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From left to right: Weda, Hare, and Guu. Surrounding them are the jungle critters: Pio and the Pokute.

a.k.a. Jungle wa Itsumo Hare nochi Guu, Hare Nochi Guu, Jungle Hare Nochi Guu, Haré and Guu

Haré+Guu is a manga created by Renjuuro Kindaichi note  for Square Enix's primary manga magazine Monthly Shonen GanGan, where it was serialized from 1997 to 2002.

The series later received an anime adaptation in 2001, directed by Tsutomu Mizushima in his second directorial outing, note  animated by Shin-Ei Animation of Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan fame and broadcast on TV Tokyo. It was followed by 2 OVA's, Haré+Guu DELUXE and Haré+Guu FINAL.

A sequel manga, Hareguu, ran in Monthly Shonen GanGan from 2003 to 2009.

The series follows Haré, a boy who lives in a jungle village with his mother Weda, who is still rather young and somewhat of an alcoholic. Life is good in the jungle, and Haré is a happy boy, until the day a monster eats him. He wakes up the next morning, uneaten and in his own bed. While he is wondering if it was all a dream, Weda announces that she has adopted a little girl named Guu. With her pink hair, shining eyes, and sweet smile, Guu charms Haré's mother — but when Weda's back is turned, Guu becomes a scowling dark presence that frightens Haré. Not only that, she is capable of swallowing anything she takes a fancy to — whole bananas, live birds, even people and landscapes — and Haré discovers that anything Guu swallows is still alive inside her, in a completely different world...

Haré's life turns into an endless parade of torments by Guu as he tries to keep her out of trouble. This is all made rather difficult by the wide array of paranormal abilities she possesses, the bizarre supernatural events that happen around her, and her enjoyment in toying with Haré's neurosis.

Despite the apparent horror overtones, this is actually a rather wild and surreal comedy, kind of like the Cthulhu Mythos as written by Mel Brooks or perhaps Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker. It's filled with sight gags and absurdities (the "primitive" jungle village, for instance, is filled with all manner of conveniences such as a public address system and video games). Still, there are serious elements hidden behind the comedy — for instance, Haré is almost 10, and his mother is only 24, and he worries about why she moved to the jungle village. A severe Mood Whiplash results when it turns out Weda got pregnant ten years ago by a character who comes back, making Haré realize he's been a bastard child all this time.

The Japanese title of the series, Jungle wa Itsumo Hare nochi Guu, is a rather elaborate pun that can be read several different ways, due to different readings of some of the words:

  • In the Jungle was Always Hare but then came Guu
  • The Jungle was Always Nice, Then Came Guu
  • The Jungle Is Always Sunny or Hungry

and the most obscure, a pun on a common phrase in Japanese weather forecasts:

  • The Jungle Is Always Clear, With A Chance of Showers
  • The Jungle is Always Clear, With Scattered Guu

(where "Hare" means "clear" and "Guu" means "showers").

Any way you read it, it means Guu is turning Haré's life upside down.


Haré+Guu provides examples of:

  • Adaptation Expansion: The anime generally expands upon the manga, adding many scenes. Examples include:
    • Episode 11 (the Beach Episode) extends the scene where Guu rescues Hare on the open seas, adding an Evangelion-parody sequence with a giant Guu rising from the water and tipping over an aircraft carrier. Additionally, the entire first half of the episode (showing the villagers deciding to go to the beach during a heat wave, and their travel by bus) is original, since in the original manga, the beach chapter came in the middle of the City arc.
    • In Episode 18, the entire extended Aliens parody sequence (where Hare and Dr. Clive hide from Dama, who acts like a Xenomorph) is original to the anime. In the manga, Dama shows up very briefly, glances into the house and immediately leaves.
    • The entire second half of Episode 20 (the snow episode), where the benign snow turns into a blizzard, leaving all the students trapped in the school, is original. In the manga, the chapter ended with a short gag where Hare wished it would snow every day, and Guu obliged, to the point where all the villagers caught a cold.
  • Balloon Belly:
    • In episode 14, in Hare's Imagine Spot, Guu gets a bloated belly as he imagines her devouring all the servants from Weda's mansion.
    • She also displays one in FINAL episode 2, after briefly swallowing everyone in the school park.
    • In episode 19, Hare lies down in bed with a bloated belly after he's forced to eat the prodigious breakfast Bell has prepared.
  • Bears Are Bad News: In Episode #9, a bear beat up Weda pretty badly and Guu had to transform into her older form to defeat him by wrestling.
  • Bilingual Bonus: In episode 7, they show a book from Dr. Clive's library in German with an transcript from a lecture about the comparison of student stipends in Japan and in Germany.
  • Bizarre Dream Rationalization:
    • People swallowed and later released by Guu often rationalize their experience as a dream. For example, in Episode 2, Guu eats the other students in the class; they later turn up fine, all talking about what they think was a crazy shared dream. A similar thing happens when, in the sequel manga, Guu swallows Hare's cousin, who later recalls having a "dream" about spending time with some odd people.
    • In Episode 7, Hare and Dr. Clive get their bodies switched. The next day, when everything's back to normal, Dr. Clive assumes that everything that happened earlier was just a dream.
  • But You Were There, and You, and You: In FINAL Episode 5, Hare ends up in a RPG game world inside Guu's stomach. All the NPCs in the game have the appearances of characters from the outside world. Guu explains that the population of the RPG world is based only on people she has seen and met. A similar thing happens in the sequel manga, when Hare goes into Guu's stomach and sees it turned into a medieval Japan-like world inhabited by NPCs with his friends' faces.
  • Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: The bank robber in Episode 23 seems to think that he's playing a video game, referring to things such as "fighting a boss" (confronting Robert) and "casting a shield spell" (taking a hostage).
  • Combat Tentacles: A mild example: Guu often extends her fingerless arms dozens of feet to corral Haré whenever he tries to run away from her shenanigans. She's punched him a few times the same way, too.
  • Comedic Spanking: Haré and the island doctor switch bodies thanks to Guu. When they return to normal, after Haré finds out the Doctor actually is very hard-working, he finds the nasty surprise that he has abused being a kid with some of the island women, who promptly take Haré away. We hear some smacking sounds and then we see Haré lying on the ground, with his pants pulled down to reveal his red butt.
  • Couch Gag: In Guu Deluxe, Haré says something different each time during his super-fast part of the theme song.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Dama, the insane old barber lady, has some kinda hidden martial art skills and superpowers, which she used to fight the bank robber and save Weda, after she threw herself off a cliff, so the bank robber wouldn't murder Haré.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Guu is perhaps the living embodiment of this trope, as she almost never stops snarking. Even when she does, she talks in the exact same tone of voice.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: When Weda came back from the city back to jungle with its tropical climate, she stripped down to her underwear and her being very sexy caused a few guys too busy staring at her to run into each other.
  • Eye Catch: Each episode in FINAL has an eye catch between its two halves. These always feature a character making a small dance and saying "eye catch!".
  • Fountain of Youth: One episode features Weda and Dr. Clive being made into children by Guu, and Haré has to take care of them for a day as they rapidly grow back up.
  • Gender Bender: In one of the story arcs of Hareguu, Guu switches the sexes of everyone in the world (with nobody except for Hare and Guu remembering their old sex). A few of the characters (most notably Gupta and Lavenna) stay the opposite sex even after Guu changes everyone back.
  • Grievous Harm with a Body: Gupta threw a liana in Guu's face, after which Guu retaliated by throwing Haré in his face. A couple minutes later, Gupta did use Haré the same way as Guu did.
  • Homage: To Aliens, of all things, complete with ominous motion tracker beeping and Haré taking the role of Hicks nervously checking the ceiling passages.
  • Informed Ability: Weda is supposedly a very skilled hunter, but we never get to see any of that.
  • In the Dreaming Stage of Grief: In Episode 20 Hare, left out in the blizzard, hungry and exhausted and losing strength, starts telling himself that this must all be a bad dream and that he's about to wake up in his home, to a breakfast feast.
  • Invisible Parents: Weda's father doesn't get any screentime (at least none except a few flashbacks with his face not shown), because he was an asshole towards Weda by driving her away, after she became pregnant with Haré.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Parodied in FINAL Episode 5, where Hare finds himself in a RPG game world. Guu recommends that he get some money from a chest in a random house, which he does, only to get attacked by the owner and beaten up for stealing.
  • Lower-Deck Episode: The second half of episode 4 of the Final OVA focuses solely on Ravenna, and shows how all the odd things happening in the jungle look from her perspective.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Shortly after their reunion, Dr Clive asks Weda who Haré's father is. She tells him point blank that it's him. The Bad Doctor himself was unaware, but twigged once Weda reminded him of what their previous relationship had been like. Haré does not react well to this revelation; the Doctor handles it only marginally better.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Gupta and Guu started throwing stuff at each other (including people (Haré) and animals), until Guu tried to thow a giant man-eating flower and Gupta ran.
  • Mental Time Travel: Hare ends up doing this in Chapter 31 of Hareguu, where his consciousness goes back in time, and ends up in his body back when he was five years old. The "original" Hare from that time is implied to be unconscious while present-day-Hare is controlling his body.
  • Mood Whiplash: Episode 20 starts light-hearted and happy, with snow suddenly falling in the jungle (courtesy of Guu, of course) and all the students having fun building snowmen and tossing snowballs... then the snow turns into a blizzard, and the episode takes on a dark turn as everyone get trapped in the school and start slowly going insane, with Hare forced to head out into the blizzard to get help.
  • No Ontological Inertia: In the final chapters of Hareguu, once Guu vanishes, all the changes she's done to the world are reset — gender-switched people go back to normal, the inhabitants of her stomach reappear in the real world, etc. (and nobody except for Hare remembers her existence).
  • Nosebleed: This is Bell's most frequent gag toward an apparent crush over Weda... and she drains BUCKETS of them!
  • Only Sane Man: Haré feels like this often, especially when the rest of the village takes the oddities that pop up in stride.
    "Why are all the people around me slightly demented like this?" —Haré, episode 3
  • Paranoia Gambit: While Guu starts out messing with Haré directly, as he grows wise to her ways she moves more towards simply doing nothing and letting Haré drive himself into escalating paranoia over what he imagines she might do.
  • Parody: Combat video games, Power Rangers (Wendee Lee has voiced tons of characters in the actual show), and even high school anime and soap operas.
  • Reality Warper: This is basically Guu's shtick. Anything she wants will happen, no exceptions, no matter how crazy it is.
  • Recursive Canon: In episode #6, while Guu is watching the TV, Hare is reading the manga that the anime is adapted from, as seen by the cover.
  • Really Fond of Sleeping: Leji the school teacher typically tries to make the school days revolve around naps. His name is a Meaningful Name as it sounds like the Japanese pronunciation of "Lazy".
  • Retcon: The Final OVA involves Weda's siblings hiring assassins to kill her because they're after her inheritance. The opening scenes of the OVA explicitly show the siblings grimly reading Weda's father's will and calling an assassin. However, the later Hareguu manga reveals that Weda's siblings are perfectly nice people who weren't involved with the assassination at all; the actual culprit was Hare's cousin.
  • Rule of Funny: Guu can basically do anything, all of which is used for the purpose of being funny. And freaking out Haré.
  • Running Gag:
    • Guu doing something seemingly caring, friendly or helpful towards Hare, with Hare thinking about her warmly... only to reveal that she was actually trolling him yet again.
    • Rain pours every time Guu's chaotic plans are complete and starts their mental breakdown on Haré. Usually at the end of an episode. Lampshaded, as Guu almost always opens an umbrella right before it does. Also a case of Meaningful Name or Bilingual Bonus, since (as mentioned above) Guu's name can be read to mean "showers."
  • Share the Male Pain: After Dama, the crazy barber lady, hit the bank robber in his cojones, any male present winced in pain, including Weda's newborn son Ame.
  • Shout-Out:
    • In episode #1, Haré is playing a RPG whose combat mode is an obvious Final Fantasy reference.
    • In episode #9, Haré plays Psycho Fighter III (Street Fighter with its Serial Numbers Filed Off).
    • In episode #18, the device Guu produces to track the location of Dama is quite obviously a Sega Game Gear.
  • The Speechless: Two of the students. They're always seen in the background, and whenever one of them would speak, something seems to prevent us from hearing it.
  • Spell My Name With An S: Weda/Ueda, Leiji/Lazy, Hale/Hare, Goo/Guu, Uighur/Wiggly. In the manga, her name is spelled "Goo" in English.
  • Spoof Aesop: Frequently. And of course... it's usually Guu's doing.
    Guu: And today's lesson is... no underwear.
  • Stable Time Loop: One of these happens in Chapter 31 of Hareguu. Hare finds a photo of himself as a child, in Weda's father's safe. Guu sends him to the past via Mental Time Travel so he can find out how the photo came to exist, and in the process of this travel, he ends up causing his photo to be taken. The chapter ends with Hare confused over whether the photo or the time travel came "first".
  • Super Mode: If pushed, Guu can transform into a much older, much more serious-looking, goddess-like version of herself. This happens very rarely and always heralds a serious asskicking.
  • The City: Early on, an unnamed city explicitly based on New York City in the manga where some local characters are originally from is referenced by them as casually as the similarly unnamed neighboring village, implying they're fairly close to each other. However, a later episode shows us Hale and Weda taking a twelve hour flight to visit a distance big enough to possibly explain why the city-dwellers have a completely different skin tone.
  • Teen Pregnancy: Weda, who is only 24. Though it turns out that it's actually played for drama; the implications of her age and how young she was when she became pregnant are, yes, taken seriously. The second time is shown not to be a big problem due to the whole village, Haré and Dr. Clive supporting her and her mother and even Bell, who has an lesbian crush on her, give the blessing to her wedding with Clive.
  • Translator Microbes: As the Hareguu manga reveals, inside Guu's stomach people can understand each other's thoughts, which is how Hare can communicate with Seiichi and Tomoyo. The effect even lingers after Hare leaves her stomach, allowing him to talk to Seiichi and Tomoyo when they meet in the outside world.
  • Trapped in TV Land: In FINAL Episode 5, Hare goes into Guu's stomach, set up as a RPG game. The entire episode is one parody after another of Japanese RPG tropes.
  • Trauma Inn: Parodied in FINAL Episode 5, where Hare finds himself in a RPG game world. Hare and his party head to an inn and lie down in beds, the lights go out and back on, and everyone get out of their beds and comment on the nice sleep... everyone but Hare, who protests that the lights literally just went off for a second and he didn't even begin to sleep.
  • Vomit Discretion Shot: When Guu boxed Haré in the belly to shut him up, he puked, but the puke was pixelized and his retching was replaced by some nice music.
  • Weirdness Censor:
    • Somehow, Guu's incredible abilities pass unremarked by anyone except Hare (which Hare sometimes lampshades). It helps that Hare usually tries to hide Guu's weird abilities from other people, rather than exposing them. When someone does notice Guu doing something impossible, they brush it off as a hallucination, a magic trick, etc. Probably justified by Guu's Mind Control abilities.
    • A notable example is Episode 21, where Guu takes the role of the plane's captain and stewardess; Weda sees her directly both times, and her only reaction is to be amazed that this woman looks and sounds so much like Guu.
  • Weird World, Weird Food: The characters love to eat pokute, animals with human-like faces, and manda, fruit with human-like faces, arms, and blood-red filling.
  • Welcome to Corneria: Parodied in FINAL Episode 5, where Hare is in a RPG game world. Hare meets a Trauma Inn proprietor who speaks only in fixed phrases, and becomes annoyed that the NPC isn't even listening to him.

Alternative Title(s): Hare And Guu, Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu, Hare Guu

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