Acro Trip

Episode 10

We're close enough to the end of the season and it has become easy to roll with Acro Trip's general pattern. Outside of the odd flashback episode, every week gives us a series of very loosely connected sketches, all of which exist for little more purpose than to give our cast of characters an excuse to act like weird dorks and yell nonsense at each other. We might also get the tiniest smidgen of world-building. Still, it's quite obvious that the show couldn't give a damn about telling a coherent story. I hope nobody has been getting their hopes up on seeing any tantalizing reveals or dramatic climaxes. The main difference between a good episode of Acro Trip and a mediocre one is whether or not its weird, screeching nonsense manages to be funny instead of merely annoying.

Thankfully, this week's episode lands the show on the “Funny” half of the spectrum, though only barely. Every episode recently has had at least one sketch that manages to drag the whole venture down, and this week the award for biggest waste of time goes to Berry Blossom's “I Am Embarrassed Because I Messed Up My Hair a Little Bit By Cutting It At Home” plot. The visual of her walking around in a spatially impossible motorcycle helmet was alright (where the hell are her giant hair braids sticking out from?) You can see the punchline coming from a hundred miles away. Given how predictably the bit plays out, I think it would have been funnier if the show had just gone with B.B. really mangling her hair. I'm talking, like, a full-on Courtney Cox from Scream 3 cracked-out coiffure.

The other sketches are a lot better. The Kuma Kaiju vs. Giant Berry Blossom battle in the opening is good fun, mostly because of how utterly incompetent every participant is. Chrome somehow summons the thing on accident; Berry Blossom can barely comprehend what is going on most of the time; and poor Kuma Kaiju just wants to go home. The funniest joke of the whole thing probably comes from Chizuko herself, who is horrified to realize that she is seemingly the only one in Fossa Manga who thinks that maybe they should raze the city a little bit. You know, to give Berry Blossom some evil to defeat.

The hero show story is also fun, if only because it's the only sketch of the week that gets enough time to develop some decent running gags like poor Chrome getting constantly swept away by mobs of obsessed children. I still don't understand how Chizuko mistook the Tomatoman-shaped profile of the poster for Berry, but I guess being that down bad is liable to screw up anyone's brain. I also chuckled at the sheer idiocy of the final sketch, mostly since it's about time for Chizuko to start developing a proper villainous lair. I'm still not sure what the show seems to be trying to foreshadow with the evil boss' blink-and-you'll-miss-them intrusions into the plot, but there are only a couple of weeks left in the season. Whatever Acro Trip is planning, I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later.

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Acro Trip is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.