The Mike Toole Show

Anthology Chronology

While I sat there trying to digest the second installment of the The Animatrix. that one? The Animatrix was a rare bird, an anthology film tied to a Hollywood film, steered mostly by Japanese talent, which was both an artistic and commercial success.

Arias, when trying to explain how The Animatrix was conceived and what they were trying to accomplish with it, kept going back to a film he called Manie-Manie. He brightened considerably when I ed the movie and its US name, Neo Tokyo; it was one of the first big anime anthology films.

Anthology films are an odd and weirdly persistent category. They tend not to be huge successes, simply because their overall quality usually depends on maintaining some sort of common strength between the segments. That can be hard to maintain when a mix of directors, artists, and performers are involved. The champion of anthology films in the west is probably Jim Jarmusch, whose Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. I say that both facetiously and in all seriousness; it's weird and dumb, and in its best moments (i.e. the “Smooth Criminal” segment) virtuosic and breathtaking.

So who's the champion of anime anthology films? For my money, it's got to be Harmagedon.

Instead of discussing a few of the best anime anthology films, I'll take a look at each one. After all, there are only, like, nine or ten of them! 1987 is when it all started, which makes sense because that was when Japan's bubble economy was peaking, giving both corporations and consumers cash to spend on any number of foolhardy endeavors, like producing OVAs and buying OVAs. That year gave us both Neo Tokyo, which I contend is still a better title than Labyrinth Tales or Manie-Manie, and The Order to Stop Construction, and for the latter, he chipped in the title sequence.

It's actually interesting to compare the two, because the briefer Neo Tokyo, supervised by Kazufumi Nomura started with a simple common theme: shorts about robots.

In their own way, each of these anthologies would prove very influential. The former is what delivered Redline would complete the circle.

It's kind of a shame that Running Man is so ascendant, because the other major part of the film, Otomo's The Order to Stop Construction, is also really fantastic, an example of the director working at his “society in breakdown” best as a hapless salaryman is dispatched to a treacherous, robot-manned construction site and thwarted repeatedly by the machines meant to do his company's bidding. It's remarkable to think that Otomo got this done while also finishing up the Akira film and pitching in on Robot Carnival.

Otomo's bit in Robot Carnival is also classic Otomo (the movie's title graphic is actually revealed to be a massive land vehicle that wreaks havoc wherever it goes), but that movie is both more expansive (nine shorts total) and more varied in tone and style. Franken's Gears, directed by the incomparable Megazone 23 Part 2; the latter is probably the best thing Kitazume ever did, which seems a bit tragic; after all, decades later, the guy is still working. But then you see it, and it really is brilliant stuff. Robot Carnival fared particularly well on the American repertory film circuit, where both critics and casual viewers flocked to it. To this audience of fresh faces, fare like Starlight Angel, with its heroic robot taking a beautiful girl on a magical trip through a theme park, must have seemed exactly like what anime ought to be.

The 90s would bring on another Otomo anthology film - Memories. This one's another tidy 3-segment package, led off by Stink Bomb.

I get taken to task a lot for preferring Stink Bomb over Magnetic Rose. The former really is excellent, compelling stuff that also has the bonus feature of introducing the greater animation world to a young talent named Satoshi Kon, who had done what Otomo did and moved from manga to anime production, and who would both write the screenplay and provide setting and character artwork. But what raises Stink Bomb, an energetic action-comedy about a pencil-pusher who accidentally turns himself into a biological weapon, is just how great of a black comedy it is.

The segment has a moment of true magic - one that comes later for some viewers than for others - when you realize that the people collapsing senseless in the face of lab tech Tanaka's odor are in fact dead, so this dopey nerd, who desperately rushes back to Tokyo to get help, is the unwitting center of a mass casualty event. It's incredibly difficult to make a story that is both horrifying and hilarious, like Dr. Strangelove, but Okamura really pulls it off.

That brings is up to The Animatrix, which is probably the first film in this piece that most of you readers will seeing recently! It's gotten a bit more exposure than the other anthologies, simply because it was created as a marketing exercise, a direct-to-video tie-in for the extremely successful Matrix film trilogy. In this regard, it would prove exceptionally influential - to this day, direct-to-video sequels, prologues, and side-stories come for movies every season, and The Animatrix is the film that proved this approach would work.

That isn't to say that The Animatrix is a cynical cash-grab, either. Final Flight of the Osiris, simply because its use of CG looks a bit dated.

The Animatrix was another anthology made with the help of Studio 4°C, so in its wake, maybe it was high time they embarked on an anthology picture of their own. We got that in 2007's Sweat Punch. Well, maybe it's not a “pure” anthology - it's built from shorts that were previously released, so it's more of a package deal. Of all the films I survey here, I'd venture that Sweat Punch is the most “Liquid TV” of the bunch - it's varied in style, a bit scattered in its storytelling, but still endearingly weird and fun. It's got a punk rock SF story from Osamu Kobayashi, a mecha tale that evokes nothing quite so much as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and a bit with a boy's pet robot that plays kind of like a mirror universe Iron Giant.

But my favorite bit of Sweat Punch is its opener, Prof. Dan Petory's Blues, a zany musical affair featuring a burned-out academic using a hand puppet to explain his bizarre scientific theories about UFOs and weather. Ideally, segments in anthology films like this need to do a good job of combining mood and narrative, and Petory's Blues gets the job done. One of the best things about these anthology films is getting to experience anime that doesn't really feel like anime, and Sweat Punch is jammed with that kind of stuff.

Warner Bros.' Moi Animation instead of the artistically superior Telecom Animated Films as their animation unit.

The one dangling talking point in Gotham Knight is a segment called Deadshot. It's particularly striking - the DVD release uses artwork from it - a product of Mad House directed by one of their top action guys. You won't find his name on it, though. I got curious about this, so I went after the executive producer, Gregory Noveck, on twitter for some answers. He pinged me back, but never explained the story in detail. (I don't blame him for this, it's kinda weird to circle back and ask about this stuff a decade later. Which is why I do it all the time!) I eventually got the details from an insider, and typically, it's both more interesting and more mundane than you'd expect. One big thing that looks different: the Japanese DVD cover, which focuses on Bruce Wayne instead of Batman.

By this point, we were in the mid-2000s, and Otomo's films of old were long in the rearview mirror. Someone had to definitively step in, right? Anthologies needed a new standard bearer, and that was Studio 4°C. It made perfect sense - the studio was already renowned for their commitment to experimentation, they'd contributed to anthologies since Memories, and their Sweat Punch was already on the market. So they pressed ahead with another anime anthology, Genius Party.

I absolutely love the first Genius Party's sense of creativity. It's got a segment where a guy chases his own ghost around. It has rocks giving birth to birds, it has a tremendous fart joke, and it has a jaw-dropping dystopian callback to Shōji Kawamori. I laud these films for being “un” anime, but Shangai Dragon is extremely anime, with its depiction of time-travelers and an alien invasion. But delightfully, the subject of the invasion is a slow-witted Chinese kid, an orphaned 5-year-old who somehow stumbles on and activates a device that makes thoughts into reality. Just for the heck of it, Kawamori slips in a near-perfect countermove to the fabled “Itano circus” missile shower.

What Genius Party lacks is a coherent thematic or stylistic tendency. This isn't a problem in the first film - there's simply too much talent on display - but Netflix and judge for yourself.

2010 would bring us more Studio 4°C goodness in the form of Akiyuki Simbo?!

My biggest problem with Halo Legends is that it looks like crap. Alright, that's actually unfair - the film looks OK, but its 2D stylings don't mesh well with the smooth, crisp 3D aesthetic of the games. It also isn't as thematically coherent as the Batman anime. Really, it's only going to be of interest if you're into the Halo mythology. I think that it's interesting product, but something of a missed opportunity for both 343 Industries and Studio 4°C. Perplexingly, it seems to have dropped off of most streaming services; for a while, you couldn't escape the damn thing.

I ire Studio 4°C for their willingness to experiment, and what they achieved with the Genius Party films-- hell, I ire them for their work on that Short Peace.

Short Peace ain't perfect - somewhat surprisingly, Otomo's own entry, Gambo, a tale of a girl who enlists the help of a strangely friendly lost polar bear to battle a demon, is both adorable and relentlessly brutal.

What caps Short Peace off magnificently is Farewell to Weapons, a segment based on an old Otomo manga and directed by Gundam cool again. (Gundam was still cool, he just modernized it.) Katoki's vision of Otomo's manga is terrifying and hilarious-- it's a tale of futuristic warfare in a bombed-out Tokyo, as heavily armored human fighters square off against relentless automated weapons platforms. What's chilling about this story is how similar modern warfare already is to what Otomo and Katoki depict; just like in the story, we already have drones, and remote control vehicles, and gun cameras, and airstrikes driven by laser pointers. Fittingly, the story starts with a full unit ready for combat, and ends with a freaked-out last survivor waving a warhead at an indifferent robot enemy. Note to anime creators: please adapt more 80s SF manga for current TV and film projects!

Short Peace also boasts one additional segment - a video game! Leave it to Otomo to get creative. I would've given the game, a platformer called Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day, a whirl, but I don't have a You Tube walkthroughs, so I was still able to sample it that way. With Short Peace, Otomo reclaims the title of anthology anime champ, to the point that I had to double-check his bona fides to make sure he wasn't somehow involved in the production of Genius Party, too.

I hope we see more short-form anime anthologies like Short Peace, and Genius Party, and Neo Tokyo. These projects provide creators with alternative means to tell stories, which is necessary; way back in the 1970s, Osamu Tezuka noticed how prevalent cheap, goofy TV anime was getting, and fearing this form taking over entirely, he started pumping out ambitious short films left and right. I'm glad that creators continue to follow his example, and it's paid off-- after revisiting these films, I have to point out one thing: Running Man might be the single most influential eleven minutes of Japanese animation in the entire medium. Agree? Disagree? Seek the film out and try it for yourself, and talk about your favorite anime anthology in the comments.