Slice of Life

by Dustin Kramer

When it comes to analyzing anthology films, there is always the question of how to approach them. Should each entry be examined based on its own merits, or should the collection be discussed as a singular entity? In short film anthologies where multiple filmmakers are gathered to create pieces under a unifying theme or idea, one should expect that each work will vary greatly in narrative, tone, style, and even the artists’ personal interpretations of that coalescing concept. This encourages the analyst to consider the entries independently. But then what is the point of gathering them under a common banner? Is it simply for convenient consumption? In this piece I will take a look at Studio 4°C’s presumptuously titled Genius Party, a collection of seven animated shorts by Japanese filmmakers, and ponder whether its entries need to be seen as an undivided unit or if they are better cherry-picked from the lot and enjoyed as standalone projects.

Genius Party

The film opens with Atsuko Fukushima’s Genius Party, which lends its title to the anthology as a whole. The short begins with what appears to be a man dressed in a makeshift bird costume wandering through the desert. When the bird-man finds a stony sphere with a face admiring a flower, he snatches the little stone’s heart and eats it, causing him to grow fiery wings. Another stone witnesses the strange transformation and decides to eat its own heart. A tall, iridescent flower sprouts from the rock creature, develops wings, and flies into the sky to the amazement of all the other smiling boulders who are now exposing their own hearts. A bolt of lightning descends from the sky and bounces from heart to heart taking us to our title screen, which serves to bookend this collection of films. We briefly return to the bird from the beginning who is staring blankly at a massive, fleshy, pulsating film projector surrounded by a floating ring of stone creatures. Thus ends the first segment of the movie.

Although undeniably strange and kinetic, this introduction doesn’t serve to establish much of an overarching concept or idea for the films to follow. Sure, I could wax intellectual and pronounce the unifying nature of cinema appreciation as the central theme of this opening segment, but the short barely gives me enough to make such an assessment. Moreover, the films that follow don’t seem to share this message. Apart from the animation, the best thing about this segment is its percussive, electronic soundtrack.

Shanghai Dragon

Next up is Shoji Kawamori’s Shanghai Dragon. This film follows a bullied Chinese boy who finds a glowing device that will bring into reality whatever he draws with it. Soon after this discovery, the planet is invaded by space ships and robotic war machines. The boy must exploit his newly acquired equipment to save the Earth from destruction. After becoming a superhero in the vein of popular super sentai series and saving the world, the boy learns that the invaders came from a star far away and in the distant future. He sketches and summons a dragon to travel there and, presumably, fight on.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this portion of the anthology is how inconsistent the animation quality is. From top to bottom, it constantly wavers between top-tier production values and the stuff of TV budgets. One of the more interesting aspects of the animation is how the elements drawn with the device never look like they are totally part of the surrounding world but actually like what they are: haphazard doodles come to life. Despite the  issues and an ending that feels tacked-on, Shanghai Dragon proves too charming to dislike and is among the better segments in Genius Party.

Deathtic 4

The cute-but-grotesque Deathtic 4 breaks up the mostly traditional animation that fills out the rest of the anthology. We are introduced to a world full of zombies and monsters living out run-of-the-mill, day-to-day existences. When a strange storm brings a living frog to this morbid place, a zombie boy recruits his friends to help him return the frog to the living world before it is discovered and killed.

An interestingly produced piece to be sure, director Shinji Kimura appears to have digitized hand-drawn textures and layered them over computer animated characters and backgrounds to create a world that exists visually somewhere between CG animation, claymation, and traditional animation. Outside of action sequences, the frame rate suffers. The stop-and-go vibe doesn’t work quite the way it does in claymation and ultimately only distracts the viewer. This derivative story about the subjectivity of “life” and whether it is worth protecting is no where near as successful as its stylistic cousins by filmmakers like Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

Doorbell

Comic book artist Yoji Fukuyama’s Doorbell tells the story of a high school student who must outrun ghostly clones of himself to his daily pedestrian destinations. If the apparitions beat him, they commandeer his life, making him — the “real” version — invisible to friends and family.

Perhaps more than any other animated film I’ve seen, Doorbell is noticeably the work of a manga artist. Fukuyama, who had only worked in comics prior to this project, has made a distinctly static animated film. Impeccably framed and kinetically stunted, this segment is an excellent example of how a medium can perform outside your limited expectations. Not above or below them, mind you, but in a different space than you might envisage given the chosen art form. This is not to say that the short is a series of unmoving images; the shots that the director chooses to linger on define what the audience will take away from the experience when it cuts to black. What ends up being a cogent allegory for self-improvement is a standout in this collection.

Limit Cycle

I wish I could give you a summary of Hideki Futamura’s Limit Cycle, but the absence of any semblance of a narrative structure makes that impossible. I wish I could tell you about the characters of this piece and how they grow and change or at least how the world changes around them, but that’s pretty hard to do when there aren’t any. I wish I could initiate a conversation on how this segment utilizes its animation in a way that is unique or interesting or beautiful, but it doesn’t.

Limit Cycle can only be described as a longwinded, self-important musing on God versus the self and individualism versus hive mind. Its points are hardly coherent and read more like throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks poetry than the essay that it means to be. It begins with vivid, aggressive sequences over loosely related narration. Eventually, we are given biblical illustrations flying toward the camera in lieu of the interesting, if pointless, animation we were treated to at the outset. Unsuccessful in almost every way, Limit Cycle is unmerciful at almost 20 minutes long and is among the lengthiest pieces in the anthology.

Happy Machine

Masaaki Yuasa’s Happy Machine follows a baby as he discovers that his nursery and everything in it, including his caretakers, are artificial. What follows is a grand, psychedelic adventure of obstacles far too dangerous for any real infant to traverse. Imagine Patrick Read Johnson’s Baby’s Day Outif it had it been written based on an LSD-fueled fever dream and you’re on the right track.

The color pallet and designs are simple, and the animation is fluid. The segment is easily one of the most visually interesting and beautiful shorts inGenius Party. A dynamic elemental motif guides the aberrant narrative as the baby encounters various creatures with the visual and functional flourishes of fire, water, air, earth, and metal. The short’s weakness is its pacing, which disrupts its message about the cyclical nature of life. It loses its way near the end when the baby is nearly consumed by a giant plant while trying to save one of his new friends. In an awkward time skip, we cut to the baby as an old man walking through the desert. He travels alone pulling a wagon behind him carrying rough wooden sculptures of the creatures he met as an infant. He finds a colossal humanoid structure — likely the titular “happy machine” — on the dry plains. Entering it, he finds a crying baby in a dark, empty version of the fake nursery he came from himself. Back outside the contraption, the old man sacrifices himself to power it up, returning color and life to its interior and happiness to the infant. The final title card reads tsugi — not the Japanese word for “end,” but rather the word for “next.”

Baby Blue

Baby Blue, written and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, posits a hypothetical. “What if we forget about today and our futures?” He puts these words in his characters’ mouths — a high school aged boy and girl — but he wants the audience to answer the question. Maybe not “what if” but “what would be left?” Without today or the future, we are left with the past. The things we do today, whether in service of our fleeting desires or the trajectory of a life hopefully well-lived, may stay with us forever. What we disregard today we will certainly remember tomorrow.

The high school students, portrayed with realistically understated performances, take this paradoxical manifesto of sorts and play hooky from school. Using only the money in their pockets at the time of departure, they make for the beach. Reminiscing along the way about similar flights of mischief from their childhoods, it’s clear that these two have a rich, well-recollected history of “forgetting about today and the future.” After stealing a bike, getting lost, outrunning a police officer, and evading a biker gang with the help of a hand grenade (yes, you read that correctly), the runaways reach their destination. A solemn conversation at the sea laments missed opportunities despite having lived a life together. The mutual disappointment of never exploring a romantic relationship with one another is poignant and real. With the events of the day too recent to see through rose-colored glasses, the could’ve-been-couple retreats to their homes feeling a bit lost.

Had I not known that Baby Blue was the product of Shinichiro Watanabe, there’s only one other person I would have guessed directed this piece: Makoto Shinkai. Like the brunt of Shinkai’s body of work, this film relies on the audience’s understanding of nostalgia to provide emotional resonance. It even looks like a Shinkai film when it utilizes beautifully rendered wide shots of cloudy skies — almost a hallmark of the man’s films at this point. But unlike Shinkai, Watanabe demonstrates that the character’s feelings of nostalgia can’t be dwelled upon too much without making the characters seem inactive, as though in a state of arrested development. Instead, Watanabe conveys that time spent together recalling “the good ole days” will be indiscriminately reminisced about in years to come. It’s a bittersweet reality that we can’t see how happy we are today until we reflect on it as a bygone age. The nostalgic overtones don’t define the film like they tend to in Shinkai’s work but alternately enhance Watanabe’s message about the nature of the emotion. The films draws to a close in a scene with an extremely low frame rate, as though sequenced with a series of photographs — perhaps the ultimate symbol of happy recollection.

* * * * * * * * * *

The need for these movies to be assembled under a single title confounds me. There is no narrative, thematic, or creative through-line connecting the seven films that comprise Genius Party, and the fact that five more films were originally intended to be included in this collection (later released asGenius Party Beyond) speaks volumes about the importance — or lack thereof — of sequence with these stories. The only shared element between these productions is where the animation was produced, Studio 4°C. In this light, it feels less like a creative boundary for a group of artists to work within — as seen in Tokyo! or Paris, je t’aime – and more like a sizzle real for the production studio. I assume the title refers to the filmmakers, but the pervasiveness of modesty in Japanese culture makes this a little hard to swallow. In any case, however you decide to watch these shorts — whether to completion and in their collected order or independently of the Genius Party placard — shouldn’t affect your experience.