The seventh and final Kara no Kyoukai Movie is another long one, clocking in at two whole hours. This really gives more than enough time to properly give attention to the story that explains the rest of the mysteries that the previous six movies have left behind. And really, these past seven movies have been a real treat. They’re all different and don’t try to rip off each other, contrary to what you might expect. They’re a great recommendation for any mystery-fan, though do note that the seventh movie isn’t the best.

I’m pretty surprised with some of the flaws that actually managed to slip by in the second part of A Study In Murder. The focus this time is the shock-factor: there is a lot of gore, even more disturbing than in the previous movies, and it also touches upon a big taboo in anime: drugs. While I applaud this series for actually going there, I do think that they could have spent a bit more time making them work out right. Bluntly said: this is the most unrealistic of all the Kara no Kyoukai movies.

The gore really is gruesome, but there are times when it’s overdone a bit too much. Characters who are badly wounded (even those without any sort of supernatural powers) just walk away without even flinching (or bleeding, for that matter), and not to mention Shiki’s ingenious “handcuff-escape-trick”. hello? You have a mechanical arm! What was the point of giving her that anyway? The effects of drugs on people also didn’t seem too well portrayed. Especially for a movie of this caliber, I expected a lot more detail. This also was the only movie in which the CG didn’t blend in well with the other graphics. While most of the movie looks as gorgeous as ever, the CG saliva just looked way off, and some of the goreish flesh-wounds had this as well. Really, what happened?

But despite these, does it have enough to make up for it? Plenty. The interplay between Shiki and Mikiya in this movie adds a lot of depth to their characters and it provides a satisfying closure to the questions that were asked throughout this series of movies, mainly in the second one. It’s pretty unpredictable as well: before starting this movie, I had a completely different image of the true culprit.

The direction is also as solid as ever, and the double length really allows the story to play out like it should have. It’s just a shame of the above-mentioned flaws though. In the end, my favourite movie of the seven remains the fifth one, closely followed by the fourth. This one hovers somewhere in the middle: still very good, but hampered by strange flaws and a story that just isn’t as strong as some of the others.

Science fiction, androids and artificial intelligence are a popular theme in anime, but Eve no Jikan shows that you can still come with new ideas. It’s an OVA series of five episodes of 15 minutes, and 1 of half an hour, and it shows a possible future in which androids have just become able to look and act like regular human beings.

It explores the boundaries of intelligence, what it means to be self-conscious and in what aspect androids differ from humans, as well as human relationships with those androids. throughout its six episodes, it shows a variety of cases of how people chose to deal with it, through the eyes of the lead character Rikuo.

Overall, it’s a very well made series, and worth the watch just for the setting. However, it’s also just way too short: it has enough potential to fill up a regular 13-episoded tv-series, and it could quite possibly even run for 26 episodes. right now, the characters are just too underdeveloped, there’s too little time to get to know the fairly large cast in this series, there are so many interesting questions that are still left hanging, and there’s still a lot of potential left in the concept that the creators weren’t able to touch.

Still, there always is the chance for a continuation: Studio Rikka is a rare example of a successful independent animation studio, and considering the success of this series, they’re probably aiming for more. There is a flaw that can’t be excused with this, however: the characters tend to put an overemphasis on their acting. Especially Masaki’s character feels way too dramatic, and feels unnatural because of this.

Nevertheless, I definitely support these short OVAs that try to do something fresh and different. The OVA-format is really one in which you can take a lot more risks than with your regular TV-series, and yet hardly any series take advantage of this. Eve no Jikan’s problem is that it’s just way too ambitious for this format: it tried to too too much in too little time, which prevents it from being a classic, but on the other hand its short length turns it into a very accessible nice and light watch.

Well, I guess that with this, Higurashi finally comes to an end, and I have to say that the creators couldn’t have chosen a better way to close it off than with Rei. It really made excellent use of the OVA format to surpass itself, in terms of comedy and silliness in regards to episodes 1 and 5, and in terms of solid scriptwriting for episodes 2, 3 and 4. I’m really going to miss this series.

Anyway, I’m not going to write a review for this OVA, because I know from experience that I’m terrible at those kinds of reviews, especially if I don’t marathon them. What I do want to say though, is that everyone who finished the TV-series should really also give the OVA a chance. It’s one of the very few cases in which the OVA is as good as the series it’s based on.

Anyway, this episode closes off Higurashi with another silly chapter, in which Rena swallows a “Magatama” which makes her fall in love with whoever holds an identical “Magatama” in a different colour, which shows Rena spooning up to Tomitake, Takano, Oshii and eventually Keiichi through a hilarious episode. I liked it better than the first episode of Higurashi Rei, because even though it was very silly, it also showed a new side of Rena: the side of her that wants to be close to others, and so is very easy to adapt her hobbies to others.

This also leads to an awesome Mah-Jong match, and at that point you could really see that it was a wise decision to put the director of Shion no Ou on the director’s position, rather than Chiaki Kon. The Mah-jong match in this episode which probably only took up 5 minutes was more exciting and creative than anything I’ve seen in Saki for the past half five months. It really reminded me that there can be game-based series that don’t have to rely on god-mode powers and Deus ex Machina.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

The sixth Kara no Kyoukai movie is called “Oblivion Recorder”. Unlike the fifth movie, it only takes up an hour of airtime, and tells about another supernatural mystery case in which Shiki becomes involved. While it doesn’t match the standard that was set by the movies 3, 4 and 5, it nevertheless is a nice little movie.

In this movie, we learn that Mikiya has a younger sister. This movie shows her, as she tries to solve a murder mystery that took place in her school, helped by Shiki. The storyline this time is simple but effective, and there’s a nice layered mystery behind a seemingly straight-forward murder. The build-up is pretty well done, and overall this makes for an enjoyable movie.

Where this movie fails to live up to in comparison to its predecessors is that its scenario and execution lack polish. Mikiya’s sister turns out to be yet another girl with a brother complex. I dunno, I think that the creators tried to appeal to taboos, but that doesn’t really work when this trope is already used by tons of other anime. And overall, as much as I appreciate that we got to know more about Mikiya this way, as a main character for a KnK movie, she fails to stand out and is among the least interesting ones.

On top of that, the dialogue also feels rushed and uninspired for a movie. There are a number of conversations that clearly lack a bit of polish here and there, and there are quite a few plot-holes left open at the end of it, most of which I don’t think are going to be answered by the seventh movie. This movie simply doesn’t have the deep characters nor the addictive storytelling of the third, fourth and fifth movie.

What it does have, however, is the best CG during an action scene out of the six movies so far. Mikiya’s sister’s magic is very flashy and the creators make really good use of it during the action scenes. As a standalone movie Oblivion Recorder would have been fine, but the standards of the Kara no Kyoukai movies so far have become higher than average after all.

Genius Party gathers many different people with many different talents to create shorts. With Limit Cycle, this is monologues. It’s basically 20 minutes of monologue about religious and philosophical topics. Its director is Hideki Futamura, who isn’t really a big name. He worked on a bunch of the Animatrix shorts, did key animation for movies as Junkers Come Here, Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust and Perfect Blue, and he directed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. He’s definitely someone with talent, and here he finally gets to prove again what he can do.

In these twenty minutes of nothing but talking however, he makes the classic mistake that you can do with these kinds of shorts: he forgets to put anything into context. What we have right now is some random guy who rambles on about life, death, immortality, religion, et cetera. I just had one question on my mind, though: “what’s the point?” Why is this guy delving into philosophy? What does he want to achieve?

You see, the thing is that right now you have a string of dialogue of a level that even I could have come up with. Just give me enough time to quote a bunch of famous philosophers who talked about life, immortality and religion, and voila! This isn’t intelligent, this is just plain random. I think that what the director should have done is that he should have looked more at good examples, in which endless strings of dialogues and monologues do work. Most notably, if he watched Mamoru Oshii’s short on Twillight Q, or Mouryou no Hako, he would have gotten a good idea of what he needed to do to put some meaning behind these words. And give them impact.

Still, a complete waste of time this isn’t, because thankfully the visuals are utterly gorgeous. Along with Dimension Bomb, Limit Cycle definitely has the best aesthetics of all the shorts of Genius Party, and that has to say something. The compositions, character-designs, use of colours, and filters, all come together wonderfully along with great character-designs. If anything, the images were much more thought-provoking than the dialogue!

Anyway, to wrap up Genius Party: it really was a great opportunity to see so many different talents and styles, together in one package. These compilation movies of different short stories have been there before, but never in this scale, with so many different movies and I can only hope that Studio 4C (or any other studio for that matter) is going to continue making more of these, because I really enjoyed sitting through even the lesser ones.

As for my favourite ones, my top three consists of Dimension Bomb, Toujin Kit and Baby Blue. These three are definite works of art and really succeeded in what they set out to do. The other shorts also all have their own merits in their own single way.

Most of Genius Party’s animation is hand drawn or animated with cells. Deathtic 4 instead is nearly entirely CG, and feels the most like a platform to try out new CGI techniques. On top of that, the characters are all zombies and talk in some strange kind of Scandinavian-ish language that nobody can understand. The director is Shinji Kimura, a guy who mostly is involved with background art for big hitting movies as Akira, Angel’s Egg, My Neighbor Totoro, Steam Boy, Tekkkon Kinkreet and Prime Rose, and he also took care of the art of the first short of the Gotham Knight movie.

So as expected, the background art is very good. I didn’t notice it at first, but the he designed a very original city that at the same time doesn’t distract from the real art in the foreground. You can see that a lot of time went in designing every single building. On the opposite side though, the story and characters feel among the dullest of what Genius Party has to offer. It’s straightforward, there’s no real symbolism or depth to the story. It just feels flat.

But this is really the power of Genius Party: because it has directors with so many different backgrounds, there’s lots of stuff that you can see. Baby Blue had a director who is excellent at characterization, and so that short had the best characters. Instead shorts like this one, Toujin Kit and Wanwa the Doggy that are directed by animators and background artists have a very distinctive visual style instead. This is why I’m a fan of these compilation movies, and I can only hope that in the future, more of them are going to be released.

On a side-note, anyone know what happened to Le Manchot melomane?

Well… what can I say…?

Wanwa the Doggy is… different. It’s… I’m still not sure what it is; all I know that it was really, really weird. The one who brought us this abomination was Shinwa Ohira, an animator. He worked on the animation of various big-hitting movies, but also on stuff like FLCL, Gosenzosama Banbanzai, Gundam and a few television series here and there. But none of it really matches up in terms of weirdness to… whatever the hell it was that I just watched.

The best way to describe these thirteen minutes are as a very bad acid trip. Shinwa Ohira just continues to throw weird stuff at the screen throughout the entire 13 minutes of this short, one scene more nonsensical than the other. I guess that it was about a kid’s worries as his mother is having a baby, but even children don’t have that kind of imagination.

The animation was as good as usual : there was a lot of movement, and you can see that the creators used lots of imagination for nearly all of the visuals here. Just don’t ask where the hell this inspiration came from…

While there are other quiet shorts in Genius Party, Toujin Kit definitely feels to be the most down-to-earth no-nonsense movie of the bunch. At the end of the thirteen minutes, there is no doubt what the story is about: there’s hardly any deep symbolism, there is no over top action, and instead Toujin Kit is what it is, and because of this it definitely has its merits.

The director for this one is Tatsuyuki Tanaka, who is one of the lesser known names to participate in Genius Party. He’s one of Studio 4C’s key animators, and also worked on a few random other series. In Toujin Kit however, he definitely demonstrates that he belongs among the big guys. I remember Anonymous’s comments on the animation of Eden of the East versus Dimension Bomb, and after Toujin Kit I’m really starting to understand what he meant. Because of the attention to detail in today’s animation, animators are forced to cut a lot of corners in animation.

Toujin Kit has none of this: here characters are animated: they move realistically, and hardly ever stand completely still. The frame-rate is incredibly smooth, and the rest of this short is on purpose kept very simple and down to earth, in order to not have any cheap distractions from the animation. In fact, there isn’t even a soundtrack: just some background noises.

The characters and story however aren’t dull in any way either. Because they’re so well animated, they’re easy to connect to and well likable, despite the fact that none of them are really nice people. Some of their motivations are well explained, the others are easy to guess or imagine and together they form a very complete little story.

Moondrive is the oddball of Genius Party. It’s a full fledged comedy, much more than Shanghai Dragon was. It is really silly, and I got a great laugh out of it. The director of this one is a genius of aesthetics: Kazuto Nakazawa, who people may remember as the director of Comedy, one of the biggest visual masterpieces of the past decade. He also did the key animation for the OP of Ergo Proxy and the second OP of Blood+, the character-designs for Ashita no Nadja and was the animation director of Samurai Champloo. This is one guy who knows how to make things look good.

And it shows in Moondrive as well. The visuals in these fifteen minutes were absolutely fantastic. Don’t expect anything like what you saw in Comedy, but instead this time he went for a dark and gritty setting set on top of the moon. The character-designs are full of style and incredibly imaginative, and the animation is incredibly quirky: it knows exactly how to capture the comedic tone of this series, it’s quirkish and made to make you laugh at the black humour of this short movie.

So yeah, in terms of story and symbolism this short doesn’t match up to the other parts in Genius Party and a few of the jokes are rather predictable or repetitive, but the rest of the jokes and quirky characters really make up for it. This is another reason why I’m such a big fan of these collection of short stories: you’ll never know what’s going to turn up next, and you’ll never know when a short is going to make you roll on the floor laughing.

Yeah, don’t mind about the order of these posts. I found out a bit too late about the real order of the shorts, so I’ll just label them accordingly and review the individual movies alphabetically… for as far as it’s possible. Gala was done by Mahiro Maida, the guy who founded Gonzo. This guy is basically a jack of all trades in the anime business: he animates, directs, designs, produces, draws mecha, writes screenplay, he’s tried out all sorts of stuff. The series he directed are also have no similarities at all, and range from incredibly bad (Final Fantasy Unlimited) to incredibly good (Gankutsuou, The Second Renaissance).

Yeah, that’s pretty much Studio Gonzo in a nutshell. ^^;

Anyway, Gala again is a great little movie of fifteen minutes long. It’s about a strange village with all kinds of weird and uniquely designed people living in it, where suddenly a giant seed drops from nowhere. First they want to destroy it, but gradually their attempts to destroy it turn into something completely different. For what happens next is something that you’re going to have to find out by watching it, but I’ll just say that there is a lot of symbolism in it, and leads up to a very good conclusion.

Music also plays a very big part in these fifteen minutes, but my one complaint is that the soundtrack nearly totally overshadows the music that’s played by the characters themselves. And don’t get me wrong, it really is a wonderful soundtrack, but this is a pitfall very common for anime, as it simply isn’t able to properly synchronize such complex moves as playing an instrument. Even a movie budget doesn’t turn out to be enough to get it right.