Au Fou!

"Au Fou", also called "Satsujin Kyou Jidai", is a surreal animated short film, directed by Yoji Kuri.

Basic plot: This short film contains little to no plot, and is mostly a compilation of surreal death scenes involving: Man running miles just to kill one man with a knife...; Man stranded on island and waving to a boat...; Woman dying by farting... Man falling down from skyscraper roof and seeing a woman...etc.

Having watched several animated shorts made by Yoji Kuri, I find this one to be one of the most bizarre shorts I've seen from him, mostly due to the black humor. Also the best of the director's short films I've seen so far, as several of the segments put in this one often have somewhat unpredictable and surprising endings.

Originally made in black-and-white and running for nearly 13 minutes. This film also exist in a colored "international version" in which two segment have been cut off, and segment titles are in French.

Besides from some weird soundtrack and strange voices, this film has no actual dialogue.

If you are into bizarre and surreal animated movies coming from Japan, and cartoons with black humor otherwise, I can recommend this one to you. My overall rating: 7/10.

Some other bizarre short films coming from Yoji Kuri include: "Love" (Ai, 1963), "Aos" (1964), "The Window" (Mado, 1965) and "Human Zoo" (Ningen Doubutsuen, 1962).

This is genuinely nuts. Yoji Kuri is a mad man.

That can be said about all his shorts. Au Fou has one of the more enjoyable concepts of the bunch, though, with most segments here showing something for slightly too long, and then delivering a simple gag. If you think a death is coming, more often than not, something absurd will happen to prevent it, and in some cases, harmless situations lead to ridiculous violence.

It doesn't sound funny if you break it down, but I thought the dark comedy here generally worked. There were a couple of sequences where I wasn't sure at all what the joke was supposed to be, but things move fast enough throughout, so it was hard to get too upset about that (plus it's only 12 minutes). Au Fou perhaps teaches us that life is too short and meaningless to get caught up on such things. One more valuable life lesson: don't lean out a window while daydreaming about risque things.