#88: Onara Goro (2016)

From https://www.asiancrush.com/wp-content/uploads/
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A.k.a. Onara Gorou

Director: Takashi Taniguchi

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: The tale of a sentient fart, Onara Goro, who helps people with sage advice.

With a premise about a fart in the shape of a man, coming out of another man, who helps people in their lives, you'd think alongside its limited animation anime lets any bizarre premise through the planning stage. You'd be right, but with some of the vocal performances clearly wooden on purpose to the ear, Onara Goro is in on the joke. Another factor to consider is that this is a creator of an independent creator named Takashi Taniguchi, who had already created this project (alongside Onara Goro appearing in merchandise and promotional material including his own underwear) before he was giving the chance to make this anime, even setting up a crowd funding campaign on the Japanese site Makuake which was successful. Regardless of the absurdity of the project, which is clearly in the premise, this is a creator outside the industry who managed to have a show shown in Japan and globally streamed on Crunchyroll, which is an accomplishment with the added advantage like all these odd micro projects that they allow new voices to appear. He has made work before this, and has afterwards, including Yo! Daitouryou Trap-kun (2017) whose lead character suspiciously looks like Donald Trump, so he could eventually become a cult figure in his own right if titles like Onara Goro catch on. Screenshots of his work suggest that the aesthetic appearance of this series is a trademark of his already.  

Consisting of twelve plus three minute episodes, Onara Goro gets tired of its premise quite soon into itself and introduces other humanoid farts along the way, parodying various genres too like horror (I smelt what you did last summer?) or high school romantic drama in which a romantic love triangle is decided on a penalty kick out, all the ordinary human characters replicated by humanoid replicas made by fart gas attached by the rectum through clothing and going through the drama instead of their human counterparts. Looking like the denizens of a Ghostbusters cartoon in their rotund shape, these characters are deliberately silly - Onara Goro becomes Dr. Goro in one episode, able to cure anything by gas related supernatural healing but believing an ordinary person's life is as precious as a major political figure's.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VsLpSECSVfs/maxresdefault.jpg

The limited animation plays to the deadpan nature, highly detailed visuals (with an etched drawn look) but with minimal movement. The absurdity is compounded by the automatic presumption of it being just another bizarre production from the anime industry, a joke reaching a madder point as the end credits is always a live action dance sequence between a five woman idol group and a life sized, plastic replica of Onara Goro himself, asking one to have psychic powers and be able to wonder what the idols were thinking having to do a choreographed dance sequence with a fart.

Like many of these micro series, Onara Goro is digestible and easy to finish quickly to the point of danger that they are entirely disposable; even if that was the original case, you look at one of the first of them to make a name, Gdgd Fairies (2011-13), and I am amazed (as someone who was already a fan of both its seasons) how that micro series has grown for me in quality, in comparison to all these I binge, and how many don't reach the point that one did, in how it managed with its second season to go beyond the original joke and get legitimately creative and even weirder for the better. This is not a detraction to Onara Goro, as it's clearly the work of a creator who can easily jump to another peculiar premise just through looking through a list of his of his creation. But in this case, it definitely feels like it was stuck at the moment it was either stretching the gag as far as it could go until it could go no further, or a fart humanoid dimension and becoming an action fantasy advantage would be the other way to have ended it....which it does for one of its final episodes, showing the possibility if this got a second season.

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#87: Genius Party (2007)

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Directors: Various

Screenplay: Yoji Fukuyama, Hideki Futamura, Shôji Kawamori, Mitsuyoshi Takasu, Masaaki Yuasa

Voice Cast: Tomoko Kaneda, Rinko Kikuchi, Kaoru Mizuhara, Lu Ningjuan, Taro Yabe, Yûya Yagira

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

From https://cdn.animeuknews.net/app/uploads
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Genius Party:

Director: Atsuko Fukushima

Known for their innovative, idiosyncratic animation you can forgive Studio 4°C for both creating two anthologies released over two years and calling them both "Genius Party". Befittingly the first segment by Atsuko Fukushima is also called Genius Party.

In a strange sci-fi desert, a birdman finds a living sphere with a soul heart attached to it, leading to a giddy enlightenment where all those involved (including the sphere and its peers) transform in an animation enthusiast's wet dream. Naturally it leads to these creatures inventing cinema, which is hilarious and acts as a long but perfect introduction for any anthology, only matched by Katsuhiro Otomo's humorously misanthropic bookends with added explosions for Robot Carnival (1987).

From https://jfdb.jp/data/photo/movie/bb/de/d3/
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Shanghai Dreams:

Director: Shoji Kawamori

Shanghai Dreams, from this beginning, splits Genius Party between two action heavy tales at the start before they become more introspective. Kawamori is definitely a genius before anyone asks, the legendary mecha designer/anime director/screenwriter/visual artist starting whilst a teenager in the industry, and among the anecdotes to him the kind of man at an anime panel in the US gladly demonstrating his craft by bringing intricate versions of his designs made out of Lego as tangible examples. He can also claim, among a large career CV, being the original creator of The Vision of Escaflowne (1996) and being involved with all the legendary Macross franchise baring Macross II (1992).

He decided to set a story in a present day China, with two languages including Japanese used, and envisions an alien invasion that can only be stopped by a distractible five year old boy given the ability to make his imagination real. Its befitting I mentioned Kawamori as someone with a healthy creativity, because it feels like a personal side is being shown here even if this premise doesn't go as you'd expect, a nice anti-climax with humour because giving a very young boy who interested in flights of fantasy isn't necessary the person expected to stop actual alien machinery. It does instead turn into a sweet ode to childhood imagination where the two soldiers from the future involved, with the their cybernetic bodies and guns, sympathise with the boy and the smarter young girl after it all blows over, lamenting and celebrating the idea of imagination that children are capable. Its arguably is one of the best shorts in a strong anthology, both as a sumptuous visual feast and feeling like a sincere creation from a very well regarded veteran.

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Deathtic 4:

Director: Shinji Kimura

Deathtic 4 shows us the world of the undead, where a young ghoul with a trio of super powered but thankless boys attempts attempt to take a living frog back to its world. Its idiosyncratic aesthetic stands out, alongside again being a kinetic short which emphasises a cleverness to action in giving it vibrancy and making every short count as its animated, not always found in live action. The aesthetic details given also invoke a living world with its own logic you wish you could see more of, just for the police force who are the show stealers of the segment, literal person sized balloons who use peddle bikes with bells as their pursuit vehicles.

From https://antiotaku.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/geniusparty042.png

Doorbell:

Director: Yoji Fukuyama

Doorbell as with the last segment, whilst they have grown in admiration, do have the unfortunate place of being the most conventional films to an anthology that mainly pushes for very unconventional art styles and structures within them in comparison. However, that's not necessarily a bad thing as Doorbell to its credit, in which a young male is cursed by a doppelganger that, when they reach a person's door first, leaves him an invisible spectre wandering the streets, is still an immensely engaging tale. Its neither merely metaphysical or supernatural, just a very open minded and curious tale open to interpretation whose more conventional art style, bright and calm, is helpful in making sure its tale and emotional depth is of priority.

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Limit Cycle:

Director: Hideki Futamura

Out of all the Genius Party, Futamura's segment is going to be the most divisive. Following a James Dean lookalike, this is a religious/spiritual mosaic in moving form, his life in a futuristic city a deadbeat job, blurred figures passing by and wanton sex with women as he searches for the truth of his existence. With a narrator talking of existential ideas in an oblique way, and with real religious and alchemical symbols and drawings onscreen, Limit Cycle could turn people off easily.

It asks, if you know exactly what everything used or spoken of means, whether it has actual depth or not, but an obvious problem is that religion and especially the alchemist material is subject matter not talked about by many unless you're a scholar (amateur or professional) of this material. It's clearly more deliberate than most anime and with a point, not like the notorious fact that, for all its depth, the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise just used Christian and Judaic references just to look cool. Helping Limit Cycle is that, connecting the images together, it has a cognisant and easy to follow plot - one man finds his spiritual other half, his soul, and then finds God.

The monologue and the symbolism (including the Jewish symbol of the Tree of Life Evangelion has used itself) needs to be decoded, alongside the real life figure God himself is clearly designed as, in particularly as Alchemy is a very unconventional and fascinating choice to have referred; viewed in stereotype as men trying to turn base materials into gold, which many actually tried, it has however been interpreted especially with the Hermetic philosophy (based on the figure who dubbed himself Hermes who influenced alchemy over centuries) to clearly have a spiritual meaning, the transformation to gold a person's spirit rather than a base wealth. That kind of reference doesn't get used a lot, or properly to the actual source materials, so in the middle of Genius Party it's a curious and divisive choice to have done. Because I have some knowledge of this type of material, I'll confess to being the who admires Limit Cycle especially as it's still a visual feast, helped by its New Age score, whilst also recommending viewers to take the segment with a pinch of salt, particularly as I'd argue the narration more than the visual content is the aspect people will struggle with more.

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Happy Machine:

Director: Masaaki Yuasa

After the divisiveness of Limit Cycle, trust Studio 4°C's genius Masaaki Yuasa to steal the entire anthology with Happy Machine, so visibly a metaphor of life and death in a curious tale of a baby who, raised in an artificial nursery with a robot wet nurse, then wanders the alien desert outside and encounters various creatures, all until a circle of life analogy takes place without the Elton John score from The Lion King (1994) being required.

Yuasa's style is clearly his own, but it is difficult to pinpoint why in clear precise detail despite all the work being visibly categorisable as his - he is referenced in lieu of the Superflat movement, and takes styles like cartoon exaggeration and using images of real people for characters amongst his many other idiosyncrasies. The influences he's opened up about (like Yellow Submarine (1968)) are visible in his world here, one with a beloved plant creature who eats all waste alongside denizens who could have cameoed in René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973). It stands tall as the best of Genius Party, a tale of a bitter sweetness nonetheless also with gleeful eccentricity that has always been his best trait as a director, someone whose work is legitimately adult in its emotional spectrum but playfully weird. Happy Machine also feels like it was made without breaking a sweat on his part, adding to the aura around him.

From https://goboiano.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/
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Baby Blue:

Director: Shinichiro Watanabe

In lieu of this, Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe's Baby Blue is unfairly forced to follow it and to end a strong line-up for the entire anthology. It's still a good segment, and in vast contrast to my original review I've grown fonder to it as a result, in which a boy and a girl decide to skip school and travel to a far off beach one day, one in the territory of naturalistic drama.

There is a mountain to climb with a premise like Baby Blue's in lieu to Makoto Shinkai making this type of subject his domain, and high school being a pathological obsession of anime in general nowadays, but it helps Watanabe's is a sweet hearted tale, one with some eccentricity to be allowed in which there's a subplot about a hand grenade of all things, something that in a tale of two people who love each other but are to depart definitely gives this domestic tale an edge with how that goes. It's modesty was what I originally (and unfairly) dismissed it with, when in reality it ends what was an anthology that was for too long difficult to see and now has been a worthwhile experience to finally see.

#86: Urban Square: In Pursuit of Amber (1986)

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Director: Akira Nishimori

Screenplay: Kazunori Itō

Voice Cast: Akiko Hiramatsu as Naomi; Eiko Yamada as Yuki Tamura; Kazuhiko Inoue as Ryou Matsumoto; Hirotaka Suzuoki as Shimohara; Kazumi Tanaka as Hasebu; Kei Wada as Professor Naratomo; Makio Inoue as Henmi; Nobuo Tanaka as Detective Mochizuki

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: Failing author and deadbeat Ryou Matsumoto finds himself in the middle of mystery, potential love and the chance of losing his life when he witnesses a man being gunned down on the street in a chance encounter.

When Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone, did he envision his instrument being the soundtrack of cheesy eighties lounger jazz? As someone who played the alto sax until sixteen-eighteen, at college, I have a bias for arguably one for one of the best looking, designed and sounding instruments ever created (including the non-alto variants), but I am also painfully aware of how the nineteen eighties made the instrument a joke. It's not the "Sexy Sax Man" in the opening of The Lost Boys (1987) that's a bad example either, that example a meme which became awesome, but all the terrible soundtracks instead which marred the reputation of Sax's instrument. Its particularly poignant when one reads of Sax's life and how he nearly died multiple times in his childhood - a three floor fall, drinking vitriolized water by accident, swallowing a pin, burned twice, nearly being poisoned trice, near drowning and other freak mishaps - to the point his own mother thought him cursed to eventually die, only to realise how he managed to still scrape through, designing the saxophone alongside other cool looking instruments, only for really tacky muzak to besmirch his hard work. Now Urban Square's, actually getting to the anime OVA itself and the score by Chickenshack, isn't that bad, but it does have the cheesiest aspect to what is an anime very aware of its own clichés for good humour*.

In this short form action thriller, which treats moments of death and potential severity as a playful farce, there's a reoccurring gag which plays on our hapless protagonist Ryou Matsumoto, who escapes bullet fire like a Lupid the 3rd character in cartoon motion, never wanting to write anything based on his own life despite people constantly recommending this advice to him. The irony is not lost when one character later introduced, a stereotypical hard boiled cop eventually thrown off the police force, shots a helicopter with just a big gun. It is a predictable narrative - one hero, villains who are very bad, a female love interest named Yuki Tamura who is sweet and in peril a few times - with the only real quirk being that the story's over faked relic certificates. The rest could've been a live action Hollywood film.

From http://animediet.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/US3-600x374.jpg

Probably the other idiosyncratic detail is the story being animated, which is important for myself as animating an action scene rather than shooting it on a set has a different effect. I must confess I can find action films dull despite the hard work making them, but due to the inherent hard work to put together an animated action scene, I had to appreciate animation when it's actually good, Urban Square for what it managed to do also good, especially as it is a solidly well made and stylish production. Noticeably as well, whilst it plays itself as comedic, it does play its actions sequences with real deaths involved, providing a sense of gristly consequence that does give the OVA an edge; all the while with its lead is still constantly referencing the clichés being used within the story itself for an added flavour to the material.

A large part of this is just because its screenwriter is Kazunori Itō, famous for the Patlabor franchise, the first 1995 Ghost in the Shell film and other famous productions which vary between serious and comedic tones. He is, alongside everyone involved with the production, playing to the clichés for fun. Whether it makes sense to or not doesn't clearly matter, one assassin sent after Ryou not a gun toting villain but a martial artist sent to just destroy him (and his entire apartment) with kicks and punches, nor the man versus helicopter segment which feels entirely from the American action films being made at the same time with more self awareness of itself as a moment.

Helping with Urban Square, as mentioned, is that it's one of the better made anime OVAs I've seen from the eighties. Beginning with Akemi Takada's character, her career with famous eighties work like Urusei Yatsura to Patlabor as well, it's a solid production whose action scenes are fluid and gleefully unfolding its clichés up front, from Ryou escaping an assassin with a giant machine gun to the hard boiled cop who risks his career for what he believes is right. There's even a properly executed joke just about a film the characters see within the narrative, a Friday the 13th pastiche where Jaws interrupts the proceedings. Because of moments like this, I've had to rethink my opinion of Urban Square: In Pursuit of Amber a lot in the time that's passed to this review. I was ready to dismiss it originally as predictable but now in lieu to a lot of time to have passed, the anime's developed a justifiable charm...even the eighties muzak jazz.  

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRmkixoLVm7Mzv-Df_EmzhPzzciYGwMhEtIegB2MTSVJjebneZYXJ7GbtdBY1-XZKPbsGcSIUs565GhpcDZun0nwYwVXnoOtJr6IofnOq3clCZsVipDCA8jmYPCvOsYMjCqCNJpKXhKO8/s1600/Urban+Square+THAT+AIN%2527T+REGULATION.png

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* Arguably, Lisa Simpson and her sax playing, which was why an impressionable young boy like me, who watched The Simpsons obsessively, started to learn the alto sax in inspiration from the character, was a major benefit to jazz's reputation just for the Bleeding Gums Murphy stories.