Kurogo Kurusu is a high school student with an almost annoying love of kabuki the traditional Japanese dancedrama. The only problem for him is that his school doesnt have a club for it. He decides to take matters into his own hands and create a kabuki club. First things first: the title is fun to say. Try it. KABUKIBU. It means kabuki club but it sounds to my ears like its meant to continue going. Kabukibukibukibuki... The premise is basic: excitable 10th grader loves kabuki sets out to create a club with his more stoicseeming but loyal best friend. They meet and convince a number of students to join including ones with backstories like classicallytrained in Japanese dancing and proceed to put on some small performances. Its 12 episodes and theres really not a ton of drama. The stakes here are pretty low: teen wants a club needs people gets people. People who mostly dont know much about kabuki and must be converted either emotionally to see kabuki as interesting and the club as a worthwhile activity or just artistically to be able to put on decent kabuki performances. Interestingly Kurogo himself could be included in the latter group because it turns out that just a love of kabuki and having watched a lot of it does not automatically a kabuki actor make. Incidentally I didnt know much about kabuki either. The show does a pretty good job explaining it. Theres no Englishlanguage equivalent I can think of but if you can sorta imagine Shakespeare in the original most hardtounderstand language spoken by people with adolescent voice cracking with costumes inspired by mimes you might get close. This is not a criticism its just very different than anything Ive ever seen. The story is driven by small things: will they find enough members? Will they have enough time to learn their parts before their first performance? Will that one classmate stop being such an elitist asshole long enough for something nice to happen? And because the scope is kept small it works well. No worries about going to a large competition this is just a really enthusiastic teenager who wants to have a schoolsanctioned reason to learn about and perform kabuki with other people for the next 3 years. Thats it. It was just plain enjoyable. Verdict English dub? No Visuals: Nice often bright. Character designs are distinct and the highlights are always when theyre in costume. Japanese writing in the background is subtitled extremely well in my opinion as seen in one of the screencaps above making it easy for me to read. Its more realistic though so no designs are super memorable despite designs being famously done by CLAMP. Worth watching? Yes Its a great lowstakes show that explains things pretty well. No stress not weird stuff going on to cause plotholes.