Robot Carnival
After watching Genius Party, I heard about this old collection of animated shorts which ANN calls buried treasure. With Katsuhiro Otomo supervising the whole thing and my good impression of Memories, I actually had quite high expectations for this. It’s a little unfortunate how these expectations were not met at all. I will still comment on the films one by one.
Before doing so, let me rant a little on the 80s style a little bit. I hate it. I hate the american style with a passion and the japanese attempts at copying the horrible style of the 80s still leaves me breathless. Of course the animation quality is nice and there’s a lot of detail in the drawings – but who cares about details when the character design is simply crap. Well, if you want more rantings on these kinds of topics, I’ll refer you to the myriads of anime bloggers who love these discussions. Personally, I’m a child of the 2000 generation and I like my moe girls.
Opening, Ending, Epilogue
Actually the parts that were actually done by Katsuhiro Otomo were my favourites. Unlike most others, these parts really did not need any dialogue to make me feel intrigued. The visual style, the ‘cuteness’ of the ballerinas, the shock of the explosions, everything felt perfect. The opening has actually heightened my expectations for this short story collection – only to make me find out that it was the best part of the whole thing.
Star Light Angel
The most outstanding part of this episode definitely is the music. As much as I dislike 80s music in general, I have certain things like “Take on me” by A-HA. Ahaha. *hrm* Thus, I actually enjoyed the soundtrack of this particular episode and it was the upbeat music that kept me awake. Unfortunately this did not help the silly story much.
Cloud
Visually, this definitely was my favourite. The drawing style (yes, I call it drawing style here) was much more suitable to my tastes than everything else and looked a fairly artsy. Besides that, the story didn’t make all that much sense to me (of course), which is my main issue with this film.
Deprive
Robot hero saves damsel in distress from evil alien. The whole thing has some nice visual effects and that’s it.
Franken’s Gears
When I watched the film, I honestly didn’t know what was going on. The premise sounds quite great in my opinion, and it even has some hilarity, but considering that I barely could see what was going on, I have found the execution pretty horrible.
Presence
In terms of execution, “Presence” leaves me with some disappointment just like “Franken’s Gears”. Both stories could have been really great, and both either looked bad or had rather bad storytelling. In fact, the story of “Presence” is generic, but nice: Man builds a female doll-like robot because he is disappointed with his family life. When the robot starts to act very human, he is scared and destroys her. Years later, he sees her in his dreams again and leaves his old life with her.
Visually, the backgrounds are great and the details put into the characters even more so. But why would they have such ugly faces? Why does the doll have a horrid hairstyle and look fat? If the doll actually had looked cute, I am sure the film would have touched me much more.
In the end, I have really liked the design of the little angel robot. That was actually cute.
I demand a re-make of “Franken’s Gears” and “Presence”.
A Tale of Two Robots
The sole fact that this had dialogue and comedic action scenes made me enjoy this film more than most of the others. There were some characters, but it was a bunch of idiots against a ridiculous mad professor. Oh my.
Nightmare
Honestly I barely remember what happened in Nightmare anymore. So the city was destroyed and only one man survived? At any rate, the animation is nice, but ultimately it was pretty boring.
I guess the main reason for my disappointment with this whole short film collection was that the complexity of ‘robots’ (no matter how clichéd they are today) haven’t really been taken into account. Some of them, like “Clouds” (to some degree) and “Presence” have a little bit of that, but not much.