Andrew Osmond looks over 2 new shorts series, Season 3 of ‘Star Wars: Visions’ on Disney+ and ‘Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26’ on Prime Video.
The last fortnight has seen not one but two anime high-profile anthology series released online, whose names reflect their differences.Streaming on Disney+, the third season of riffs on a Hollywood blockbuster franchise.
It’s a tie-in that will (hopefully) be watched by many fans who wouldn’t normally try anime, whereas anime purists may shun it as “too American.” Over on Prime Video, is a title that likely sounds esoteric to manga and anime outsiders.Fujimoto is the manga artist who created , though the first “Fujimoto” anime I covered in this column was the film of his strip .And whereas is family-friendly – the new season is rated “12” – the Fujimoto anthology often crosses into horror, though hilariously its most age-restricted episode, an 18+ story, has no violence, and no sex either – or not beyond what you might see in a gallery.
More of that later.Anime anthologies Collections of anime films date back decades.Many older Western fans first encountered the form with the 1987 feature film , available on Crunchyroll.
It included contributions from Katsuhiro Otomo, a year before his epic film .Otomo was also involved in one of the best-known – and perhaps best – anthology anime, the 1995 film .I’ve seen it many times in the last 30 years and I’ve always been awed by it.
A three-part film, it has a phantom opera singer in a crimson gown singing in a space station-cum-haunted house as it becomes a maelstrom of metal.(I wrote an article on this segment, “Magnetic Rose.”) also has a hapless everyman on a bike being fired upon by Japan’s entire army, and a city of giant cannons shown in endlessly scrolling shots.Eight year later came perhaps the most anime anthology, 2003’s , spun off from and repaying that film’s debts to anime.
As a Hollywood spinoff, it’s a precursor to .also boosted the reputation of a young animator called Takeshi Koike, future director of , who I interviewed last week.Then came (2007) and (2008), two anthologies by Studio 4°C.
They have a lower hit-to-miss ratio than or , but they still have many superb moments, and I wrote more on them here.Also from 2008, it’s possible to find some segments from NHK’s series, including the last completed work from the brilliant director Satoshi Kon.The one-minute film is viewable here at present.
Studio Ponoc’s aptly-named anthology (2018) is bold on a small scale; one segment depicts a child’s subjective experience of an anaphylactic attack. The Japan Animator Expo online series (2014-5) had some interesting segments but it’s not on an official platform as of writing.One anthology that would spark enormous interest were it ever to be released is the series of short films by Studio Ghibli, mostly directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
They’re presently only watchable at the Ghibli Museum and Ghibli Park in Japan, including one enticingly named .’ first season debuted in 2021; the second in 2022.Notably, while Season 1 films were produced by Japanese studios, Second 2 films were made by studios in other countries, ranging from South Korea to South Africa.
Of S2’s episodes, I was most impressed by “Screecher’s Reach” from Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon, bringing one of its country’s spooks into the universe.For Season 3, Disney has gone back to using anime studios, and included a couple of direct sequels to stories from the first season.One is the season opener, “The Duel: Payback,” which returns to the monochrome, Kurosawa-influenced, samurai version of .
As with the first “The Duel,” it’s directed by Takanobu Mizuna and made by the Kamikaze Douga studio, though now another studio, Anima, is co-credited.It’s enjoyable, though like many sequels it can’t recapture the surprise and impact of the original.In particular, I felt its set-pieces were the wrong way around.
“Payback” starts with a lightsaber duel on a building that’s , and that rather trumps the fights that follow, despite look-ins from Ewoks and franchise stars.I was pleased to see, though, that the later battles take place on the Japanese isle of Enoshima, one of my favorite day-trips from Tokyo when I’m in Japan.The other sequel is “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope,” by the Production I.G studio.
It continues the adventures of the Force-sensitive girl Kara in an episode that’s beautifully presented, but never exciting or outstanding. It may be a good bridge to the forthcoming series announced last April – we know Kara more by the story’s end.But it’s a story with splendid production values where nothing happens.Kara’s return after a four-year wait should be more of an occasion.
The original “Ninth Jedi” in ’ first season was directed by Kenji Kamiyama ( ).He’s also directing the upcoming series.However, the “Child of Hope” episode is by another veteran, Naoyoshi Shiotani, who’s best-known for his long stint on the gory sci-fi franchise .
As another of my columns discussed, it’s easy for anime directors to become known for violent anime, so it’s a shock when they switch so readily to something far milder.Shiotani himself said he liked “cute fluffy things” when I interviewed him in 2016.If neither sequel lives up to their respective originals, then most of the season’s other episodes are disappointingly middling – agreeable, occasionally fun, but well below ’ heights.
The stories often feel like standard TV fare, with no chance of anything bad or subversive – no shock dark ending or blaze of glory.There are a few surprises, such as a duel in “The Lost Ones” episode which evokes the bold-colored anime of the 1990s.But without a convincing context, it’s no more than a hollow, though enjoyable homage.
Regarding the most satisfying, interesting episode, I must declare I’ve done past work linked to the studio which made it.Polygon’s cel-shaded CG episode “The Bird of Paradise” is lovely enough to startle viewers who only know the studio for murky fare like and But the episode is closer to “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” Polygon’s 2023 story for the third season of Netflix’s .In both stories, women struggle through purgatories; the character is a blinded young Jedi in a story with Buddhist overtones, married to resplendent mindscapes of blossom pink.
It may be stately and didactic enough to scare off some viewers, but I reveled in how it stretched the format.The last episode, “BLACK,” is an experimental art piece that is remarkable to find in a series on Disney+… and I found it a terrible bore.Animated by David Production, it’s an auteur work by Shinya Ohira, who was writer, director, character designer and animation director.
Ohira is an animator who’s a hero to fans, the aficionados who place most weight on the quality and individuality of the animation itself (more here.) Other fan-feted animators are in BLACK’s credits, including Toshiyuki Inoue and Takeshi Honda.But “BLACK” isn’t a film; it’s a showreel.Watching it, I found myself thinking I’d rather watch a fan-made montage of these artists’ other works (example), where the grandstanding doesn’t swallow the humanity.
The show-off nature of “BLACK” is exemplified in a bit when the fighters are riding horses, and you it’s because galloping horses are notoriously hard to animate.Late in the film, some of the fighting conveys the abject nature of war, a purgatory less pretty than the one in “The Bird of Paradise.” But it should have been “BLACK”’s start point, not its conclusion.For readers thinking that I’m a Krusty the Clown philistine, I should also add I also hated the avant-garde “Dimension Jump” short in .
That was by the legendary director Koji Morimoto, and I described it in a magazine review as “a deeply annoying troll of a film.” I should add that Morimoto directed one of my all-time favorite anime ever, “Magnetic Rose” in .There’s no accounting for taste, or art.My last word on ; it still has too few episodes as enjoyable and effective as a 2015 animated fan film that was inspired by anime.
“Tie Fighter” was drawn and animated single-handed by the English artist Paul Johnson, and it “does a ” on by getting the audience to root for the enemy.Over to , now streaming on Prime Video.As mentioned earlier, it’s based on the works of the eponymous artist Fujimoto, creator of and .
Specifically, it’s based on eight strips that he wrote in his youth, between the ages of 17 and 26.(Fujimoto’s age is slightly unclear, but he started in his mid-20s.) As with , the episodes are created by a range of directors and anime studios, though none carry a comparable name clout to Shinya Ohira or Production I.G.The stories themselves run the spectrum from horror to comedy, from bloody Armageddon to character dramas.
Most involve high schoolers, while a recurring theme is fraught relationships, familial or romantic.There’s a vampire story, a mermaid story, and two alien encounters.And as with , I found myself disappointed by the series in the round; not by its technical execution, but by stories that mostly didn’t satisfy at their wrap-up – with one outstanding exception.
There is, of course, added interest in the fact that these are early stories by a writer we know would become a titan.Here are the young Fujimoto’s choices of what to write, and what he thought readers would find funny and interesting enough to want more.But watching the stories (I didn’t know any of them in advance), I got impatient fairly quickly.
One story, “Love is Blind,” mocks how anime and manga blow up teen crushes and confessions to cosmic proportions, till the world is at stake.It’s full of self-important smash cuts and jokily literalized heavy weather.But I’ve seen an anime commercial that made much the same point in a few seconds flat.
“Nayuta of the Prophecy” is a better episode; this one spoofs “sister complex” stories, but with a good enough story so that you care if its alternate magical world is ending or nor.The boy-meets-sea-girl story “Mermaid Rhapsody” works well enough.It balances Disney sweetness with darker mythology.
The darkness reflects a boy’s terror of getting closer to a girl, like “Love is Blind.” (If you liked the vision of land and sea communities in “Mermaid Rhapsody,” then try the anime series on Crunchyroll.) Then there’s an episode called “Woke-Up-as-a-Girl Syndrome.” It’s not good but it’s notable; it goes into sex and gender territory with a blithe flippancy that Western Gen Z fans would find far more shocking than .By the episode’s end, you wonder if the young Fujimoto was trying to create an allegory about transgender people, or if he’d even of them.The opening story, called “A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard,” raises issues of anime style that we’ve seen recently with .
As I discussed in my column on that franchise, many fans disliked the “realistic” style of the TV ; they felt it didn’t suit a story of a crazed character fighting crazed battles against crazed monsters.Significantly, that style was very visibly changed in the film sequel, .Animated by the ZEXCS studio, “Chickens” starts like a joke.
Monstrous aliens devour humanity and then decide to mimic human culture, donning uniforms and going to high school themselves.It could have been told in the campy style of “Love is Blind” and some of it camp.When an alien first changes form, it’s hilarious.
And in the second half, there’s a flashback to Armageddon, with screaming people being bloodily eaten by monsters like .It’s a disconnect that seems completely intentional.The episode’s climax doesn’t seem to have any more ambitions than pastiching the giant monster fights in and similar fare.
’ carnage is rated “16+” on Prime Video.The only episode to get an “18+” rating is the last one, “Sisters.” What horrors does it offer? The answer is a nude (frontal) painting of the main character, an art student, which wins a prize at her school – to her fury, as she didn’t paint it.The artist is her younger sister, and why she created the painting is explored in the anthology’s best story by far.
As “Sisters” unfolds, it becomes a clear thematic precursor to , which was also about two female artists.Unlike most of the stories in both new anthologies, “Sisters” is entirely satisfying (and for a story about nudity, it’s no more prurient than a life drawing class).Animated by P.A.
Works, which made the series mentioned above, it’s drawn largely in a realistic style, which doesn’t preclude warm human interactions.But it also has fantasy interludes in a lambent realm of massing pale colors.It’s like a painterly, heavenly alternative to the ravishing vale of suffering in the episode, “A Bird of Paradise.” Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media.
His email is [email protected].
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