Kipo and The Age Of Wonderbeasts Review

I just finished watching Season 2 of Kipo, and it has quickly become one of my favorite shows. The premise is an interesting one, set in an apocalyptic future where giant talking animals rule the earth, forcing humans to live underground, the story centers around a 13-year-old girl called Kipo who ends up on the surface looking for her father.

Created by Dreamworks for Netflix the show was actually based on a webcomic of the same name written by Rad Sechrist

So, how does this show hold up compared to other cartoons? First off let´s start with animation and world-building.

The premise of this world is basically Fallout meets Planet of the Apes. It is both a beautiful but dangerous world populated by mutants and a couple of human survivors. However, unlike most stories of the genre, the characters and the environment are extremely colorful, perhaps because this is more aimed at kids.

There is actually a lot of creative concepts, like for example animals are divided into different tribes with their own theme. This leads to groups like Rock Vipers.

To plaid wearing Lumberjack Cats.

To Dubstep bees?

As for characterization, first, there is Kipo. She is a plucky all-loving hero, with a love for music and astronomy, who can´t help but try to befriend everyone she tries to meet. She can be naive, this being the first time she's ever been to the surface, but her friendship ability ends up helping her along with the story.

Along her journey, she befriends a group of surface dwellers. You have Wolf, a loner girl that had been raised by wolves and has been surviving on her own and a fierce warrior before meeting Kipo. She initially has a hard time trusting others but warms up to the group.

Then you the comedic duo, Benson and Dave the Bug. Benson is a music and food-loving surface dweller, and Dave is an immortal insect that is constantly molting from a child to an adult or old age. He is the source for most of the slapstick jokes. They had bonded over food and have been together ever since.

And let´s not forget the group's mascot, Mandu ( Korean for dumpling), an adorable four-eyed pig.

I could also go all day, talking about every character ( there are a lot of interesting ones) so, instead, I´m gonna talk about the main Villain Scarlemagne.

I would describe him as Mojo Jojo meets the Joker, meets Mozart. He is an intelligent mandrill that bases his style on 18th Century Rococo Style. He has the ability to produce mind-control pheromones, giving him power over any primate. He spends the first season looking for human dwellings to create his personal army in order to rule the entire surface world, with humanity as his slaves. He can be very terrifying at times. As it turns out he actually does have a backstory connected to human survivors that made him what he is, but I won´t spoil it here.

The soundtrack is also great really brings the story to life. Like, adventure time and Steven Universe it does have some musical moments where the characters sing, but they are sparse enough to not irritate the viewers.

The writing is also great, sometimes you can go from exciting dangerous scenes, to really touching moments between characters. The comedy in this show has had a lot of chuckle worthy moments. One example is that you have a bunch of wolves doing their best Carl Sagan impression and doing... science rap. Or how Dave regeneration ability alone as led to a lot of jokes, like how his personality changes to grumpy teenager to a senile old man in a matter of minutes. Or the use of his body parts for slapstick without it becoming too dark and gory for kids.

So, yeah if you have Netflix, I recommend checking out this show.

Thanks for reading, and if you like my content please support me here or through Cointree