I’ve never seen anything so wonderfully deconstruct every possible trope in the world of anime, the very medium of anime itself, and even the nature of humor itself as what I’ve seen out of Pop Team Epic, but then this gem appeared in episode #8—
This is actually still animation, technically. In fact, they’ve also used puppetry which can be classified as animation. I’ve just never seen a performance anything like this before and it totally blew me away. I watched it twice and the second time I was looking for anywhere they could have cut it between takes— I only noticed one cut in the last few seconds when they cut to zoom in.
Some years ago I had a dream where I had found an episode of “Dave Barry TV” on the tube late at night. The sort of situations and pacing in Pop Team Epic reminds me of what I saw in that dream— except, in that dream, the episode of Dave Barry TV lasted about four minutes after which Dave didn’t know what to do past that point so he spent the rest of the episode massacring low-flow toilets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLabhPVVG2I