Welcome back to Multiversity Comics’ Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts reviews. This week there’s plaid, axes, and cats vomiting. Like, vomiting A LOT.
“Real Cats Wear Plaid”
Written by Bill Wolkoff
Directed by Chase Conley
1. The Burrow
The cold open gives us our first glimpse of where Kipo came from, and just as predicted back in episode one, everyone’s wearing jumpsuits. I know it’s not a big deal, but I like when design from an earlier episode reinforces plot points later on. This is also a point where the TV show diverges from its source material a bit, where Kipo was always in her iconic outfit, instead of discovering it when she ventures into a surface world clothing store. Whatever Radford Sechrist had envisioned of life in the burrow back when he was working on the comic, it’s clearly evolved in the show. Some things have remained exactly the same though, like the giant wooden spike that smashes into the Burrow and the giant eye staring in.
2. “Mutes”
OK, clearly I was wrong about mutes referring to mute mutants, since the Timbercats are explicitly called mutes and they most definitely talk. So mutes are just mutants then.
3. Yumyan Hammerpaw
So this is pretty clearly a reference to Paul Bunyan, which I know are those statues of a lumberjack in America and… well, that’s where my knowledge of that ends. For some reason I always thought those statues were like the mascot of some kind of flapjack store franchise. So this episode was sort of educational in a weird way. I’m guessing Bunyan was a legend for some reason, but the stories everyone told about him were ridiculously exaggerated and excessively masculine. Let’s check Wikipedia and see how right I am… OK, so that was a pretty good guess. Still, I get the feeling there’s probably more than a few jokes going over my head this episode. Thankfully, the cat puns still landed.
Also, the animation on Yumyan coming back down from the canopy was awesome.
4. Catterbrawl!
I know Timbercats are supposed to be lumberjacks, but the way they speak about their warriors, the songs they sing about them, the images of them carved in the roof of their eating hall… there’s a lot of viking in them too, and I got a lot more out of the viking stuff than I did the lumberjack stuff. The brawling and the drinking milk out of steins, even Kipo braiding Yumyan’s moustache like a viking. Plus, I like to think a lot of viking feasts ended with everyone vomiting too (though for different reasons, of course).
5. Kipo seeing things differently
Because that’s what this episode is all about. Kipo doesn’t jump to the same conclusions as everyone else, and sometimes that gets them in trouble and other times it gets them out of trouble. Either way, her looking for the humanity in even something as initially horrifying as Pierre is great at shaking everyone out of their patterns of behaviour. Kipo clearly believes the world’s a better place when people help each other out, and I can’t help wonder how much of that is from her upbringing in the Burrow and how much of that is just who Kipo is. The attitude of looking out just for yourself or your social group is clearly something Kipo’s not comfortable with, and it brings out the uglier aspects of people.
What did you think of this episode? Let me know in the comments and check back next Saturday for episode four.
