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Shunga Alert! is a gloriously silly and surprisingly wholesome and inclusive sexcapade, with a little educational tour of Japanese art history sneaked in. The plot, such as it is, centres around the efforts of a frustrated (in more ways than one) artist, a virtual AI idol with ambitions for world domination, and a sex robot with episodic amnesia, as they try to thwart an American YouTube influencer who wants to destroy all shunga—Japanese erotic art—in a bid to save the Japanese birth rate.
The plot, as you may have gathered, isn’t really the point here. (Although, in fairness, the storytelling fundamentals are actually quite solid.) The star element of the show is the clever interplay between the intrepidly game live actors and shadow puppetry in an intricate woodblock style that veers between beautiful execution and—deliberately—something more Terry Gilliam-esque. The examples of shunga artworks themselves, with one notable exception, are absolutely gorgeous and, without sounding too much like a dirty old woman, I would have been happy to have seen them take up more screen time.
The show’s writing is careful to recognise and avoid the abundant potential pitfalls of a white narrator presenting the “exoticism” of Japanese culture, getting ahead of any criticism by poking fun at itself. Likewise, misogyny is largely avoided, with only a slight trace evident of male fears about women’s nether regions—though, to be honest, most of the gross-out humour is distributed pretty even-handedly. Much like the Dolly Parton quote that “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap,” it takes a lot of brains to make a show this dumb—or, at least, to do it so well.
The jokes in Shunga Alert! steer well clear of the obvious takes of the genre and range from broad to quite sophisticated and clever, ensuring a hilarious time for people of all tastes. With the caveat that it is explicit, this is nevertheless a show with so much goofy good-heartedness and abundant originality that it is sure to delight a wide audience.
