Umi kara no Shisha

Meh. It looks like an old-school silent cartoon due to being black and white, and I can't think of very many modern b&w anime other than Tamala 2010, so I guess that sort of makes it stand out. There is a small amount of dialogue that I wasn't able to understand, but given the content, I imagine it's pretty extraneous. The story is basically some weird bandaged monkey stumbles upon an abused turtle, scares off the bullies, and then the bullies later return to poke the turtle, and it turns into a kaiju monster. It's just nonsense for the sake of stringing together the bare ... semblance of a plot for the purpose of animating.

The animation is pretty stiff until about the 4 minute mark, when the monkey rips off his bandages to reveal he's actual a bandage fetishist rather than wounded. It looks a lot like One-Punch Man (not saying this was influenced by that franchise; One first released a web comic version of One-Punch man in 2009, and this is from 2010, but I don't know how the old web version compares), but what it really draws from is a little bit of DBZ, and a whole lot of the old Daicon animations. Lots of explosions, missiles and Macross-styled mechs and Itano Circus patterns, weird little characters, homicidal school girls, etc. Daicon is more enjoyable, and has way better music, though, as well as smoother, better choreographed animation. The color is also a strong point.

Honestly, it feels like the days of b&w animation are dead in both Japan and the West, and that's probably for the better. I say this as a huge fan of b&w cinema, but color is a more integral part for animation, and a lack of it is more of a long-gone technological limitation rather than a decent aesthetic choice. I can think of only 3-4 independent Western animators that work in b&w consistently.

Nothing too terribly interesting, but it's a breezy 8 minutes, and some of the pyrotechnics are okay. It's one of those things where it's not really worth seeking out, but if you're relaxing on the couch, then it's easy to sit through.