The Fall 2022 Preview Guide

The Human Crazy University

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What happens to people when they are pushed to their very limits and driven into a corner like bugs? The Human Crazy University depicts these situations from the perspectives of various characters.

The Human Crazy University is based on the Human Bug Daigaku_Yami no Manga YouTube manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I'll be honest: I spent the entirety of The Human Crazy University's premiere waiting for the joke to hit. The show had to be a joke, what with… well, everything about it. The art and animation looks like a Kappa Mikey fan-animation gone wrong. It looks like what would happen if Aqua Teen Hunger Force made an anime parody back in the year 2004. It looks like what would happen if mid-tier Newgrounds flash animation was produced using nothing but plagiarized artwork traced from those old How to Draw Manga books. Hell, the main character of the show is a convicted wife murderer who may or may not possess some kind of supernatural ability to avoid all manner of horrible deaths through sheer, absurd cosmic luck. So, after twenty-two fairly agonizing minutes, why wasn't I laughing even one bit?

Well, it's definitely possible that the series is operating at some 4D chess levels of technical incompetence, like a Tim and Eric sketch that got taken way too far. The bizarre scientist guy that our man Hirofumi spends most of the episode talking to is certainly obnoxious enough that I have to believe that Human Crazy University is at least partially aware of how gobsmackingly terrible it is. Then again, the rest of the episode is so deranged in its commitment to deliver a bunch of facts about human execution methods and strange survival anecdotes in the most boring manner possible that I also have to suspect that Human Crazy University is utterly sincere and fancies itself a piece of bona fide edutainment.

Either way, the end result is a singularly strange and unsettling viewing experience, though it isn't strange or unsettling in any sense that I could recommend it as a Halloween appropriate watch. It isn't fun, at all. It's just… such a goddamned weird little show. I don't think I could hate something that is so singular, but I absolutely can—and will—tell you all to stay as far away from Human Crazy University as possible.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

What can I say about this premiere? I watched it, for one. Sat through the whole thing uninterrupted. I found a few of the random facts it brought up interesting, in a “oh I should look that up on wikipedia later” kind of way. I was very confused for a while about why this somber story of a death row inmate's execution was animated like a Newgrounds video from 2004. And I suppose in the abstract I can appreciate that this is a unique series in the TV anime landscape. So I can say that for The Human Crazy University. I just can't say I liked any of it.

It really comes down to the presentation. This is based on a series of voice comics that's been releasing on Youtube for a few years, and somewhere along the way they decided the best way to translate that to a full-length TV anime was to make it look cheaper and worse than the original manga art, and also not animate any more than absolutely necessary. Characters do not walk, their models are simply moved up and down while a background image scrolls behind them. 90% of the shots are two characters standing or sitting next to eachother as they share random facts about executions they read off of the world's most morbid Snapple caps. It's all about one step above just listening to a podcast about execution trivia, and filtered through a barely coherent story of a death row inmate who's apparently impossible to kill that barely gets expanded upon.

That particular wrinkle is perhaps the only thing that might get somebody interested in this. At the very least it's something unique that you can't get from a slew of true crime and history podcasts/books/documentaries, but it's not enough to make this half-baked edutainment set-up to be, y'know, entertaining.