Robot Carnival

Robot Carnival is an anthology film featuring nine shorts. They are all well animated and have amazing visuals. I personally found the first half more enjoyable than the second but this is largely subjective. The individual narratives of the films are decent, but it's obvious that the main focus was on the animation. Robot Carnival is unique. It's hard to recommend to anyone who enjoys complex characters and stories. But for anyone who just loves raw animation and visual talent this OVA is a no brainer. If you're on the fence, Robot Carnival is definitely worth the watch ... purely for the talent presented.

Like any anthology film, it's gonna be a mixed bag, but Robot Carnival is pretty consistent in quality... mostly in not being immensely impressive throughout any of its seven main segments. "Cloud" is really nice as an interlude and "A Tale of Two Robots" steals the show, but the rest are pretty forgettable unfortunately, though they're still pretty neat. The only one I actively hated was the ugly, unengaging "Presence", which is not coincidentally the one with the most dialogue by far (most of these segments have no dialogue at all).

Also, the opening and ending segments are amazing and need to be seen to be ... believed. Oh man what a world of animation it was back in Economic Bubble-era Japan. What I wouldn't give for Japanese animation to go back to the era when studios got enormous funding for these ridiculous passion projects.