Hidari

The title of this review tells you pretty much all you need to know about this short film. I guess it is a traditional story of revenge in the samurai genre. There is a backstory hinted at but that's it. It is hinted at but what else can you do in six minutes? It is stop-motion animation and it is very animated; pretty much non-stop action. The artwork makes almost no attempt to be realistic. There is no setting in which the action takes place. If it were being presented in a theater it would be called "bare stage". The characters are so unrealistic as to be called grotesque. All that being said, it is a lot of fun.

Every single second of this sadly far too short film is pure art, from the set, to the character designs. The Motif of wooden Edo period Japan is upheld through the designs, all of our weapons are either period accurate, including carpentry or woodworking tools that would be. Applying a good layer of stylization on top of the film with fun action and super cool weapons the wooden puppetry and its themes are consistent throughout, while the action is followable low in cuts and entertaining to watch. My only real gripes are that the length is appallingly short, and that the character interactions are few to none. We could have better established stories but for a project like it is this was amazing.

Is it still steampunk if everything's made out of wood, or does it become woodpunk instead? I don't know, but the aesthetic of Hidari is cool, and as a short film that's basically just one action scene, it's entertaining. It feels like it does for samurai films what some recent Godzilla short films do for the kaiju genre; just delivering the goods within as short a runtime as possible, and it's a fun approach to take, even if it's inevitably not as fulfilling as something longer. But if Hidari is labeled a "pilot" film, then I feel like it's a pretty successful one, and this style could well work for a feature so long as it had a decently fleshed-out story (hell, it might even be watchable without a narrative, come to think of it... see the fairly recent Mad God, for example).