Poco's Udon World (Anime) Review

In the midst of something flawed, you can find a lot of the problems you start to struggle with in a piece can be looked past or seen kinder when the core theme or emotion delivered in a story is done well or with heart to it. And in many ways, Poco's Udon World feels like a case study of it.

The story, ostensibly about a young man whose parents have passed, coming home to his abandoned childhood home and finding a tanuki boy in human form who he adopts and names Poco, is a show filled with a large amounts of small things or moments that bothered me over its run. Whether it's some characters acting in incredibly in your face ways that seem bizarre or downright rude for a show focused somewhat despite the magic premise on an emotional journey of rediscovery and memory. Some moments do speak of very bizarre and I use this term as a descriptor and as a trope, 'anime' means to set up conflict or infighting i.e. circumstances that are bizarre, born of in your face character scene eating or that seem entirely unnecessary and in this celebration of perhaps a very beautiful area of Japan, we do still see elements of a culture and tradition that are about legacy and the archaic nature of it, inheriting the family business, choosing marriage partners, a fear of the different.

Yet at its core, Poco's Udon World surmounts bizarre circumstance, moments of low quality or even it's own emotional hurdles, by maintaining something quite special; an earnest emotional heart to its story and a surprisingly heartfelt honesty in some of its messaging; it's a story about being able to embrace what we want of the past and also, doing our own thing. There are dozens of key moments where characters acknowledge the history and love that made them want to seek out or pursue these paths but how they've changed, what makes them different people and why that's okay. That we can conform to the things that give us memory while also diverting and choosing our own paths forward.

This show delivered a heartfelt and uplifting finale, an acknowledgement over it of love and how we must hold onto it however far away we grow from those we call family, and whether it's by blood, friendship, parent or child, or those we simply know when we see them as family, we must never let them go in our hearts. Despite all its flaws, there was indeed a wide world held in this show and one born of love at that.