Asylum Session

This one's an oddity. Set in a seemingly corrupt future, Asylum Session is focused on an aspiring art student named Hiyoko, who bonds with the residents of a tent town called Asylum who have set up their own society and are under threat of eviction by the town authorities.

Before I go into the story and characters, let me first address the rather obvious issue with this film that comes in the form of its CG animation. The rendering of it is quite rough with characters looking rather crude with how they look at many points in the film and animation looking just as crude with ... stiff, awkward movements and attempts at creating special effects like paint being sprayed and smoke looking quite fake. This is perhaps the worst implementation of a fully CG-animated film that I have come across with an anime.

Moving onto plot and characters, these areas are a bit of a mixed bag. There is enough time to offer up basics to the plot with the conflict between the tent town residents and authorities. It is unique from your typical corrupt society title in that the tent town consists of residents who are heavily inspired by the arts as they try to organize a festival to defy the authorities and one resident, Akira, is the strongest in resisting the eviction thanks to his cyborg implants and having an interest in tagging. The anime takes some time to show Akira and Hiyoko strike up a sort of bond together where more of the former's beliefs and origins are revealed.

However, the anime does suffer from lacking enough depth in exploring more about its world to allow it to have more than a basic plot. There is little revealed about the corrupt elements of the futuristic society and what led the residents of Asylum to take refuge in the tent town. Also as a lead character, there is not much fleshed out on Hiyoko's character beyond her being a runaway from an argument with her father, as we don't get to know what drives her to like art and what type of relationship she had with her father before running away.

Setting aside its horrible CG animation, Asylum Session offers some unique story concepts with its futuristic society that it sadly doesn't take the time to further flesh out beyond some basic direction. It felt experimental in what it attempted to execute for its premise and sadly, the effort is a mediocre one as a result.

Asylum Session is one of the most odd things I've seen in this medium. The best term to describe it as would be "mixed bag".
Review:
Story/Plot/Writing: I have many conflicting thoughts regarding this area. The story is unique, for it's very different from your average dystopian or corrupt society story, and I really liked the idea of resisting the authorities through an artistic event, but it's really lacking in terms of depth. The whole thing just feels really shallow, since it doesn't delve too deep into the world it takes place in and doesn't give us much information. Why does the police want to take down ... the Asylum town and evict the residents? What caused them to act in this way? What's the history behind this world? There was a war, but what caused it? The plot itself is very simple and works well, but it could have been much more complex and a lot more could have been done if everything was a little more fleshed out and if the world was explored further. The film also became really weird towards the end, it was almost as if it transitioned into a comedy with all of the crazy shit going on.
Characters: They were cool, almost damn cool! This along with its unique approach in the dystopian setting was definitely this film's strong suit. They're quite enjoyable, especially Akira, whose personality I found to be the most enticing of the bunch. One thing that really stuck out to me was the connection that Akira and Hiyoko formed throughout the film, it was very nice and it revealed some interesting things about the characters, which left them feeling more likeable and real. Through their conversations, we learn about what these characters are like and it gives us some background information on Akira. My only gripe is that while the film took the time to do this with the titular characters, it still didn't give us enough information about them, leaving them only slightly more fleshed out than the story. I really would've loved to see more of Akira and the Asylum resident's pasts and relationships (especially Akira), as well as Hiyoko, since we don't know much about her character, and what her relationships were with others (her parents).
Art/Animation: The art style, like the story, is very unique. The character designs are very different from one another and it has a certain edge to it, especially with the heavy street vibes it gives off. In my opinion, this would have worked out a lot better in 2D. It could have shone brightly among all the similar style anime we have, because man it looks cool! Now, I can't talk about this film without addressing the elephant in the room: The quality of the art and animation. While the art STYLE is unique, the actual art itself (the 3D models) look really bad, almost horrendous I should say. Definitely not the worst ever, but nowhere near good. The renderings look as rough as my first Blender project, and the cel-shading takes a really long time to get used to. Then there's the animation, which can be extremely crude and jarring at times, specifically the movements which feel awkward and stiff as hell. This is some of the worst CG I have ever seen in anime, it might even be worse than Ex-Arm.
Sound/Music: The music was very fitting and stood out to me a lot. I mean, the guy who made the film was a musician. The voice acting was good as well.

Overall: For a film that was nearly a one man project, it left me impressed. Sure it looks awful, but this was done by someone who had very little experience with animation and just decided to make an animated film one day and just went and did it. This film also did a great job at conveying its messages to the audience through some surprisingly special and touching moments in it, especially the scene where Akira and Hiyoko are under a bridge after the police try to evict everyone and try to demolish the stadium. It gets you thinking. You know, this film really isn't that bad. I'd go as far as to say that it's good, but the visuals really hinder the quality of the film.
Would I recommend Asylum Session? Yes, even to those looking for a "bad" anime to watch, since this can be hilarious at times due to the animation. 5.4/10 Rounded to 5/10 for MAL score.