Cipher

Cipher is an anomaly. I have no fucking what this is supposed to be or why this was made, but regardless I can’t help but say I liked it. It’s a film that feels like it either came from a brilliant mind or an idiot who had no idea what they were doing. It summarizes several chapters of a story in a 20 minute music video, and then provides information on how it was made, and even though the hilariously awful dubbing for the first 20 minutes is in english, the interviews in the second half are entirely in japanese with no english subs. I ... just… I don’t even know man, this shit is wild.

This thing's wild. It's a jumbled up montage of music videos stripped of context, and then an MTV-style "real bro interviews" thing where the main actor has a very noticeable accent, completely breaking the illusion of the character, along with a few real bad voice actors to go along with it.

Yep, this is a Japanese anime movie where it's voiced entirely in English. It's not much better than you'd expect.

It's wild and barely comprehensible, but it's also pretty short. 15 minutes of the 40 minute runtime are actually a making-of featurette after the fact; that's pretty nice and I appreciate it.

"Hello Japanese people we plucked off the streets, can you speak English?"

"Yeah!"

"OK, great, you're hired!"

If I were a gambling woman, I'd place money on that being the way they found the VA's for what is essentially a 30-minute long AMV intercut now and then with dialogue. I can't say I wasn't entertained, though, oddly enough. Maybe it was the music, or the way they hype up American culture and the film making process, but this just left me nostalgic and longing for a decade I wasn't even born in.

It's definitely something I would recommend if you want decent animation set to catchy pop songs ... and don't care too much about story or characters.