Keroppi in the Big Adventure

Kamezuki★ 4

“Kero Kero Keroppi no Dai Bouken” is a Sanrio short for kids that shows the titular Keroppi and his friends journeying to the tanuki Pokopon’s village and then retrieving his stolen bellybutton. Unlike other Sanrio shorts I’ve seen so far, the plot in this one doesn’t really add up. Keroppi dreams about having a belly button because his father, a doctor, told him about the existence of belly buttons. His father had treated a “bear” (actually a tanuki) that had a belly button recently, so Keroppi decides to journey all the way over to the tanuki’s village with his friends to see the belly button. Howdoes he know where the village is? And why is it so far away? Who knows. But when he gets there, another tanuki rushes up to tell him that Pokopon (the tanuki in question)’s belly button disappeared after a thunderstorm recently, and now he’s so depressed that he won’t come out of his room. Apparently, it was stolen. The tanuki tells Keroppi who stole it and where they’re located, so Keroppi and his friends take it upon themselves to retrieve the belly button. If that tanuki knew all of this already, why didn’t she and the other villagers go after the culprits themselves, instead of relying on a bunch of strangers she just met to do so? The story gets weirder from there, but I won’t spoil the ending. Anyway, the story was odd, and I thought that maybe that had to do with the fact that I watched the dubbed version. So I looked up the synopsis for the Japanese version, and it’s quite different, at least for the beginning part (I couldn’t find a summary in Japanese of the entire episode). My guess is that the story makes more sense in the original Japanese. Technical aspects-wise, the animation and voice acting (dubbed) weren’t that good, and the music was forgettable. I wouldn’t recommend watching this short unless you can find the Japanese version, which may have a more coherent plot.