Out With A Bang

This is my final review, the last hurrah.  This has been an interesting exercise in writing and ego but now I must go.  Let us come full circle and end The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre with a review of an anime, and not just any anime but an anime film I had been waiting to see for ten years before it was finally released on DVD in the US for the first time at the beginning of the month.  Will it live up to my expectations and hopes?  Let's find out as I review

1987

Directors: 

Katsuhiro Otomo 

Atsuko Fukushima

Koji Morimoto

Hidetoshi Omori

Yasuomi Umetsu

Hiroyuki Kitazume

Mao Lamdo

Hiroyuki Kitakubo

Takashi Nakamura

Yup, as you can see from the list of directors above, this is another anthology film involving Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo.  You know the drill; time to go short by short.

Opening:  This is a clever little bit to introduce the main title, seen above.  I'm not going to give away what happens, you'll have to see it to believe it.  It is cute, hilarious and deadly frightening all at the same time.  Kudos!

Franken's Gears: A mad scientist tries to create life Franken-style, only with a ROBOT.  Goes as well as you'd expect.  This is one with no dialogue (the opening technically had dialogue but it was all in gibberish) which works fine (quite a few of the short films in Robot Carnival have little or no dialogue actually, which I can see made it ideal for importation to the West and explains its subsequent popularity on TV over here in the early 90s).  This short is merely OK, nothing special but nothing putrid either.

Deprive: This is standard 80s anime fare, which is not standard for this movie.  It involves a loyal robot rescuing a girl from alien invaders but the plot is meaningless as you are supposed to marvel at the action on display.  I have seen enough of  this type of stuff that all this short provoked from me was a ho-hum reaction.  Easily the weakest segment of the film.

Presence: An inventor creates a robot girl but destroys her when she actually starts to think for herself.  Years later his guilt catches up with him.  Everyone else seems to love this one (it's also the longest part of the movie).  I don't.  The story itself is merely okay but the character designs are creepy, the animation is fluid but unnatural (something I forgot to mention by the way: most of the animation in Robot Carnival is done at a full 24 fps, which is very rare in anime) and the protagonist is not sympathetic at all.  Oh well.

Star Light Angel: A girl goes to an amusement park, gets her heart broken then has an encounter with a romantic robot.  This one is the opposite, people seem to hate this one the most but I actually kinda like it.  It looks like an anime music video; all it needs to complete it is a J-Pop song.





Cloud: The *artsiest* short here.  It's a robot boy walking in front of changing cloud formations.  That's it.  And yet, it becomes more than that.  Subtle, meditative and beautiful, this is what anime should aspire to be every once in a while.

A Tale Of Two Robots: This is my personal favorite.  Two robots, one Japanese and one European duke it out in Tokyo.  Because it is the 19th Century however the results are hilarious.  This one comes off as both a parody of WWII Japanese propaganda and of giant robot battles in general.  It also has (in the Japanese version) the European antagonist speaking his lines in English and it alone is worth the price of admission.


Nightmare:  Imagine Fantasia's "Night On Bald Mountain", only in Tokyo and with robots.  It's okay but the influence is obvious.  Come on, guys.

Closing:  Like the beginning also cute, funny and frightening.  A perfect way to end this movie.






In the end as with all anthology movies Robot Carnival is a mixed bag.  Overall I would say that it is an above average effort, thanks to a few really good shorts and a consistently great level of animation.  I'm glad I got it even though it wasn't the revelatory experience I was hoping for (it's not as good as Labrynth Tales or Memories).  It was a fun watch.  And even the failures are interesting failures (most of the time anyway).  This movie represents a time back in the eighties when Japanese animators would actually experiment with stuff like this.  Those days are mostly gone, although Otomo did release his newest anthology movie Short Peace only a couple of years ago and it is pretty good so there is still hope.

Well, I must now sign off and say adieu (or is it sayonara?).  It has been an interesting six years, and I hope in another six I will be doing something more productive than writing movie reviews on the internet.  But who knows?  The future is always fluid but for now, for right now for The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre this is the