If you liked this, the style is very indebted to Frédéric BACK, one of the two gods of indie animation together with Yuri NORSTEIN. He's from France, later based in Canada, but the only legal way to see all his films in decent quality (by which I mean not converted from NTSC-style to PAL-style video, which to put it in lay terms really messes them up) is to import the Japanese DVD released on Studio Ghibli's label.
This Minna no Uta, however, is perhaps the best work in the mode of Back I've seen yet. In fact, as thematically wishy-washy as Minna no Uta videos are by necessity of their original purpose (essentially, inoffensively cheering people up throughout the day), it's way more viscerally transporting than any of Back's films as I've seen them, because those are still only available to me in standard definition at best. It makes Ryu KATO yet another creator with a huge body of work that really deserves my attention (over watching unsubtitled Japanese vlogs that I only comprehend a few words of, which is what tends to get my attention nowadays).
I'm not going to claim it to be outright best, as I also like and still think about a Back-ish indie short I think of as being from somewhere in South America, or maybe it was from Portugal or Spain, involving a repairman losing his sight. I remember the imagery but not details that could help me find out how anyone else could see it… |
