Rilakkuma and Kaoru follows the characters of the same name in their daily adventures where some days are good but other times things could go better. Here is our full Rilakkuma and Kaoru Review.
The anime was released in the Spring 2019 anime season on Netflix. Rilakkuma and Kaoru is animated by dwarf Studio and produced by Netflix. Season 2, called Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure started airing in late 2022.
I absolutely loved the visuals of the stop-motion animation, there was just so much detail to everything in every location. While the locations and animals all looked perfect, I had a bit of a problem with the human characters, they all had a bit of a creepy puppet look to them, this was a bit of a turn-off early on, but I did get used to it by the end.
Something that also weirded me out at times there the sounds. Clothes moving and water dropping all felt kinda out of place and felt like it didn’t correlate with the type of fabric or the amount of sound it should have made. At some points, this was a bit of an irritating point, but just like the creepiness of the human characters, I kinda got used to it.
The main human character feels really selfish in every episode, and most of the issues and plot points in the episodes got caused by this issue and also bring out the worst moments in the episodes. Every episode did have a good message behind it in the first half, but somewhere in the middle of the season this also somehow got less focus
The best thing in the anime where the bears and the bird, I absolutely loved the silly things they got up to. The anime would be better if it would focus on them maybe with the neighbor kid, who had a pretty good dynamic with the bears.
I really have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this anime, the visuals were so good that I just got sucked into it, especially the bits outside, but the main character didn’t really get good until the final few episodes where the main focus went to the bears.
While I hated Kaoru, the main human character, I do hope we get to see an improvement in season 2, some of her story was kinda left up in the air, but after that, I just hope the focus shift to the bears doing cute and fun stuff while they just play around.
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