Having finished "CIPHER THE VIDEO" after 40 minutes’ worth of confusion, bewilderment, laughter, and tears, I feel it necessary to gather my thoughts on it in some fashion. Recently released in a new rip/encode by ARR, “Cipher” is truly one of the more puzzling works I have ever seen from any era, in any medium. Its intentions seem wholly unknown to me, buried under the purest of incompetency, laziness/budget constraints, and seeming indifference.
The provided summary is as follows:
"Annis Marfie is a boyish-looking girl, who is studying art in New York. One day, she discovers that her schoolmate, an extraordinarily beautiful semi-pro model, Shiver is actually
...
impersonated by two people. They are twins, Shiver and Cipher, but for the world, they act like they were just Shiver. Annis gets interested in the intention of these two, who fool the world this way, so she approaches them. "
However, absolutely none of that actually happens. Maybe it does in the manga, who knows, but, so far as the OVA goes, nope. What does happen the anime? Well, story-wise… absolutely nothing. There is a character who is an actor. This actor, his director, fellow actors, and fans are interviewed by an off-camera reporter. The whole “secret twins” idea is entirely lost, but there are two characters who look identical. Also, there is a girl who is somewhat involved with one of them. All of this, aside from the brief and thoroughly inconsequential interview scenes, is told without any dialog, as… the majority of “Cipher’s” content is comprised of oft-baffling musical montages. I’m not making this up, in the first fifteen minutes, all but a rare 2-3 minute interlude is an unending string of montages. Of the stomach churning late-80s fare present are only two songs that I recognize - Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” and Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose.”
I know of no better way to convey just how poorly handled and monotonous this dragging parade of montages is than to describe in great detail what I see as being the peak of their strangeness. After an opening string of cutesy montages lasting eight-and-a-half minutes, the anime finally cuts to what seems to be its long-delayed actual opening… instead, you are treated to a brief shot of the three main “characters” sitting around a television, which soon zooms in to show a 40-second cake commercial. No, wait, it gets better. After this mind numbing break, the viewer is treated to the first instance of dialog from the supposed center of the story, carried out in the previously described interview fashion. We see the young man on the set of a new film, a football feature entitled “WINNING TOUGH.”
All of the voice acting is horrible in the most surreal of fashions. Characters mumble through lines, insert awkward pauses as if it were their first time reading the script, and, on at least one occasion which I would bet my life on, actually trip up and stumble during the reading. This mishap is left in, as he then goes on to backtrack a half-step and continue the line. There is a definite “Blood Freak” feel going on here. After we dabble around with them for a while (approximately two minutes), what is, so far as I can figure, supposed to be the preview for this football film is shown in, you guessed it, an extended montage. When it came around to a few bars before the hook and I placed this familiar song as “Footloose,” I just lost it. If it does not last for the entirety of the song, then it is certainly a cut which is damned close to it. This Kenny Loggins anime football travesty finally comes to a close, leading into another worthless string of awkward and uncomfortable interviews for a minute (as in, literally, one minute) until… you can just feel them coming at this point, another montage.
I pray that I still have some readers, as what I am about to share deserves more than any other documented history or human expression to live on in some sort of shared consciousness. The montage following this one-minute break… is… a new, separate montage… set, again, to “Footloose.” A “Footloose” anime montage to follow up after the last “Footloose” anime montage because, hey, what could possibly be better than a “Footloose” anime montage? The mind reels. What absurdity! At every turn, this thing just gets stranger and stranger. It does not in any way feel like something that could have been directed or even aided by an actual human being. The pacing is so unnatural, the approach so obviously muddled… at the very worst, even the most artless of trash contains some trace of inherent subscription, again, even unconsciously, to standard rules of storytelling. It goes so far beyond any excuse possibly rendered along the lines of budget constraint or general inexperience of its cast and crew.
Despite the arguable contradiction in such a statement, the only organizational reasoning I can place to try and make some sense of this thing’s reality is that it is an unintentionally dadaist work. It is a brain-breaking monstrosity - seemingly a relic from another dimension, somehow released on home video within our own. Don’t accuse me of exaggeration until you’ve seen it yourself. There is absolutely nothing identifiable as “human” present at any point on any discernible level of this 40:50 shoujo abortion. Oh no, there’s more.
After the second coming of Kenny Loggins follows more pointless and unilluminating interview footage, more montages (at least we get some good funeral footage of the twins’ mom, as if anyone could actually be emotionally invested in these blank slate dweebs), and, finally, a genuine meeting of of two of the main characters in an unintentionally gut-busting scripted scene. After that (quite literal) rude awakening, the twins talk about what they are going to make for breakfast. This is clearly supposed to be humorous, but, really, I could go back and give a line-by-line transcription of the scene, and, yeah, there’s nothing more or less funny than summing it up as two men discussing which breakfast foods they want to combine into their meal. That this seems to be a source of great amusement for them is another testament to this OVA being more an approximation of human entertainment than the genuine article. This is, however, the most story and character development offered thus far. Suddenly, at 23:35, a familiar tune pops up…
“Say, isn’t this the hit 1984 Phil Collins ballad,’Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)?’ The very same song which was featured at the start of this OVA? Is… wait… why are credits rolling at barely over halfway through the running time…”
After being treated to another full-length cut of that soft rock classic, nearly fourteen minutes remain… fourteen minutes occupied by a making-of featurette/love letter to whatever-the-hell you just finished watching. It appears to be hosted by the main character himself, in character, but… this same voice also carries out the proceedings as a removed and subjective narrator. It really just alternates from line-to-line, basically. In this behind-the-scenes look, you gain an insight as to how the filmmakers sought for accuracy in recreating the wasted and trivial New York City setting. They claim to have closely studied the editing techniques of MTV programming to effectively emulate their tone (they didn’t). They worked with English voice actors in an attempt to create something unique in the world of Japanese animation. The universality of just how terrible every actor is in this feature is staggering. One would seemingly have better luck of getting decent performances out of people pulled from the street at random. This stands out even more when you watch people actually trying at this garbage.
How could this have been made? How did nobody at any point of its construction take a step back and realize how stilted, unnatural, and altogether heinous this thing is? Watching this featurette proves that it either is, in actuality, the result of human effort, or, at least, the work a highly evolved shapeshifting race (my money is on reptilians). How did it happen. How did any of this come to be. This review is loaded with such adjective saturated descriptive turns, and even combining them into one general impression fails to get across the broken feel of this anime. It is akin to the sorts of stimuli forcefully presented to someone in order to “break” or otherwise psychologically reprogram them.
So far as scoring goes, "Cipher" exists completely outside of any scale which could sum up its worth in simple numerical value. To reflect this, only a "0" or a "10" would seem applicable, so I opted for the "10," figuring that it would likely be uniformly rated lowly on this site. It is, if nothing else, a bizarre artifact of late-80s anime product which is entirely unlike anything else you will ever see. Whether or not this warrants a proper viewing is up to you.
Alternative Titles
Japanese: CIPHER THE VIDEO
More titlesInformation
Type:
OVA
Episodes:
1
Status:
Finished Airing
Aired:
Mar 3, 1989
Producers:
Victor Entertainment
Licensors:
None found, add some
Studios:
Magic Bus
Source:
Manga
Genre:
Drama
Theme:
Showbiz
Demographic:
Shoujo
Duration:
26 min.
Rating:
PG-13 - Teens 13 or older
Statistics
Ranked:
#129582
2
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Popularity:
#5828
Members:
12,237
Favorites:
76
Resources | Reviews
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Your Feelings Categories Apr 17, 2012
Having finished "CIPHER THE VIDEO" after 40 minutes’ worth of confusion, bewilderment, laughter, and tears, I feel it necessary to gather my thoughts on it in some fashion. Recently released in a new rip/encode by ARR, “Cipher” is truly one of the more puzzling works I have ever seen from any era, in any medium. Its intentions seem wholly unknown to me, buried under the purest of incompetency, laziness/budget constraints, and seeming indifference.
The provided summary is as follows: "Annis Marfie is a boyish-looking girl, who is studying art in New York. One day, she discovers that her schoolmate, an extraordinarily beautiful semi-pro model, Shiver is actually ... Mar 23, 2015
Overview:
I have seen a LOT of really weird anime, but I have never seen anything like Cipher. This anime comes completely out of left field and just leaves you speechless. It is basically a 40 minute music video that tells the story of a famous teen actor and his twin brother, who often attends school in his place. It was made in the 1980s, so the soundtrack is mostly Kenny Loggins and Phil Collins. It is PURE 80s cheese! I guess you have to consider that "AMVs" didn't exist in the 1980s, so the very concept of watching anime mixed with popular music was brand ... Sep 1, 2016
Up until lately, I have been out of anime to watch. Much to my surprise, being a very big fan of this medium, I thought to myself that, maybe, it was time to quit. With my national exams coming, it would have been easier for me to focus on them. Few days later, I found out that I still needed my daily dose of anniemays and mangoes and manhwuoes and whatever, had it become a habit to watch much coming from this medium. Much to my serendipity, I was able to find a masterpiece that was able to bring me back to this medium. That
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Mar 29, 2021
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Ah yes, Cipher. Cipher is a classic 25 minute, 80s anime about the life of Roy Rang. It is well-known around the anime community as a legendary mess of a show, but was it really that bad? It was made by the same studio that made the critically acclaimed Legend of the Galactic Heroes after all. So the story is about the life of Roy Rang and who he is. Most of these 25 minutes are not about the story though. Most of it was music playing while the characters were dancing, walking, or just showcasing the city. There were a few moments when the ... Apr 10, 2022
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
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Jun 29, 2015
Gosh, Cipher is such a strange work.
There's a guy named Cipher, and a guy named Siva, and they're both... twins or something? Nothing is really explained about their relationship to each other or what is even going on in the film. One of them is a movie star making a football film, that's about all I got out of it. None of the characters are introduced very well (or in some cases at all), as there's very little dialogue in the film, and the dialogue that is there is done through an interview-like style that doesn't actually say much about them or the story at hand. The ... Apr 6, 2018
I'm so confused???? But apparently, that's expected, since this is pretty much an (official) AMV for a manga.
To be fair, the music is good. It's very american (i mean, phil collins is in the intro! just an example), but it's good. The dub is horrible, it's like they COULDN'T pay for actual voice-actors so they just asked around the street for random people to come over and say some lines in front of a microphone. BUT... it's so hilarious that you just roll with it and accept the awkwardness. It kind of gives a certain "charm" to this OVA. The art is pretty and I actually want ... Oct 12, 2018
An Avant Garde Masterpiece
A surreal fragmented narrative told through nothing but mock interviews, fake advertisements and animated music videos sequences set to 80s pop hits. In fact, the whole thing is book ended by Phil Collin's music! Despite wielding only this pastiche of 80s pop culture, a compelling example of 'show not tell' storytelling is expertly achieved within just 20 minutes. The remainder 15 minutes? Dedicated to the promotional material and the 'making of'. A fitting metafiction for this story within a story. Notable: -The Twin Towers as an allegory for our twin protagonists ... Jan 27, 2019
OK. This is somehow the cringiest anime I have ever seen, and that includes many of the worst listed on MAL.
Story: 0 I was forced to give this a 1, but if it was up to me it would be 0. There is literally no story. One third of this is a montage of disconnected moments and the worst dancing ever in anime. The rest of it apart from the final scene is about a guy who's filming a movie: it doesn't do much. Then the last scene is him meeting his brother. That is it. That is all. It is a plotless mess that is ... Feb 4, 2022
"Cipher" is a bundle of emotions, and a love letter to 1980s New York and Los Angeles.
My attention was kept for the entire 26-minute runtime, but I didn't understand what I was watching. It started to make sense when I realized that the target audience for this was readers of the "Cipher" manga, who would already be familiar with the characters. The OVA served as a "demo reel" of sorts that let the readers see their favorite characters animated and speaking English. So, although it looks like a bizarre spectacle at first glance, there is meaning behind the madness. It starts off with one of the ... Apr 22, 2020
You will never see another anime quite like Cipher.
It is a music video, a love sonnet to New York City, a tribute to Phil Collins, a movie within a movie, a commercial for cake mix, an interview, a psychoanalysis of its characters, a surreal mind trip... Cipher is all those things and so much more. As I watched, I felt a full range of emotions: confusion, delight, disgust, joy, outrage, hilarity. Although based on a shoujo manga, director Tsuneo Tominaga decided to throw the source material away, including a linear narrative, character arcs, and discernible dialogue, for a bizarre trip through his subconscious. Lacking any semblance ... May 6, 2020
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. Jun 14, 2022
"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 ... Mar 24, 2020
Okay, this is my first review and I just need to write about this awful anime. I guess I now know why it is on the MAL badges for unique anime.
I couldn't find a good storyline in this anime, to me it was as if ingredients were thrown together to make a delicious cocktail only the ingredients consist out of rotting meat and milk that has been spoiled for three months. The art for it's year of making was okayish, I just couldn't enjoy it and it eventually became a thorn in my eye in combination with the voice acting. The only thing I ... Jan 17, 2019
Ah, the much-maligned "Cipher". Notoriously rated one of the worst anime OVAs of the decade. Also considered one of the weirdest anime shows to be made, leaving many to scratch their heads thinking, 'why does this even exist?' (However, it does not take the cake for the strangest ever -- that honor goes to Chocolate Panic Show).
And yet, if viewed from a certain perspective, it has a certain...charm. I would certainly be more willing to watch more like this, than about half of the current,modern crop of regular anime series that are dredged up and vomited on ... Aug 11, 2020
Cipher is definitely one of the cringiest and worse animes I have ever seen.
Story: 1/10 There is no story. Half of it is a montage of random scenes that have no connections in any way. And the other half is some terrible 'interview' of these people being cast into a movie. Completely plotless. Art: 1/10 The art is very ugly and terrible quality even for the 80s. A lot of the animation gets reused as well. Sound: 1/10 The songs that were played were TERRIBLE and didn't fit the video at all. The voice actors were so monotone and cringy, awfully recorded too. ... Dec 17, 2020
As an immediate disclaimer, I made the mistake of watching Cipher after getting only four hours of sleep. That said, I really don't think it makes a difference how much sleep you get, nothing can truly prepare you for this experience. I was warned that this OVA made no sense. I knew that the voice acting was... A Choice. People said it was a confusing, hilarious mess, and they were right. I thought I was ready. I wasn't.
The plot pretty much doesn't exist, or at the very least, if there was meant to be a plot buried within the 80s music and cake mix ... Feb 25, 2021
Cipher The Video is like if you took the prompt to make an anime based off of MTV but you just did a recording of MTV and made it anime with a few Manga characters recurring and i love it. It just slaps no question. If you know the manga premise then you can kinda know whats going on but you don't need to because it doesn't have a plot and is basically a 40 minute OP, the dialogue is in english as its set in New York but it can be a bit shaky cos its a bit old (this doesn't at all matter
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May 29, 2021
i am literally begging you to go watch this right now. this anime is borderline surreal. why is the whole thing in english with japanese subtitles? why is there a fake advertisement in the middle of it featuring a knockoff pillsbury dough boy? why does this anime end with the twins kissing and then going to make yogurt with ice cream and raisins for breakfast? every choice made in the production of this anime is baffling. how on earth did they afford to license these songs? i wish every anime would just randomly start playing footloose halfway through. i felt like i was having a
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Aug 7, 2019
a transcendental experience. i love this with every fibre of my being. effective art makes you ask questions, so:
why was the Hindu god Shiva shown in this 80s MV set in New York? the Japanese pronunciation of 'Shiva' is similar to 'Shiver', the name of one of the twins, right? what are the implications of the twin sharing the same name as a supreme being? like was this supposed to imply Shiver is the ultimate creator of the universe? is this why he has that red spot on his forehead? and why did the two brothers kiss both during and after the flashback showing their ... |