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When Anime Boston announced they would be premiering the RE:cycle of the PENGUINDRUM movies, I went ahead and did something I'd been meaning to do for a while but hadn't gotten around to: I watched the original Penguindrum anime. Theoretically, I could have made sense of these recap movies on their own, but that would require making sense of Penguindrum, an anime with a reputation for being strange and complex even by Kunihiko Ikuhara's standards. I figured watching the show first would be the best way to experience the story and to assess if any confusion experienced with the movies was due to editing or just the material itself.

These two movies are probably gonna be watched more by pre-existing fans than newcomers, so I'm not alone in watching RE:cycle of the PENGUINDRUM as essentially an excuse to rewatch Penguindrum. This isn't a Rebuild of Evangelion-style reinvention but basically, just the series condensed down to a little over four hours, with just a small bit of new footage as a treat. Even though I'd just finished the original series the day before the convention, I appreciated the RE:Cycle films as a rewatch, as it's interesting to re-experience the story of Penguindrum with full knowledge of the characters' secrets and what's going to happen to them.

About half of the new footage consists of a framing story, centering on Shoma and Kanba as kids visiting the Hole in The Sky library. They are greeted by Momoko in the penguin costume, who has a baby penguin with her and are guided to the story of “Mr. Frog Saves the Penguindrum” — which tells them what's destined to happen in their future, AKA the plot of the TV anime. This new material integrates naturally with the already-nonlinear preexisting content and further enhances the story's theme of fate vs. free will.

The other new scenes include a new opening theme and a lot of live-action shots of various locations from the series and animals at the aquarium. In a style similar to the end credits of Sarazanmai, the animated characters are integrated into the live-action footage. Functionally, these montages serve as breathers from the sped-up story. Practically, I wonder if the point is to boost otaku tourism to these locations.

Does the RE:Cycle edit improve upon the series? You can make the case more for Part 1 than Part 2. The TV series can be challenging to get into in its first few episodes, before the character backstories start to fill in and especially before the big midpoint reveal gives its wacky fantasy some historical heft, so moving through them at a faster pace with less recycled footage generally works well. There are also some improvements in sequencing: in the case of Ringo's story, moving up the flashback to her parents' conversation makes her more compelling as opposed to merely annoying early on.

However, some of the cuts affect the pacing negatively. For example in Part 1, the way the love potion storyline gets condensed makes Ringo's change of mind more jarring, as opposed to the more natural development in the show. These pacing issues are more pronounced in Part 2; where the first half of the Penguindrum TV anime could have been sped up, the second half is so packed with story and character development that pretty much any cut is going to end up losing something. Even just being able to take breaks between episodes, to think things through and collect your emotions, is a benefit of the serialized format inherently lost in this adaptation.

Ultimately, this is still the same Penguindrum people already know and love, just condensed, slightly restructured, and with just a bare minimum of new material. It's still a fascinating and powerful story, told with enough style and absurd humor that it remains entertaining despite just how heavy and upsetting its subject matter turns out to be. These movies are not the best version of this story, and their recycled nature makes them eminently skippable, but the good stuff is still good.