Anime / Nangoku Shonen Papuwa Kun

Mbaba mbamba mbabaaa!

Nangoku Shonen Papuwa-kun (南国少年パプワくん; literally Papuwa the Tropical Boy) is manga Gag Series written and illustrated by Ami Shibata that was serialized in Monthly Shonen Gangan from April 1991 to June 1995.

The series begins with Shintaro, the top-ranked member of the world's most powerful assassination organization the Ganma Army, deserting from the group after stealing the Blue Hiseki, a priceless Artifact of Power, in the hope of selling it on the black market and living off the riches with his younger brother Kotaro. While escaping from the Ganma Army along the southern seas, his boat is destroyed and he ends up stranded on Papuwa Island, a strange and mysterious tropical paradise inhabited by a host of Talking Animals. His unconscious body is found by Papuwa, a young boy and the island's sole human inhabitant, who takes the Blue Hiseki from his possession and uses it as an ornament on the collar of his pet dog Chappy. When Shintaro comes to, he attempts to reclaim the Blue Hiseki only to find himself completely outmatched by the improbably strong Papuwa.

With no clear means of escape, Shintaro is forced to become Papuwa's servant and wait on him hand and foot until he can find a way to take back the Blue Hiseki for himself. Along with having to deal with Papuwa, Chappy, and the myriad of other weird creatures on Papuwa Island, Shintaro must fight off various assassins sent by the Ganma Army to dispose of him.

An Animated Adaptation was broadcast on TV Asahi from October 1992 to October 1993 over 42 episodes. The anime series adapts all of the manga's first half, with the addition of a few original stories.

A sequel series, simply titled PAPUWA, ran in Monthly Shonen Gangan from 2002 to 2008. It received an anime adaptation which ran from 2003 to 2004.

Tropes Featured

• Abhorrent Admirer: Shintaro is relentlessly hounded by Itou the hermaphroditic snail and Tanno the crossdressing fish soon after arriving on Papuwa Island. Along with being non-human, the two are also quite hideous and very aggressive in their pursuit of him.
• Adaptation Expansion: While the manga begins with Shintaro already at sea with the Blue Hiseki in his possession, the anime includes a brief action sequence showing him fighting off various members of the Ganma Army before making his escape. Miyagi, Tottori, and Arashiyama are also incorporated into several plots that they weren't featured in in the manga.
• Aerith and Bob: The series' human cast includes character with relatively ordinary Japanese names like Shintaro and Kotaro, uncommon but still not particularly eyebrow-raising ones like Miyagi, Tottori and Arashiyami, and downright bizarre Gratuitous English ones like Magic, Service, Harem, Liquid, and Loser. The two that take the cake are Magic's two subordinates: Tiramisu and Chocolate Romance.
• Almighty Janitor: Shintaro is the world's greatest assassin, but is forced to work as Papuwa's maid upon being shipwrecked on Papuwa Island.
• Archnemesis Dad: Shintaro's father Magic is the leader of the Ganma Army and preeminent Big Bad of the series. While Shintaro naturally hates him, he is actually a Doting Parent whose love for his son borders on romantic attraction.
• Art Evolution: The first two chapters of the manga feature a much more simplistic and flatter style before shifting to a more detailed one. It undergoes a second one at around its halfway point; becoming even more detailed and less Akira Toriyama-like.
• Artificial Human: It is eventually revealed that the Red and Blue Hiseki can create human life spontaneously, with both Magic and Papuwa's ancestors descending from them. Besides them, they also created Shintaro, Jan, and Us to serve as their guardians and heralds.
• Assassin Outclassin': Shintaro is the best assassin in the world's most powerful assassination organization, yet he is utterly outclassed by Papuwa in a fight. The other assassins sent by the Ganma Army fare little better against him.
• Author Appeal: As Ami Shibata's debut manga, this series features several qualities that would go on to become her trademarks, including:
  • Numerous gags relating to regional references about various places in Japan and incredibly lame wordplay puns.
  • A cast populated by handsome, muscular men, Funny Animals, and virtually no women.
  • Near-constant jokes about homosexuality, either through Homoerotic Subtext or outright acknowledgement.
• Back from the Dead: Service's dead best friend Jan is revived from the dead in a new body by the Red Hiseki, which Shintaro's spirit later fuses with to return to life himself. By the epilogue, the Red Hiseki has created a new body for Jan so that both can go back to living independently of each other.
• Big Bad: Magic, Shintaro's father and the leader of the Ganma Army, serves as this throughout the first half of manga and all of the anime. By the time of the Halfway Plot Switch, he begins to lose ground and the title is passed around between him, White Shintaro, and Us.
• Big Brother Attraction: Inverted; Shintaro is positively obsessed with his younger brother Kotaro, to the point of getting a Nosebleed when admiring a picture of him. The other characters regularly mock him for his blatant brother complex.
• Big Brother Instinct: Shintaro's primary motivation throughout the series is to take his younger brother away from the violent Gunma Army and live in peace together with him.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Played for Laughs after Jan is revealed to be alive. After several chapters of both Service and Takamatsu repeatedly praising him for his character, with the former's backstory even hinging on his guilt at being involved in his death, neither is enthused by just how stupid he ends up being. Service at one point chooses to pretend like Jan is still dead right in front of him because he refuses to acknowledge that his beloved friend could be such an idiot.
  • Played more seriously in the case of Luzar, whom both Service and Takamatsu admired as a loving Big Brother Mentor but is eventually revealed to have been much more ruthless than either realized and the actual person responsible for Jan's death.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The Ganma Army seems to be made up entirely of men with extremely bizarre and eccentric personalities but genuine ability. Many of them also utilize fighting techniques that are just as weird as they are, including magical calligraphy pens and weather-predicting geta.
• Butt-Monkey: Primarily Shintaro, who is forced to constantly put up with the antics of the rest of the cast, but virtually every human character that sets foot on Papuwa Island is bound to undergo repeated humiliations.
• Canine Companion: Chappy is Papuwa's dog and inseparable companion. The two always appear together and Papuwa insists that he is his friend, not his master.
• Captain Ersatz: Papuwa is identical to Dragon Quest III's Hero as depicted by Ami Shibata in her Dragon Quest 4koma Theater except wearing a grass skirt.
• Captain Ethnic: A variant. All of the assassins from the Gunma Army outside of Shintaro are named after various locations around Japan, speak with accents associated with those locations, and have special abilities derived from customs connected to those locations.
• Cast Full of Gay: Along with the Creepy Crossdresser duo of Ittou and Tanno's mutual obsession with Shintaro, nearly every single character affiliated with the Gunma Army has overt Homoerotic Subtext with at least one other character, and blushing and nosebleeds run abound when they're all together during the manga's second half.
• Cast Full of Pretty Boys: With the exceptions of Papuwa, Kotaro, Kuriko, and Tsugaru Joker, all of whom are children, every single humanoid character is a strikingly handsome man. While the early chapters make it so that these characters rarely appear at the same time, the story's second half pushes the Funny Animal cast Out of Focus in favor of being filled with handsome men.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The gags never let up even as the story becomes more serious, meaning very dramatic scenes are often buttoned by humor and vice versa.
• Cerebus Syndrome: While remaining a Gag Series throughout, the story becomes more serialized and plot-driven from the introduction of Service onward, taking on more and more qualities of a Fighting Series as it continues.
• Chromosome Casting: The series' cast is almost entirely male, with the only humanoid female that ever shows up being Kuriko. Even including the various animal characters, the number of explicitly female characters that aren't suggested to actually be crossdressing men can be counted on one hand.
• Cloudcuckooland: Papuwa Island is home to hundreds of Funny Animals both mundane and fantastical, all of whom can talk and almost all of whom are total weirdos. While the soldiers of the Ganma Army are nearly as weird, it's eventually revealed that they were created by the same force that made the island.
• Comically Invincible Hero: Papuwa is effortlessly stronger than every single one of the Gunma Army's assassins and disposes of each of them quickly whenever he's finally pushed into engaging them in combat. This serves as a major reason for him falling Out of Focus after the story undergoes Cerebus Syndrome and begins placing more emphasis on fights — it's hard for there to be any dramatic tension with him around.
• Creepy Crossdresser: While Itou is explicitly a hermaphrodite, Tanno is a male fish who wears lipstick and fishnets and acts like just as much of an obsessive stalker towards Shintaro.
• Doting Parent: Magic obsesses over Shintaro just as much as Shintaro does Kotaro.
• Dull Surprise: Papuwa is completely unflappable, and reacts to literally everything with the same wall-eyed expression regardless of the emotion he's ostensibly expressing. Further exaggerated in the manga, where he's never even shown opening his mouth on screen until he bids Shintaro farewell in the final chapter.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference:
  • Shintaro has less hair loose from his ponytail during the first two chapters of the manga than he does for the rest of the series.
  • Miyagi wears an army jacket during his debut, whereas he wears a tanktop in all of his following appearances.
  • Arashiyama wears Saint Seiya-esque armor during his debut before switching to a cloak and fighting gi in all of his later appearances. Unlike the above two, this is actually acknowledged in-universe by him finding the tropical heat of Papuwa island too much for him to bear while wearing the armor.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In addition to Playing with Fire, Arashiyama fights by throwing otabe at his enemies during his first appearance. He never does this again in any of his following ones.
• Enemy Mine: Upon learning that his uncle Service is on Papuwa Island, Shintaro recruits the aid of Arashiyama, Miyagi and Tottori in the hope that their combined powers will stand a chance at defeating him. They don't, but it leads to a domino effect that causes the other three to perform a true Heel–Face Turn after Shintaro dies.
• Enemy Without: Inverted. It's eventually revealed that Shintaro began life as a fake personality created by Us, the guardian of the Blue Hiseki, as part of a plot to destroy the Red Clan. By the end of the manga, Shintaro has gained enough will of his own to force Us out of his body and act as a separate entity.
• Flanderization:
  • Gunma is established as a Gadgeteer Genius whose talents are mired by his immature personality during his debut appearance. In all of his future appearances, his intelligence is more or less completely forgotten about and he is instead depicted as a idiotic Manchild who is utterly helpless without Takamatsu's assistance.
  • The anime heightens Miyagi, Tottori, and Arashiyama's Goldfish Poop Gang status by including them as antagonists in many more plots than they are in the manga.
• Foil: Kuri is essentially Papuwa's polar opposite. While he's a young boy from a tropical southern island, she's a young girl from the North Pole.
• Forced Transformation: Nagoya Willow is transformed into a bat after accidentally ingesting a potion he meant to give to Shintaro, and spends the rest of the series stuck as one. He undergoes an Unexplained Recovery at the end of the manga in time to serve as Mr. Exposition for the final fate of the residents of Papuwa Island.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Even after becoming allies, Shintaro, Miyagi, and Tottori are all more often than not annoyed by Arashiyama's clinginess.
• Gag Lips: Both Itou and Tanno possess enormous, detailed lips to denote them as Creepy Crossdressers. The former also has an Overly-Long Tongue as a Shout-Out to The Rolling Stones.
• Gag Series: Ami Shibata got her start as a Yonkoma artist, and the series remains heavily gag-driven even as it becomes more serious. Slapstick, puns, and nonsequiturs appear constantly from beginning to end.
• Genre Shift: The manga goes from a Gag Series with elements of a Fighting Series to being both in equal parts by its end, becoming less episodic and focusing more on drama between its human characters rather than antics with its animal ones.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: After their initial defeats, Miyagi, Tottori, and Arashiyama reappear occasionally to attempt to take revenge against Shintaro, only to inevitably do even worse than before. The anime emphasizes their status as this even moreso, with the former two regularly appearing in episodes based on plots they did not feature in at all in the manga.
• Happy Dance: Papuwa and Chappy engage in a Shittorotto dance when excited.
• Manchild: While most of the Ganma Army's assassins could qualify as this to an extent, Gunma takes the cake. He's a grown man in his twenties who still writes in a diary, cries like a baby when he doesn't get his way, and needs his attendant Dr. Takamatsu to do virtually everything for him.
• Only Sane by Comparison: While Shintaro's a miserly grouch with a worrying obsession with his younger brother, he is by far the most rational character in the cast and serves as the long-suffering voice of reason to wacky humans and animals in equal measure.
• Out of Focus: Despite being the title character, Papuwa (and by extension Chappy) is mostly pushed into the background after the series undergoes Cerebus Syndrome and begins focusing more on the characters affiliated with the Gunma Army. While he still has some importance as The Heart who inspires kindness in the other characters, he contributes virtually nothing directly to the story throughout the entire second half.
• Parental Incest: A relatively G-rated example. Magic has a shrine dedicated to Shintaro in his quarters, sleeps with a handmade Shintaro plushie, and gets a nosebleed at the thought of being called Papa by him.
• She's All Grown Up: The manga's final chapter ends in a flash forward to Papuwa and Kuri as adults, with the former having grown into a strapping Hunk resembling Shintaro and the latter becoming a beautiful woman.
• Secondary Character Title: While Papuwa is the title character, it's Shintaro whose the protagonist. While they share the spotlight fairly evenly throughout the anime and the first half of the manga, Papuwa falls out of focus during the second half while Shintaro's backstory is explored in-depth.
• The Smurfette Principle: Kuri is the only humanoid female character to appear in the manga's entire run. Lessen somewhat in the anime, where human women occasionally appear in newly added Imagine Spots.