Shelter (Music)

A Shelter the Animation Review

TL;DR: A short that has an amazing story to it.

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"Everyone wants to live in their own world."

Story:
Due to the animation being about a 6 minute video, I had very low expectations as to how the story would go in this short. But, I was actually very wrong. It's not a very long story, but it's definitely something to make this animation worth looking into. A 17-year-old girl, Rin, is able to do anything in the world. But, there's a reason why she can do this. You find that out through the music video. The ending of the story isn't something you ... expected within the first 2 minutes.

Art:
The art is amazing. There isn't a frame in which it doesn't have any effort into the detail. Almost every frame has such vivid colors and beautiful scenery, to the point that any frame could be a great background picture.

Character:
It's literally about two characters. The main character definitely has gone through a lot in her life, which can make you sympathize with her. The other character I can't go into detail about, but they're very involved with the main character.

Sound:
It's a music video, 80% of this animation's soundtrack is only one song. But, I would say the song is very fitting as to what the story holds within this anime.

Enjoyment:
I wanted to cry. When I finished it, it kind of made me feel very sad, yet happy. The story was meant to be happy and sad, and I think it did a great job as to what happened.

Overall: 8*
This is only a 6-minute animation, but if they were to ever make a real movie adaptation of this animation, I would watch it in a heartbeat. So, the * means if the animation WERE to get a movie adaptation, in which I doubt, I'd give it a 10.

Holy hell. I've read many different opinions about this MV now and let me just get this out of the way. It's not as good as Porter fans/ anime connoisseur make it out to be, and it's by far not as bad as some anti-mainstream hipsters say. People that give this piece everything under 5 are either lying to make themselves fell better and/or stand out or they just have not watched enough shows to even know what truly awful feels like. I saw that some people gave this piece a 1 for incredible exaggerated reasons. It's a fucking music video. It's 6 minutes long. ... And apparently the people had no enjoyment, didn't like the art or the sound and hated the story. Pretty incredible, considering the theme is so mediocre that it hurts but in no way bad.

Porter went a safe way with the minor philosophical question everyone thought after watching the Matrix. "Is dis shitz real?" It's nothing new but it got translated fairly well through the eyes of a girl. They tried to establish a relationship between the viewer and the girl, but in the end 6 minutes are to short or they just did not manage to do this. Because i couldn't care less about this semen demon.
The art was good, the GC sucked ass (like always) and i really liked the track. But this is my personal preference and i'm sure that some people don't like EDM. The 6 minutes didn't feel wasted. It was a nice experience but nothing out of this world. It was just a music video done by A-1 Pictures, nothing more, nothing less.

Overall it gets a 6 from me. Daft Punk's Interstella 5555 is the greatest electronic music/anime crossover of all time and you guys can suck my dick.

This might be one of the worst things I have ever watched.

Let's get two things out of the way. Undeniably, this video looks good. It's well drawn, well animated, and is certainly eye catching with its colorful visuals and impressively imaginative landscapes. As music, this is not something that's suited to me, but I can at least understand people who think that Porter's music is palatable to them.

My problem with this piece is not related to the audiovisuals but rather with the idea that this should be taken as a story or a music video that is trying to be something more than just ... Porter's music meshed with beautifully animated sequences. I understand that these criticisms are often held back by the difficulties of critiquing something that isn't overtly concerned with story, but in a piece so unabashedly attempting to draw sympathy, there's fair ground here to levy some serious concerns.

Shelter exemplifies everything that is wrong with storytelling in anime, namely that rather attempting to tell a real story developed with content and meaningful emotion, it takes the most abusive shortcut by designing a cute character, throwing her into a position of bittersweet melancholy, and using that as a means of manipulating our basest emotions into believing there is something meaningful and tragic to be said.

People are praising the emotional resonance in the story and its ability to bring out the loneliness lost in the profundity of memory. Yet, consider a world where the main character is not a beautiful teenage girl, lost and confused in a world completely foreign to her. When you remove that physical appearance that makes us so inexplicably attracted to her stake in the story, there is ultimately no reason for us to feel sympathy. It is completely superficial.

One might say that it's only a six minute short, but the fact that Shelter goes out of its way to show for a split second the main character's letter from her father, to invoke the community to spend time and read it on a second watch, tells me that there is a serious intent to manifest some semblance of a meaningful story. However, that is undermined precisely by the video's own neglect of that story. Much like many other anime designed purely for cheap tears and easy pity, we are given not substance, but rather a montage of a young innocent girl cherishing sweet memories with someone we barely meet.

Sure it can be cute, but that does not preclude it from being utterly trite. Shelter offends its audience by presenting us with its fascinating visuals, the ostensible undertones of a post-apocalyptic world, the perceived loneliness of being potentially the last human in the universe, but gives us nothing more than the lowest common denominator of a story, one that galvanizes its sympathies out of the most mundane and pathetic tricks in the book, and half-expects us to take it seriously. I cannot in good conscience, recommend this music video to anyone.