About

"Tamifluriver Sisters" (Japanese: タミフルリバー三姉妹) is a hand-drawn animated video of the Prismriver Sisters, the three musical boss characters from the Touhou Project series, frantically dancing as if they've taken the drug Tamiflu^[1]. The video had inspired a series of parody animations after upload to the video sharing site Nico Nico Douga in December of 2009.

Origin

Titled "Three Tamifluriver Sisters", the animated video was created by Niconico user Tsunamayo (ツナマヨ) and uploaded it to the site on Christmas Day of 2009. The video features the three sisters and bosses Lunasa, Merlin, and Lyrica Prismriver, known collectively as the Prismriver Sisters^[2], hyper-actively dancing as if they've taken Tamiflu, the antiviral drug that became a subject of talk in Japan at the time for its abnormal side effects it had on children, hence the video's title. The song the girls are dancing to is remix of their theme from their appearance in Perfect Cherry Blossom "Ghostly Band ~ Phantom Ensemble"^[3] titled "Rapid Ensemble", which was arranged by COOL&CREATE and featured on their famous 2004 remix album Touhou Strike.^[4]

The dance performed by the sisters at the start of the video was originally taken from a Bad Apple!! parody animation also created by Tsunamayo the month prior^[5] while the rest make reference to many animation and MAD video fads that had become popular within Niconico.

Spread

The animation received much attention from Touhou fans and users on Niconico, where it would be watched over a million times in November 2011. Before long, Niconico users would begin to create their own animated parodies. The earliest was another Touhou parody created user Kuromari (くろまり) and uploaded to Niconico on January 4th, 2010, where it featured Chen, Shou Toramaru, and Rin "Orin" Kaebyou. A complete version of the parody was later uploaded on February 22nd (shown below, left), where it would be watched more than 230 thousand times. Meanwhile, others began challenging themselves in recreating the video in live action, with one of the first being performed by Niconico dancer Nekohito (猫人) (shown below, right) and uploaded it on January 13th, where it receive over 89 thousand views.

The animation would get a different take when user Jara-ko (じゃら子) created an extended parody featuring the various characters from the Tales of… RPG series and shared it to Niconico on February 7th, 2011. The video had since been viewed more than 750 thousand times and becoming another template for animators to parody.

Over 170 parody videos had been shared to Niconico^[12] in the eight year since the original animation's upload, with many having been re-uploaded and created on YouTube^[13] with videos often titled under the phrasal template "X on Drugs".

Notable Examples

Illustrations

Dozens of parody illustrations of the animation also have been created and submitted to the Japanese illustrators site pixiv.^[12]

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.