GENIUS PARTY BEYOND DVD Review

The Movie(s):

As part of the "Genius Party"-project each team was given the task to make a rougly fifteen-minute segment which would show "The Spirit of Creativity". These teams (comprised of talents old and new) were allowed full artistic freedom to pursue whatever they wanted to do.

"Genius Party Beyond" consists of the last five of these segments. Here are mini-reviews for each of them:

1: Gala (dir:  Mahiro Maeda)

A giant meteorite falls nearby a forest village and is attacked by an angry mob of spirits, sprites and fairies. But four of these creatures feel there is life growing within the pod, and foster it with the help of giant magical flying music instruments.

Of all the segments in "Genius Party" and "Genius Party Beyond", this one comes the closest to what you would expect Studio Ghibli to come up with. Well... Studio Ghibli by way of Gonzo and Production IG (the last two studios mentioned actually participated in this segment). Some of the designs look very familiar, but just as it seems that director Maeda is playing for safe he unleashes some beautiful lunacy and ends the segment with a good twist. Definitely one of my favorites on this disc.

2: Moondrive (dir: Kazuto Nakazawa)

Set on the moon in the future, a gang of four thugs and robbers get their hands on a treasure-map and start following it. To get to the spot marked "X" the ruthless but clumsy bunch will do anything, including playing pool against the mob, stealing a spacecraft or even prostituting the "hottie" in their gang!

Director Kazuto Nakazawa is out to have fun with his segment and it shows. The animation looks sloppy, half-finished and overly edge-enhanced but it helps to convey the jumpy energy of the protagonists. Sketchlines and nametags are left in on purpose and whenever something goes BOOM (which is often) the edge of the drawing creeps into the picture. But at the same time the backgrounds are dense with an almost insane amount of details, and clever designs can be spotted everywhere in this short. This style of animation is often not to my liking but in this case I gladly make an exception. "Moondrive" is just too funny, rawdy and bold for me not to like. In any case it's lightyears beyond the animated episode in Tarantino's "Kill Bill" that Nakazawa did.

3: Wanwa the Doggie (dir: Shinya Ohira)

A small boy visits his bed-ridden mother, but when a sudden storm separates them he gets chased by a wicked ogre through a selection of fantasy landscapes. Time and time again he is nearly caught but the boy is always rescued by the dog Wanwa. But then Wanwa dies...

Ouch, epilepsy alert! Using a unique mix of cgi compositing and thousands of children's drawings, "Wanwa the Doggie" is one big hectic explosion of color. It borders on visual overload but instead of wearing the viewer down it actually manages to pull you into this strange feverish world of imagination. And in the end, after all the rollercoaster chases, director Ohira brings a surprisingly emotional core into his story. "Wanwa the Doggie" is brilliant in both concept and execution, and impossible to convey in screenshots (I'll still try though...).

4: Toujin Kit (dir: Tatsuyuki Tanaka)

Living alone in an apartment inside a huge industrial complex, a girl spends her time giving life to dolls by using a strange machine. This apparatus works by illegally inserting some other-dimensional essence into the dolls, but when Government agents raid the appartment one of the dolls turns out to be somewhat fuller with the stuff than expected.

At heart a grey and dystopic sci-fi story, the animation style used for this segment is very realistic which contrasts nicely with the previous two shorts. Director Tanaka doesn't really draw backgrounds, he draws full environments, and these support the short as much as the characters do. There was a nice "Meta" moment where I was watching this on my television, bag of crisps in hand, looking at a girl onscreen watching animation on her television, bag of crisps in hand. It all seemed oddly real suddenly.

"Toujin Kit" may not look it but is actually a bit of an odd-one-out in the "Genius Party"- project, because it never was supposed to be part of it. But when director Fumihiko Sori (of "Ping Pong" and "Vexille" fame) discovered what his friend Tanaka was working on as a pet project, he approached Studio 4ºC and requested that "Toujin Kit" be allowed to participate as a "Genius Party" segment. After the production team saw what Tatsuyuki Tanaka had already achieved he was allowed to participate. Still under the impression that he was going to finish this segment by himself, Tanaka was surprised to suddenly see animators assigned by Studio 4ºC show up to help him get his film finished on schedule!

All of this is fun trivia but this troubled long road cannot be seen in the end result whatsoever. "Toujin Kit" is of such high quality that I hope someone gives Tatsuyuki Tanaka a chance to do a full feature. This is just stellar animation all the way, and may just be my favorite segment of this film. 

However, competing for that title is: 

5: Dimension Bomb (dir:  Koji Morimoto)

A jumbled set of impressions, memories and confused feelings of a teenage boy when he recalls a girl he liked. When he looks back on the moment when she told him she hated him, things get very intense indeed....

Morimoto is a constant factor in the "Genius Party" shorts, as he was helping people left and right on different segments. But "Dimension Bomb" is his own baby, and he cuts loose with a vengeance. His short is one of the longest, most baffling, but also most gloriously invigorating of all twelve "Genius party"-project segments.

Constructed like a videoclip around Juno Reactor's alternatively pumping, then soothing soundtrack, "Dimension Bomb" defies easy description. For all I know the interpretation I put up as "plot" may be a completely wrong one, but it doesn't matter. A normal narrative is obviously the last thing on director's Morimoto's mind, instead he goes straight for your audio-visual jugular. The surprising thing is how well he succeeds! Normally a film this incomprehensible would totally lose me, but this time I was too mesmerized by the incredible imagery on the screen. For lack of a better word it just "flows" from beginning till end. Highly detailed, wildly abstract in places, but always impeccably drawn and boldly mixing styles, this is without a doubt the most exhilirating short on the disc. A fever-dream without the fever.

Conclusion:

Studio 4ºC throws down the gauntlet with the whole "Genius Party"-project, both as a piece of art and as a technical achievement. And if anything, this second collection named "Genius Party Beyond" only heightens the mean quality of these shorts, implausible though that sounds. Judging by the likes of "Dimension Bomb" I don't know if a studio exists which can best Studio 4ºC at the moment.

I easily recommend this film as highly as I did "Genius Party". Both films are, without a doubt, pretty much a work of genius.

Or, pardon the obvious pun, the work of a party of geniuses. From any other studio the project-title might seem cocky (if not arrogant), but with Studio 4ºC it is fitting.