Pale Cocoon

Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura
Year of release: 2005
Country: Japan
Format/Subtitles: .avi/hardcoded English subtitles
Runtime: 22 minutes

Here's another animated short from Japan, a bit newer this time. The story is set in a vaguely explained dystopian world where people live underground with a huge archive of various disconnected and broken information left from previous times that several department process and restore.

The theme of this anime, except for "melancholic as fvck", is memories. Memories and histories of us as individuals and us as a whole. The archives in this world are being less and less interesting to people up to a point where everyone just walks away from them. Memories of things that will never be again are much too painful for them to bear. It will never come back and do we really need to depress ourselves with it? Or should we obscure our failures and leave them behind by dealing with the present. Are distant memories really that important? At which point does collecting and archiving becomes meaningless?

As interesting as the idea of this anime is the relative short length of the film itself kinda hampers the story. It almost feels like it's a pilot episode at times. Maybe it was made into something later on? I didn't check. Despite this flaw it's fairly enjoyable to watch and the atmosphere is projected very well upon the viewer. I just think that it could have been developed a bit further.

Art-wise I can't really say that this is something groundbreaking. It might have been great 7 years ago but today it looks fairly standard. Basically it's a blend of 2D/3D graphics. I'm not sure if anything aside from characters were drawn the usual style. I'm not an expert. I don't know.

Check it out sometimes.

Parts: one and two!

Hiroki Endo's Tanpenshu

Well this is a bit awkward. Last time I read this was in high school and I was all about "man I need to post this on the blog". Good thing I remembered to post it - right? I guess it's never late for love so here goes.

Actually I did post this in one small fragment which was The Crows, the Girl and the Yakuza but I had no idea that it was part of a compilation that contains several short stories by Hiroki Endo. Now after all this time I gave this another read and yes, it's still as awesome as ever. Calling them short stories would be a stretch though since most of them are 80+ pages long.

The stories are generally very melancholic so the comic is mainly maintaining this serious vibe about life, death, meaning and the usual things people like to ponder about. Stories themselves aren't really existing plot wise, it's more about characters and how they perceive their lives and relationships. Hiroki does his thing very well overall, the characters are fleshed out and don't act superficially like most mainstream manga characters. "Do good because we must!" and shit like that is nonexistent which is a refreshing change for me at least. They do what they must and struggle with their existence in a sadly happy way (but also murder).

If I could sum up this whole book in once sentence it would be: people are fucked up but they have good intentions, sometimes.

Recommended.

Download.