Return of the Molcars

Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School (PUI PUI モルカー DRIVING SCHOOL) is the second season of the Pui Pui Molcar anime. And, like the first season, this season contains 12 2-minute episodes. But, unlike the first season, this season has a theme.

As you’ve probably surmised, the theme of this season is driving school. But, what does that mean? Are the molcars attending a school to learn how to be racing molcars? That’s what I initially hoped. However, that’s unfortunately not the case. In this season, some of the original molcars must attend a remedial driving school.

Specifically, Potato, Shiromo, Teddy, Choko, and Abbey return — as do some side characters. But, why are our molcar heroes in remedial driving school? Have their molcar antics finally caught up with them? The answer to that question is yes.

In the first season, the molcars got up to all kinds of hijinks. But, they never did too much damage. In fact, they often turned out to be heroes by the end of each episode. But, in the first episode of this season, they destroyed an entire city block. Thanks to their incompetence, multiple buildings were left in ruins.

Luckily for the molcars, they (and their drivers) escaped prison. Instead, their sentence was to graduate from a remedial driving school. And this school seems to be far stricter than anything the molcars have been through before. It’s safe to say most of these molcars wouldn’t be on the road if this was their original test.

Now, before I move on to discussing the driving school in more detail, I need to drop a bombshell. Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School isn’t as good as the original season. It’s still good. But, it failed to recreate the magic of season 1.

Remedial Driving School

So, what’s wrong with Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School? Why isn’t it as good as the first season? Well, one of my main issues with it is the setting. Almost the entire season takes place on driving school grounds. It’s just not a very interesting setting.

There’s one episode that stands out for taking place elsewhere. In it, the student molcars take a trip to the beach and traverse an underwater tunnel. That was a pretty good episode. But, other than that, they were all kind of similar.

Often, the episodes simply involve the molcars learning a specific driving lesson. For example, there’s an episode in which they learn to ignore distractions while on the road. Distractions include things like vegetable stands (shown below). A respectable molcar should be able to avoid the temptation of such obstacles while on the road.

To me, what made the first season of Pui Pui Molcar so good was how every episode was unique. There was a cat episode, a zombie episode, an Indiana Jones episode, a time-travel episode, etc. The season as a whole didn’t have a cohesive story. But, it didn’t need one to be entertaining.

Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School attempts to have a narrative. And that doesn’t work for a few reasons. It cuts out the wacky scenarios we got in the first season. Each episode only has 2 minutes to work with. And there’s no dialogue. Those last 2 points go hand-in-hand.

Since there isn’t much run time and there’s no dialogue, that limits the story that can be told. So, what we’re left with is a very basic story about the molcars relearning how to drive properly. If we get a third season, I hope it goes back to being an episodic series.

Peter the Molcar

There are 2 new characters introduced in this season of the anime. The first is the driving school instructor. He’s a human, so he’s inherently not as interesting as the molcars. But, he’s a major character of the season, so he’s worth mentioning.

The driving instructor is very strict and doesn’t approve of any of the molcars at first. He finds something wrong with them all, whether it’s how they act or how they look. And one of his first actions is to make them look the part of respectable molcars.

Peter is the other new character. He’s a molcar, so he’s automatically a better character than the driving instructor. Peter is a special molcar. The others each have their problems. But Peter’s entire existence is a problem. It doesn’t seem like he can do anything right. And, we even see that he’s afraid of other traffic.

Speaking of Peter being afraid of traffic, the scene in which we find this out is very good. It’s probably my favorite scene of the season. I don’t know what episode it was in. But, if you watch Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School, you’ll know it when you see it.

I’ll also say that Peter isn’t the worst of the main molcars. His definable characteristics are unique enough to make him stand out. Meanwhile, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Choko. And despite Potato and Shiromo being the main 2 molcars, they’re pretty generic.

Teddy’s defining characteristic is that he eats trash — that hasn’t changed in this season. And Abbey is the itasha (痛車) molcar. In case you aren’t sure what itasha means, it’s a combination of the words for “pain” and “car.” It refers to cringey anime-wrapped cars like Abbey was in season 1.

Conclusion

In the end, I gave Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School a 7/10. It was still a good anime as far as shorts go. But, it was nowhere near as good as the first season. And the general consensus seems to agree with me. The majority of viewers preferred season 1.

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Series Overview

Pui Pui Molcar (PUI PUI モルカー) is a short-form comedy anime series that’s allegedly aimed at kids. As a 26-year-old, I can assure you that it’s fun for all ages. It’s also extremely easy to binge the entire series due to its length.

There are 12 episodes of Molcar and they’re each between 2 – 3 minutes in length. That means you can watch the entire series in under 30 minutes, which is exactly what I did this morning.

As for the content of Molcar, it takes place in a world in which guinea pigs have evolved to fill the role of cars. They have wheels, windows, and people can enter their car-like interiors. In this world, molcars have replaced cars in daily life.

The biggest difference between a molcar and a regular car, though, is that molcars have sentience and wills of their own. When a person hops in a molcar to go to the store, they don’t really seem to have complete control over the molcar. Their molcar may decide to do something else instead.

That fact is really what causes all of the molcar antics throughout the series. Molcars get distracted by food, they get scared, and they typically just do whatever they want. For example, in the final episode (which I think is the worst episode), a molcar throws a house party while its owner is asleep.

Oh, and another thing about Pui Pui Molcar is that there’s no dialogue at all. The molcars make sounds sometimes, and there’s a soundtrack, but there’s no dialogue. Everything the molcars are thinking is expressed through their actions and visible emotions. For guinea pig-car hybrids, molcars are pretty expressive.

Animation

Initially, I was a bit surprised that Molcar was considered an anime by MyAnimeList. 99% of the animation in the series is stop motion animation, not drawn or CGI animation. I’m pretty sure in the past, MAL has excluded stop motion from their database. I believe this happened with an episode of Near Death!! Ekoda-chan.

From what I remember, the episode of Ekoda-chan was determined to not be “anime” because the stop motion animated episode featured live actors. However, Molcar actually does the same thing, albeit to a lesser extent.

While the molcars themselves are the main characters, there are also humans within this world. I mean, who else would be driving the molcars? Oftentimes, these humans are simply toys that are animated in stop motion like the molcars. But sometimes we get shots of them inside the molcars and they’re actual people.

Interestingly, even when live actors are used for these molcar interior shots, they’re animated with stop motion — as is a cat in one episode.

Now, you might be thinking that stop motion animation is going to look a bit weird. I know a lot of people are turned off by anime that use different art or animation styles. I’m the same way at times. If an anime is entirely CGI animated, I tend to skip it.

But, the stop motion animation in Pui Pui Molcar is actually extremely well done. Even the vast majority of the effects are done with stop motion. For example, cotton is used to create smoke and blur effects that honestly look really good.

Also, I think the fact that the molcars walk instead of roll on their wheels is a great touch. For starters, it’s just funnier that way. However, I think this also adds to the motion of the series in a positive way. If the wheels simply rolled, they wouldn’t be taking complete advantage of the unique qualities of stop motion animation.

Best Anime of the Year?

Pui Pui Molcar might unironically be my pick for best anime of the year (2021). Today, I was going to rank all of the 2021 anime I watched on a tier list. But I decided to put that off until next week so I could watch and review Molcar first, and then include it in the tier list as well.

It’s a good thing I decided to do that because of how highly I rate this anime. I don’t think Molcar is perfect, though. I haven’t given it a 10/10. But it’s definitely within my top 3 anime of the year, which changes my Top 5 Anime of 2021 post I put out at the end of last year.

I’m not going to go back and change that post now since I watched Molcar in 2022 despite it being a 2021 anime. However, I’d like to lay out my argument for why I think Molcar should be in the discussion surrounding the best anime of the year in this section.

First, I believe Molcar’s short run time is a huge reason why it’s good. I’d love for there to be Molcar content, and hopefully, there will be a second season in the future. But it’s definitely not something I would want to watch a full season of if the episodes were normal or even half-length. It’s the right length for the material.

Second, Molcar is really funny. I wouldn’t say it’s laugh-out-loud funny. But it’s funny. I think my top 3 favorite scenes are the power-up scene in the race episode, the Indiana Jones scene in the carwash episode, and the itasha scene in the superhero episode (pictured above).

And lastly, Pui Pui Molcar is just a very creative series. It’s a lot of fun to watch because of how creative the basic idea of the show is.

Conclusion

Overall, I give Pui Pui Molcar a 9/10, which puts it on par with other top anime from 2021 such as Mushoku Tensei and Sonny Boy. If you think Molcar looks like fun, I highly recommend watching it because it’s such a small time commitment.

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My review of Pui Pui Molcar: Driving School is available now.