Amazing Nuts!

the anime is split into 4 different stories. i will write my impression from the 4 of them.

TLDR; watch stories 1 and 3, skip 2 and 4.

story 1: the coolest of them. has different styles of animation, colourful, the music is very fitting. feels rhythmic and funky. there is very little dialouge and most of the story is passed through the animation.

story 2: felt depressing and so slow. i really dislikes the animation styles which were either really bad 3d, or real life pictures put through filters to make them become cartoonish(which also looked pretty aweful). i couldnt care less about the story which sucked. ... didnt notice the music too much. i suggest not watching this one.

story 3: story is quite nice, the themes are of friendship and fighting. the animation is nice and colourful, fights have a samurai champloo feeling and are nicely done with their unique animation style and slow motion. music is good.
the story is really funny in its ridiculousness.

story 4: iv'e seen 1.5 minute from it but it was enough(i want to remind you that 1.5 minute is like 1/3 of that story because theyre short..)
its just some girl singing her story. i didnt like the 3d animation and nothing interested me in that story so i skipped it.


the ratings i gave are pretty much for stories 1 and 3. if i included 2 and 4 the points would drop by an average of 3 or more. trust me and watch just stories 1 and 3.

Continuing with this year's film festival week, we have Amazing Nuts. Which I assume is going to be rare footage of me without trousers. No? That's good, wouldn't have been interesting to most people any way. It's a Studio 4°C production from 2006. It's an anthology film containing four different stories set to music. It's been a while since I reviewed an anthology.

Story:

The anthology has four stories. Basically, they're designed like a pair of music videos with a small segment in between that gives some dialogue and story details. In that regard, the only one that kind of works for me is the second, Glass ... Eye. Which is about moving on after an addiction-related tragedy. Global Astroliner Gou is a dull piece about a primate looking space cop running around with a wild lady, who cares? Kung-Fu Love is about a girl who randomly gets declared the enemy of the world and scapegoated for a bunch of ridiculous shit and has to fight a bunch of random people. Again, who cares? Joe and Marilyn is about a singer who falls in love with a guy and then he accidentally pisses off some people with power. Who cares?

You could make the case that obviously the narratives are going to be very simple. Each one has less than ten minutes to work with. Which is a fair point to make but even just judging them as music videos, they don't really hold up. In general, the problem with these segments is that you have these overblown visuals that don't really mesh with the songs all that well. It feels like those music videos that are either being deliberately bizarre and random or that are downright pretentious because the singer fancies themselves far more artistic than they actually are.

Characters:

The characters are non-entities. Due in part to the length and in part to the musical nature of the anthology, they rely on archetypes and never get much in terms of development or depth.

Art:

Each short uses a different art style. Gou looks almost like a Gorillaz music video. Which does work aesthetically. Glass Eye may be the best in terms of actual substance, but it uses an ugly rotoscope style. Kung Fu Love looks a bit like that stupid anime I watched about the guy who thinks he's a sword. And that anime was ugly. Marilyn has the type of shameful CG that you would see in a really rubbish film like Food Fight. It's definitely the worst of the lot visually.

Sound:

Normally, I focus more on the acting than the music but, as this is a music-based anthology, we're going to focus on it. Gou uses the m-flo & Doping Panda song "She Loves the Cream" and it's terrible. I'm not exaggerating when I say I wanted to turn it off after ten seconds and had to force myself to keep listening. Glass Eye uses the Ram Rider song "Smile Again." Which isn't as bad but it's definitely a sub-par song at best. Kung-Fu Love uses the Kumi Koda song "Twinkle" which is the only song I would actually listen to outside of this. Our final song is mink's "Here by my side." It's another one that's sub-par at best with the addition of being very Engrishy.

Ho-yay:

There isn't any. All the videos have hetero-normative arcs.

Areas of Improvement:

1. Pick better music. Out of the three videos, only one of them uses a decent song. And since that's a big draw for the film, it's kind of a huge problem.

2. Better quality art. The only video that looks decent visually is Gou with the Gorillaz like style.

3. Stronger matching of visuals to music. I've already said it, but for most of these there's not much of a connection between the two.

Final Thoughts:

This isn't an anthology film I'd recommend. There's only one with visuals that look decent, that's Gou. There's only one where it has a decent narrative, that's Glass Eye. There's only one that has a good song, that's Kung-fu Love. And there's one that doesn't do anything right, that's Marilyn. And it's hard to recommend something that's basically a collection of music videos where every single one fails in some critical area of music videos. As such, I have to give Amazing Nuts a 4/10.

As an anthology, I'd have to say Amazing Nuts isn't worth your time. It's basically four concept music videos without any underlying or unifying theme. There's not really a reason these are compiled together, and none of them are strong enough to justify watching any of the others or seeking out the entire set. Of course, with anthologies, you have many attempts to connect with an audience, but I think most would agree that the first story is the only one that you could recommend universally. I'll detail my thoughts on the individual stories below, but the TL;DR is watch the ... first one, only check out the other three at your own discretion.

1. Global Astroliner Gou
This is basically a Gorillaz music video. The animation and art style are extremely appealing. It's cute, humorous, cool, and a treat to behold. It's a shame how much of it goes by in the blink of an eye, because every shot is its own little story. The story is complete, but very hastily concluded and you will definitely be lost in the succession of flashing events. You will loosely be able to understand the story just by watching it, but if you really want to get the full thing, you're going to have to spam the play/pause button and freeze frame a lot. Even then, the story is simple and sweet. I would definitely watch a feature length or even 30 minute OVA of this, but I don't think that's ever happening. The music matches the visuals well and stands alone as a good song. Really the most I can say is that I wanted more, I wish this was the full OVA, and that everything else in this collection was at least on this level.

2. Glass Eye
This was easily my least favorite because it was virtually unintelligible. There were a couple moments I understood what the emotion it is trying to evoke was, but for the most part it was complete Greek. The more offensive thing though is the visuals. It's basically just live-action with a filter over it, and it's butt-ugly. I didn't want to look at it. Even if it told a compelling story, the visuals would be hard to get past. But the nail in the coffin is the song, it's just an Engrish jpop song, bland, forgettable, much like the story it's matched with.

3. Kung-Fu Love
This one is probably the height of visuals for the anthology, but the absolute pit for story. I don't even remember the music, I was mostly trying to keep up with the story. It throws out a premise that loosely sets up the first third of the music video, but the second third is like, "what", and the third feels like an entirely new story just rehashing the designs of characters used in the first part. It's like three trailers for three different movies in a series all crammed into the same trailer. I loved how it looked but I was so detached from what was going on that I gave up trying to follow it after a point. That said, the emotion and animation is obviously the point so people who care more about visceral entertainment will get more out of this than people who want a story or meaning to ground themselves in.

4. Joe and Marilyn
This one would be my personal (distant) second, but it has some major flaws holding it back. First of all, the song sucks. Slightly better than the 2nd one's, and far more fitting and related to the story, but not a very good song still IMO. The visuals are a mixed bag. On one hand, it is almost a direct ripoff of Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. But at the same time, the two central characters have hideous shoujo-face, where the eyes down are smushed into where a normal person's lips to chin would be, and they have big bulbous heads. The rest of the characters though aren't even remotely supposed to resemble humans, they are monstrous and this hideous artstyle fits. The CG looks both surprisingly detailed and yet terribly dated. The story itself flows and makes sense, but it's incomplete and there's not much to sink your teeth into to start with. I might've enjoyed a more fleshed out full-length OVA of it, but who can say? What is here though, is just meh overall. I wouldn't really recommend it, but of the three non-1st stories, it was the most tolerable to me so make of that what you will.

So yeah, overall, your best bet is to just check out the first story on youtube or something and only watch the other three if you just want to see what sticks for yourself.