Ranked #4664

Nakedyouth

I'm going to be honest and admit that I'm not feeling particularly well equipped to write a review for this. At the same time, I also feel this extraordinary ten-minute-piece does deserve at least one, so I'm afraid you'll have to bear with me nonetheless.

The first thing worth noting about nakedyouth are the visuals, which are simply impressive. Not being an anime expert, my initial hunch was that real backgrounds were filmed and traced over, but in fact, everything is the result of masterful computer animation.

The natural scenes - birds flying across the sky, rays of sunlight filtering through trees - are stunningly beautiful and rich in detail. While the movements of the human body are animated extremely realistically as well, the characters themselves look overly two-dimensional compared to the scenery, which creates an interesting contrastive effect. In short, the visuals are reason enough to watch this.

That said, nakedyouth is an art film, and will therefore not appeal to everybody. Slow pacing, unresolved tension, repetition and lack of dialogue resulting from the fact it relies on the images to tell the story will leave some frustrated; others will turn away in disgust at the use of the same-sex attraction theme.

If neither of those things scare you, you will be rewarded by a beautifully animated short tale of teenage (homo-)sexual frustration, in which feelings aren't conveyed by words, but subtle glances, awkward situations, and finally, actions. read more