantasies a show like Butareba wants to partake in. If a guy or a gal wants nothing more than to indulge in visions of a world where they're a filthy farm animal that gets to look up as many skirts as they want while getting "stroked" by a subservient maid girl who will do anything that they desire, then fine, have at it. Make sure to use some lubricant to avoid any chafing. What I don't like is when those purely self-serving psychosexual roleplay prompts get dressed up and pretend they're an actual story that people who aren't invested in those particular kinks need to take seriously as art or entertainment. It might be one thing if Butareba was funny, had likable characters, or even attempted to tell some kind of story in its twenty-three-minute runtime. Instead, all we get are soul-destroyingly long and pointless scenes of Pig Boy and Maid Girl yammering on and on about how best to satisfy the pig's desires.

Are you deeply invested in whether or not some creep who was too stupid to cook his pork liver and avoid death by food poisoning gets all of the attention he needs for his little corn dog to stand at attention? If so…well, okay, then I guess this show was made for you. Otherwise, god help anyone who wanders into Butareba expecting anything but self-inflicted torture. I'm not offended by the pedophile porker that gets off on the thought of his new magical maid treating him like a tsundere little sister. I'm offended at the time on this Earth that I will never get back because of this stupid show. If I die tomorrow in a car accident or something, and one of my last thoughts is regretting having to watch Butareba, then I personally swear that I will reincarnate myself into the body of a Japanese anime executive and get the entire isekai subgenre banned forever.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

Two minutes, thirty-four seconds. That's how long into this episode we get before our hero, who has become a pig, figures out that he has become a pig. Nearly 10% of this premiere – more if you don't count the credits – is dedicated to our main character lying on the ground and thinking aloud about how "Gee, it sure is weird that he's in a pigpen. And he smells like a pig. And he can't seem to move his body like before. And huh, why is this blond girl so much taller than him? Weird. Better monologue for a while longer to figure things out." It's interminable and the perfect opening act for one of the most unbearably miserable premieres you'll watch all year.

I don't know if I can call this a real show. It's more like a psychological experiment to see if every person on Earth can be conditioned to hate the sound of Yoshitsugu Matsuoka's voice. Because every single stray second of this premiere is filled with our Potato Pig talking and talking and TALKING. Sometimes, he's making snarky, self-aware comments about how this is just like a fantasy story. Most of the time, he's thinking about how much he wants to bang this blond chick – who can magically read his mind. Don't worry, though; she's totally cool with all the gross stuff he's saying because she's also part of a magically subservient race of mind-reading maids who will follow any request without objection. Either that, or her favorite movie is Vase de Noces, and she's just down bad for a roll in the mud with a literal pig – when she's not providing mountains of exposition about this generic fantasy world and its color-coded magical system.

So okay, the guy talks a lot and says basically nothing. That sucks, but what about the story? Well, to that, I say: go to hell. There is no story. There is no plot. There is no semblance of a narrative throughline or the inkling of a slice-of-life comedy. This episode feels like the screenwriter was ordered to write 22 minutes off the premise, "a dude gets turned into a pig," and had 15 minutes to turn it in. Nothing happens because our swine protagonist takes 1000 words to say five, predicating every sentence on ten ancillary ones in what I think is meant to be clever dialogue. Every scene lasts several hours and accomplishes nothing. It is a horrifically vacuous way to spend your time in every regard.

Butareba is truly abysmal. I can't even muster the energy to get mad at the guy's constant gross commentary about how he wants to see a naked teenager or keeps looking up her skirt. I'm too busy feeling insulted that this was considered good enough, substantive enough, to count as entertainment. I'd sooner believe that this is a covert advertisement for bacon, hoping people will chow down on pork in revenge for sitting through this. As it stands, I would sooner drink hot bacon grease than watch another minute of this thing.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating: No.

Never have I regretted not eating pork product so much, because it would be the perfect way to wreak vengeance on this show. Or maybe that would please its main character in ways I don't want to think about, given some of the predilections he has no problem voicing aloud throughout the entirety of this truly deadly episode. To be clear, it's not that he has these preferences; it's that he knows that Jess, the human heroine, can hear his every thought and keeps thinking them at her. Sure, he tells her that she doesn't have to respond to his “monologue,” but he still knows full well that she can hear them. If that's not harassment, I'm not sure what is. (Apart from every other interaction he has with her, that is.)

Jess herself is also an issue, primarily because of how she's written. She's blatant wish-fulfillment, a hot girl who wants nothing more than to please her new pig lord and doesn't appear to have any thoughts beyond that. She's waiting for a prince to rescue her, or at least has thought about it, but why is she so eager to treat an actual pig – in both the figurative and literal senses – as that prince? Or at least as someone she ought to be taking excellent care of? I get it; pigs are cute outside this show, but she's taking things further than is healthy or believable. I love my cats and dog, but if they started narrating about wanting to see my underwear as I walked, we'd sit down to have a serious conversation about boundaries.

To make this short and sweet, this is, hands-down, the worst first episode of this season, at least so far. Wish-fulfilling fantasies are fine, but this is just an unpleasant way to do it. Even if his endless narration wasn't so unsettling, its claustrophobic style makes it difficult. If any show had to get the terrible subtitles treatment (and none of them deserve it), it's a shame it had to be the Yuzuki brothers, because had this show gotten them, there would have been something else to think about.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.