What I love even more than short films: Animated short films!

Genius Party

After finally finishing the 25 films from both Cinema 16 European Shortfilms collections, I happily noticed that Genius Party (Imdb, Wikipedia, AniDB, ANN, Animesuki forum thread) was finally subbed by BSS! Suddenly I like this fansub group much more than before, heh.

Actually I haven’t watched an anime short film collection since Animatrix, and Genius Party has made me realize how great they are. While TV series and most OVA have to fight against commercialisation, you get the feeling that the author have comparably more freedom here and can bring out the full potential of what animation can do. I was so happy about it that I am reviewing this – although I typically don’t do it for anime anymore.

Some trailer on Youtube:
Trailer no.2 (with some footage from the shortfilm no.7, more on it later ;) Trailer 1 wasn’t particularily interesting, by the way.)
Another trailer (2:04 with quite a lot of footage and faces XD)
Trailer no.3 (3:54, with more excerpts of all the films including more faces of the directors and seiyuu)

Genius Party consists of 7 films, and Genius Party Beyond another 6. BSS has brought episodes 1, 2, 4, 6 and 7. Who knows why they didn’t do no.3, and apparently no.5 has too much philosophical nonsense for the translators.

I apologize for the bad screenshots. This series necessites better ones, I’ll do them later.

Genius Party (5:38)
With only 5 minutes, the first part of “Genius Party” which gave the collection its name, is actually more an outburst of creativity and artsiness, and basically doesn’t really have a story. It doesn’t matter all that much though because of its short length and a really nice style, in my opinion. Just see this for yourself – I have spent more than 5 minutes writing this review and taking the screenshots after all, ahaha.

Shanghai Dragon (19:32)
How should I put it: Perhaps I am a little bit biased towards this story. The chinese in it is ridiculous and the seiyuu do a poor job at speaking chinese. I believe they are actually chinese people (chinese voice actors are horrible after all), but the person who wrote the script seems to speak chinese in a somewhat clumsy way. Gramatically it’s right, but it just feels wrong.
But then again: Who cares. Surprisingly, I think that a lot of little details are really well done, besides the actually good attempt at putting real chinese into the story: The little boy whose main feature is his running nose, the little girl with her pink shirt, the background details – it just works out great. If I ever re-watch this film, I will make sure to point out examples of what I found so well researched.

Doorbell (13:38)
Somehow I feel like Doorbell is a very typical short film – although it is the type that easily could have been done as live-action. It is a great story with a subtle and nice message in my opinion. But what I liked even more, was the particularily well done execution: The dialogues, the pacing and especially the cinematography gave the story its great feel. I wonder who this director is, I really am interested in this guy’s (woman’s?) work.

Happy Machine (15:06)
Ugh, Kaiba. Really, this looks exactly like Kaiba and is even more nonsensical than Kaiba. I don’t even particularily like the Kaiba style besides Chroniko who was designed quite cutely. This film has even less interestingly designed characters (actually it has no ‘characters’ at all, just random creatures) and this thing with the long legs looks like a blatant rip-off of Linkin Park’s Somewhere I Belong video or Diary of Tortov Roddle to me. Maybe it’s a common thing or simply not true, but it just doesn’t give me the feeling that the director is as creative as he pretends to be.

Baby Blue (14:43)
Okay, there is the sky, there are these background pictures blended in and there are all those trains. There also is a bittersweet love story, but it’s not Makoto Shinkai, it’s the director of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. But boy, this story is amazingly great. I easily prefer it over 5cm and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, although both were visually more stunning. This story did not touch me in the sense that it made me cry, but I love it to death. I have found it to be sensitive, smart and the character’s feelings were beautifully conveyed especially in the very last scene. To be honest, I cannot imagine that another one of the whole Genius Party franchise could top this story for me.

My current ranking looks like this:
1. Baby Blue
2. Shanghai Dragon, closely followed by
3. Doorbell
4. Genius Party, and far behind
5. Happy Machine.

Finally, I can only hope to see more of these. After this, I will be actively searching for other animated short films, and have started with downloading Robot Carnival and finding more Studio 4°C films on Youtube (like this).