The extremely irritating Doctor Irabu is a character out of three novels (well, collections of short stories) written by Okuda Hideo, which were met with both critical and commercial success. Select stories around Doctor Irabu have been turned into feature films, a stage play, and an eleven-episode anime which was aired in Fuji-TV's prestigious "noitaminA" slot in December 2009.
Australian distributor Siren Visual is currently on a streak of releasing several recent "noitaminA" series on DVD in English-friendly versions, and "Welcome to Irabu's Office" is amongst them. So is it any good? Time for a review!
The Story:
It's the week before Christmas and a selection of people visit the psychiatrist Doctor Irabu at the hospital, hoping he'll be able to cure them from their mental problems. The ailments come in a variety of forms, from not being able to sleep to excessive fear, to having a permanent erection.
But over the course of the next days each patient discovers that Irabu himself is clearly not entirely sane, nor able to help them in any traditional manner. Visitors of Irabu's office apparently must do the healing themselves, and they have to do it by confronting their issues head-on...
Anime series which are aired by Fuji-TV as "noitaminA" ("Animation" backwards) tend to be aimed at a rather highbrow audience as opposed to adrenaline-addicted teens. This doesn't mean these series are not set up to be commercially successful, but they do often look very different from what you might expect from anime.
"Welcome to Irabu's Office" fits this description entirely. It's a funny series but not hilariously so. Lots of things happen yet there is no action set-piece to speak of. And the patients' stories are never really all that spectacular, ranging from mildly surprising to totally predictable. This means that for the young and restless there isn't much to hold on to here.
Yet for patient (haha) viewers the series as a whole shows a combination of profundity and levity which is quite unique. In a society as reserved and formal as Japan, people often have no socially acceptable outlets for their emotions and this can cause anxiety-based mental problems. Despite the fact that Doctor Irabu himself is a childish ego-maniacal fetishist and probably an embarrassment to the profession of psychiatrist, the diseases shown are treated seriously. There is a distinct difference between having mental problems and being mad, and this series nicely keeps pointing that out. At times a real psychiatrist even stops the show and addresses the audience, giving valid medical comments and on occasion he even chides the series for showing outdated methods or exaggerated symptoms!
The "multiple personality disorder" apparent in the series is reflected in its style of animation as well. "Welcome to Irabu's Office" uses a combination of crude hand-drawn sketches, 3D-cgi and manipulated live-action stills. The entire city of Tokyo looks just as wildly decorated with stripes and polka-dots as Doctor Irabu's office, and anyone not important to the story is shown as a moving corrugated cardboard cut-out. And the people that DO matter change heads at select moments: there are three completely different-looking Doctor Irabus depending on which mood he's in, while his patients tend to get shown with animal heads or as live-action stills each time their mental problems surface.
Normally in anime the voices are the only part where acting is required, but the inclusion of live-action footage and stills assure that the actors are recognizably shown here. One character who greatly benefits from this is nurse Mayumi, who is Doctor Irabu's rather gothic assistant whose primary job is to look bored yet enticing, administer giant vitamin-injections and offer scathing remarks. Described as an F-cupped beauty in the novels and performed by Eriko Sato in the stage play version, nurse Mayumi is played in this series by gravure idol (and "Mutant Girl Squad" member) Yumi Sugimoto. And she is very good. Instead of just being a visual joke or a male fantasy image, nurse Mayumi is also often the sole "voice of reason" and Yumi Sugimoto has the charisma and the icy stare necessary to nail this role.
All in all it takes some time to get accustomed to the visual coda used in this series, and in the beginning you get to wonder whether all this quirkiness is necessary or even useful. Strangely enough you do get used to it after a while, and after having seen a few episodes this jarring use of different styles seems totally natural.
In fact, as the series wraps up in the last episode it manages to make its point quite elegantly, and it left me satisfied.
Conclusion:
Although I initially considered "Welcome to Irabu's Office" the least strong of the "noitaminA" series I have seen, as I neared the end I truly started to warm to it. Some of the stories suffer from blandness but as a whole the series turns out to be more than just the sum of its parts. Coupled with a unique visual style this makes this anime good enough to easily recommend.
After "House of Five Leaves" and "The Tatami Galaxy" this is the third "noitaminA" series I've seen that was released on DVD by Siren Visual. And just like those other series this edition "Welcome to Irabu's Office" only features the original Japanese dub with English subtitles. I've mentioned this before: from a commercial point of view this is a risky decision by Siren Visual, but as "noitaminA" series can be considered as adult fare it makes sense not to wait several years for some other, bigger company to release English dubs for these titles.
Also, the two discs making up the series have been regionlocked to region 4 (Australia and New-Zeeland) so make sure your hardware can handle that if you plan on buying this title.
Siren Visual is aiming for Otaku with regionfree players and I hope they are successful as this will assure more of these "noitaminA" titles to be released quickly in the future.
Thankfully, again the image-quality is exemplary for DVD. The world in "Welcome to Irabu's Office" features many abstract sights in painfully bright colors, but the video on these discs has no problems with that.
Sound is fine as well with a solid Japanese 5.1 mix.
As for DVD-extras, this edition is barebones. You get the series and that's basically it, the only other items being trailers for "Welcome to Irabu's Office", "House of Five Leaves" and "The Tatami Galaxy". The trailer for "Welcome to Irabu's Office" is quite funny though as it shows the difficulties the marketing department encountered in selling the series' unique animation style.
The end result is... well, let's be nice and call it "honest'.
All in all this is another fine edition from Siren Visual. "Welcome to Irabu's Office" is presented plainly as-is, barebones but with excellent audio and video. For those collecting the different "noitaminA" anime series (or those who are just intrigued by this title) this edition comes much recommended.
Check out Siren Visual's anime catalogue here (link).