Shock! Kuma shock!
I have to hand it to Ikuhara. It’s not often you get something with such overt, in-your-face metaphors that still leaves you wondering what they’re actually supposed to mean. Who knows, maybe when they get naked and lick a lily flower it actually represents something completely different. I don’t think you’re supposed to try too hard to connect all the dots, or else you’ll just arrive at something like “lesbians are vicious predators”. There’s themes of love and friendship, conformity and social exclusion, but whether it all forms a cohesive whole I’m not so sure about. But hey, funny bears.
The early episodes are where it leans the most into the surreal aspects, but once the smoke clears and you look past the presentation, the story is actually kind of simple, sometimes to a fault. The part about how Kureha, as a child, found Ginko and immediately called her a friend and said they’d be together forever wouldn’t have felt out of place in a sappy Key anime instead. Or Lulu’s backstory with her little brother, which was awfully saccharine considering she got him killed. The characters are very much on the moĆ© side, complete with their own cutesy bear noises. Maybe there was some kind of genius subversive intent behind that, but I wasn’t a big fan.
Yurikuma is unique enough to be worth watching despite its shortcomings, but it wasn’t all that good. Ikuhara loves repetition in his works, which sometimes enhances a particular theme or mood and ties different events together, but sometimes get a little tedious. There’s a lot of flashback scenes that didn’t seem that necessary, especially when you’re not watching it one episode a week.
I did like the ending, where instead of Ginko becoming a human, Kureha becomes a bear. Something about choosing to be true to yourself instead of trying to fit in. I’m always more lenient to shows that end on a positive note, and don’t make me feel like I wasted my time watching it. It was okay.