Voices of a not so distant star

The only short film I could find in my collection was “Planzet” this week (though thinking about it now I forgot about others which I’m now remembering when I’m writing this blog entry). 

Japan has an interesting and possibly unique short “film” market in the form of what was once called Original Video Anime (OVA) and of course now its switched to Original DVD Anime (OAD). This market is traditionally the forefront of experimentation in the anime particularly in the mid to late 1980’s where lots of money was thrown into OAVs and some where very good and some were very bad, but that’s thesis all in its self. However in current times where the money is not flowing as well, if at all, the OAD’s only are produced from a particularly successfully property (both in the West and in Japan) such as the recent “Black Lagoon” and the “Helsing” OADs series they were turned onto OADs simply for the fact that they could not be shown on Japanese television for the inherent violence and other mature themes built into them. Although they are exceptions to the rule most of the time OADs are produced much like here short films are produced here as proof of concepts. Such as “KissXsis” (no don’t ask) or “Hen Zemi” (even worse but for the curious it roughly translates as Abnormal psychology) which both went onto a whole anime season, even more rarely as a one short artistic pieces such as the horrible (in my opinion) “5 centimetres per second”

Actually the director of “5 centimetres per second” Makoto Shinkai  is an illustration of what can be achieved his first OVA “Voices from a Distant Star” was a self funded short anime if you can find it watch it is awesome it occasionally screens on crunchyroll.com (he also wrote and voice and drew it) and went onto critical acclaim and further successes including “5 centimetres per second’ also critically acclaimed but in my opinion was bad.

Planzet weighs in at about 40 minutes, its anime and it is an oddball, it has a nonstandard production aesthetic it harkens back to the 1950’s Hollywood alien attack movies motif (and I think it worked) which is unusual in modern 21^st century piece. Ostensibly its about an alien invasion, but in fact its about families and the pressure that they come under and what it means to be family.

Directing short course films has nothing superficially, to do with where I want to go, (young adult television) but on closer inspection it does a lot. Most television programming is somewhere between fifteen minutes to an hour, in other words it is short films although the content and perhaps production budgets might differing essentially it is the same.