Ranked #5676

Digital Juice

I only liked one (maybe two) of the six animated shorts that are compiled in "Digital Juice". What plagues most of them is usually a really uninspired visual style. In my opinion at least. And that is a really important aspect to take into consideration, seeing how characters or stories can't actually sustain short clips that are on average two or three minutes long - it's all down to the animation, and to a lesser extent, the sound. A few words about each segment...

Keikaku / Lord of the Sword, directed by Ohara Hidekazu

The whole thing is set up as an intentionally bad samurai movie trailer, an invitation to see a non-existant B movie set in medieval Japan. It has very limited animation that usually consists of very simple backgrounds (either flat colours or edited photographs) over which a samurai is animated doing a simple and short action, poster-like snap shots, a couple of scenes of really bad CG and filling the screen with text. The part that I liked the most - "liked" is a pretty strong word. I didn't actually like anything about the short, let's just say this part was a little bit better than the rest - is the scene where a samurai pulls his arms out of his kimono but instead a new figure appears which in turn undresses and a new one appears and so on, sort of like a matryoshka doll. The soundtrack or rather the only song that plays during the 2 minutes of the short, is a glam rock pumping piece straight from the 1980s which was strangely fitting for the clip. Of course, this being a fake trailer, there's no narrative to talk about. I tried taking the whole thing as a parody of sorts but in the end I just did not like it. [3]

Chicken's Insurance, directed by Ando Hiroaki

The better aspect of this short is Ueda Yuuji's voice acting as Chicken, the avian insurance salesman. Unfortunately, not even he was able to infuse enough humour into this irony filled short that tries to criticize life insurances and the people who try to sell them in a humorous way. It's simply not interesting in any way and the animation, which looks like chicken poop, doesn't help with that in the least. It's a combination of 2D and 3D CG that looks plain ugly and isn't really that impressive from a technical standpoint either. The backgrounds were pretty detailed and nice though. All in all, this short was pretty boring even if it's only a little under three and a half minutes long. [4]

Tojin Kit, directed Tanaka Tatsuyuki

An actual trailer, or a preview for yet another short from yet another Studio 4°C compilation, "Genius Party Beyond". It's the shortest of the bunch, only some two minutes long. It blends 2D animation with 3D backgrounds pretty successfully and I liked its steam-punk aesthetic. Seeing as it's just a preview there's not much to say about it and it's not that self-contained. Still a lot better than the rest of the shorts, with the exception of "In the Evening of a Moonlit Night". I also liked the sound and the background music and how it was used in the cuts of the animation (for example, thump or sharp sound as transition into title or new scene), making the whole thing a pretty cool, rhythmic experience. [6]

In the Evening of a Moonlit Night, directed by Yaginuma Kazuyoshi

My favourite short of the six, and the only one I actually liked. I don't know if I should say "Digital Juice" is worth seeing just for this two and a half minutes long clip, but I for one liked it enough to watch it again after I finished all the other clips. And it helped wash away the bad aftertaste this collection as a whole left me with. You can take the whole thing as a video clip for "Sunday Morning" by the Velvet Underground, which is the short's background song and leads the scenes. Not to say you're going to enjoy this only if you're a Velvet Underground fan or only if you like the song (although part of my enjoyment comes from that) because the clip is really nice by itself as well. Really colourful, dreamy and playful animation, with a lot of purple and blueish hues that suggest, as you would expect, night time or early morning. The whole short has a very mellow vibe and it revolves around a ten or eleven year old girl's relationship with two boys, representing perhaps the crossroads she is now at - a young and innocent boy the same age as her and an older, mature boy from... "another planet". The theme is treated in a pretty simple manner but it came across pretty well and like I said, I liked it. [8]

Table and Fishman, directed by Kobayashi Osamu

The longest clip... or the needlessly long clip. Just like with "Chicken's Insurance" this film is full of a really ugly blend of CG animation. Apart from the animation style which was very off-putting, the short's content and narrative didn't really appeal to me either - it's a cheesy, corny, macho love story between a bag of muscles and the dumb chick with a fine ass. Of course, the whole thing needed to be infused with a large dose of weirdness and other phantasmagorical crap. Whatever. [4]

The Saloon in the Air, directed by Morimoto Kōji

Well, this one's really hideous visually, watching it until the end was tiring and almost frustrating. I'm not the biggest fan of animation that consists of real-life photos over animation frames... especially when these photos are pasted over really bland, plastic-y rendered CG crap. The whole thing happens in a saloon / bar / brothel floating in the sky. Some glass of wine in which a woman's head is floating got pregnant and everyone is discussing the consequences of that... at first anyway. Was this thing trying to be a social commentary? I don't know, maybe. I was too disinterested in the whole thing. The collection ended with a bang, the clip is in my opinion the worst of them all. [3] read more

This 1 episode OVA is a compilation of various short stories. Each one of them has it's own world: it's own art style, it's own plot and it's own characters; they aren't related with one another at all. Due to the length of the stories, character development is basically null. The voice acting and the soundtrack suits it pretty well, too.

It is decently funny and enjoyable.