Genius Party / Genius Party Beyond - 4-DVD Box Set ( Genius Party / Shanghai Dragon / Deathtic 4 / Doorbell / Limit Cycle / Happy Machine / Baby Blue / Gala / Moondrive / Wanwa / Toujin Kit / Dimension Bomb )

Genius Party / Genius Party Beyond - 4-DVD Box Set (DVD) (*)

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Original Title: Genius Party / Shanghai Dragon / Deathtic 4 / Doorbell / Limit Cycle / Happy Machine / Baby Blue / Gala / Moondrive / Wanwa / Toujin Kit / Dimension Bomb
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
Japanese ( Dolby Digital 5.1 )

Product Origin/Format:
Australia ( PAL/Region 4 )

Running Time:
179 min + 260 min extras

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
Box Set
Interactive Menu
Multi-DVD Set
Photo Gallery
Scene Access
Booklet

Movie filmed in 2007 - 2008 and produced in:
Japan ( India, Eastern Asia )

Directed By:
Nicolas de Crécy
Atsuko Fukushima
Masahiro Maeda
Kôji Morimoto

Written By:
Nicolas de Crécy
Atsuko Fukushima
Masahiro Maeda
Kôji Morimoto

Actors:
Tomoko Kaneda ..... (voice)
Rinko Kikuchi ..... (voice)
Lu Ningjuan ..... (voice)
Taro Yabe ..... (voice)
Yûya Yagira ..... (voice)
Arata Furuta ..... (segment 'Moondrive')
Akiko Suzuki ..... (segment 'Wanwa')
Shôko Takada ..... (segment 'Moondrive')
Urara Takano ..... (segment 'Gala')

Synopsis:

From studio 4C, the cutting edge animation studio home to many of the revolutionary animation available today, comes GENIUS PARTY! Gather and all-star team of contemporary anime creators, mixing established legends with the brightest up-and-comers, give each one free reign to make an entirely original film and provide a single theme: The Spirit of Creativity. Featured in this ground breaking series: Shoji Kawamori (co-creator of the legendary MACROSS series), Masaaki Yuasa (director of MIND GAME and THE TATAMI GALAXY), Shinichiro Wanatabe (director of COWBOY BEBOP, SAMURAI CHAMPLOO), Koji Morimoto (ROBOT CARNIVAL, MEMORIES) and renowned Studio Ghibli animator, Mahiro Maeda. The GENIUS PARTY BOX set collects both double-disc digipack collections (GENIUS PARTY and GENIUS PARTY BEYOND) and includes a 16 page booklet including synopses, stills, director profiles and production material exclusive to this collection housed inside a collectors slipcase.

Genius Party
1: Genius Party (dir: Atsuko Futushima).
A humanoid creature disguised as a bird attempts to steal ideas from a bunch of round smiley-faced rocks. Or does he implant them in a way? For his interference with one rock leads to a wild exchange between the globes, resulting in the birth of several beautiful creations. This very first segment serves as an introduction to the whole 'Genius Party'-project and does a fine job of it. There is not much of a story here but the visuals are awesome and the artwork is high-quality. A great precursor of what is to come.

2: Shanghai Dragon (dir: Shoji Kawamori).
A snot-nosed little Chinese boy picks up a glowing pencil which fell from space. Whatever the boy draws turns into a real object, but his schoolclass' amazement turns to horror as both boy and pencil are attacked by a huge army of giant robots and their city-sized spaceship... This segment is just brilliantly entertaining from start to finish. Director Kawamori parodies his own mecha-background while at the same time providing us with a lovely tribute. His fame is mostly based on super-giant mecha designs (his 'Macross' work comes to mind...) and boy, does he give us a nice example here! But the whole segment is also a brilliant send-up of the whole concept, and I just loved it. The snotty nose never fails to gross me out but nevertheless I've already rewatched 'Shanghai Dragon' several times.

3: Deathtic 4 (Dir: Shinji Kimura)
Far below the surface of our world, a huge subterranean one exists where undead people live, eat and work just like we do. One day a living frog tumbles into this world and gets found by an undead boy. Together with a band of undead superhero-wannabees the boy tries to get the frog back into our own world, even daring to thwart the huge zombie-police army while doing so!
This segment is quickly described as: Jaw Hits Ground. Hard. Kimura might be best known for having drawn stunning background visuals for films like 'Tekkonkinkreet', but please let someone give him a budget for a full feature and do it fast! The world his segment takes place in is incredibly rich and rewarding, holding the middle between Tim Burton's 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and the illustrations in 'Where the Wild Things Are' (the book, not the film). It is simply gorgeous and the 3D-cgi is unlike anything I've seen before.

4: Doorbell (Dir: Yoji Fukuyama)
A guy splits into multiple versions of himself, and discovers that he is invisible to people if they see his other selves before they see him. After a few nasty discoveries he races to reach the girl he loves before any of 'the others' do. The first segment directed by a non-animator (Fukuyama is a manga artist), 'Doorbell' tells its Twilight Zone-style story as a romantic manga. It works up to a point but you never get a sense of why things happen, or what the rules are. As such I never felt anything for the protagonist or felt enthralled by what I was seeing. Just like a real Twilight Zone-episode, in fact...

5: Limit Cycle (Dir: Hideki Futamura)
A man reflects on the subject of humanity, belief, attraction and deity from the position of an all-seeing, all-knowing God. Good grief. According to director Futamura it might be a good idea to watch his segment while drunk, but I recommend against that. Just to be able to follow what the hell is being discussed takes a big amount of brainpower as Goethe's worldview, chaos theory, medieval alchemy, theology and philosophy get mixed at high speed, accompanied by colorful computer graphics. When images began repeating themselves I sort-of fell asleep, only to jolt awake at the end. I've tried repeat viewings but I keep getting lost around the halfway point. Hypnosis? Epilepsy? Or does my brain shut down when trying to comprehend the incomprehensible? Anyway, this was NOT my cup of tea.

6: Happy Machine (Dir: Masaaki Yuasa)
A baby is raised in a fully automated nursery, but when he is expelled he discovers a strange world outside to have many adventures in. By now you should be acquainted with the strange visual ramblings of director Masaaki Yuasa (if not, buy 'Mindgame' ASAP!). 'Happy Machine' carries his signature throughout and gives exactly what you might expect from a 'Genius Party' segment: abstract artistry skillfully animated by someone with lots of skill.

7: Baby Blue (Dir: Shinichiro Watanabe)
A teenage boy and girl ditch school, and pool their money to live for day like there is no tomorrow. Whoah! What happened here? The last segment of this first half of the 'Genius Party'-project, 'Baby Blue' completely forsakes the realm of the impossible and stays firmly anchored in the present and possible. This is a relatively quiet piece and the artwork is common but beautiful, but director Watanabe nails it. Like a fifteen-minute version of Isao Takahata's 'Only Yesterday' it seemingly meanders aimlessly for a while, but like that (brilliant!) movie the emotional sting is in the tail and I was very impressed by the ending, carrying an emotional weight I hadn't expected. Hats off to Watanabe who apparently is even more talented than I already thought...

Genius Party Beyond
1: Gala (dir: Mahiro Maeda)
A giant meteorite falls nearby a forest village and is attacked by an angry mob of spirits, sprites and fairies. But four of these creatures feel there is life growing within the pod, and foster it with the help of giant magical flying music instruments. Of all the segments in 'Genius Party' and 'Genius Party Beyond', this one comes the closest to what you would expect Studio Ghibli to come up with. Well... Studio Ghibli by way of Gonzo and Production IG (the last two studios mentioned actually participated in this segment). Some of the designs look very familiar, but just as it seems that director Maeda is playing for safe he unleashes some beautiful lunacy and ends the segment with a good twist. Definitely one of my favorites on this disc.

2: Moondrive (dir: Kazuto Nakazawa)
Set on the moon in the future, a gang of four thugs and robbers get their hands on a treasure-map and start following it. To get to the spot marked 'X' the ruthless but clumsy bunch will do anything, including playing pool against the mob, stealing a spacecraft or even prostituting the 'hottie' in their gang! Director Kazuto Nakazawa is out to have fun with his segment and it shows. The animation looks sloppy, half-finished and overly edge-enhanced but it helps to convey the jumpy energy of the protagonists. Sketchlines and nametags are left in on purpose and whenever something goes BOOM (which is often) the edge of the drawing creeps into the picture. But at the same time the backgrounds are dense with an almost insane amount of details, and clever designs can be spotted everywhere in this short. This style of animation is often not to my liking but in this case I gladly make an exception. 'Moondrive' is just too funny, rawdy and bold for me not to like. In any case it's lightyears beyond the animated episode in Tarantino's 'Kill Bill' that Nakazawa did.

3: Wanwa the Doggie (dir: Shinya Ohira)
A small boy visits his bed-ridden mother, but when a sudden storm separates them he gets chased by a wicked ogre through a selection of fantasy landscapes. Time and time again he is nearly caught but the boy is always rescued by the dog Wanwa. But then Wanwa dies... Ouch, epilepsy alert! Using a unique mix of cgi compositing and thousands of children's drawings, 'Wanwa the Doggie' is one big hectic explosion of color. It borders on visual overload but instead of wearing the viewer down it actually manages to pull you into this strange feverish world of imagination. And in the end, after all the rollercoaster chases, director Ohira brings a surprisingly emotional core into his story. 'Wanwa the Doggie' is brilliant in both concept and execution, and impossible to convey in screenshots (I'll still try though...).

4: Toujin Kit (dir: Tatsuyuki Tanaka)
Living alone in an apartment inside a huge industrial complex, a girl spends her time giving life to dolls by using a strange machine. This apparatus works by illegally inserting some other-dimensional essence into the dolls, but when Government agents raid the appartment one of the dolls turns out to be somewhat fuller with the stuff than expected. At heart a grey and dystopic sci-fi story, the animation style used for this segment is very realistic which contrasts nicely with the previous two shorts. Director Tanaka doesn't really draw backgrounds, he draws full environments, and these support the short as much as the characters do. There was a nice 'Meta' moment where I was watching this on my television, bag of crisps in hand, looking at a girl onscreen watching animation on her television, bag of crisps in hand. It all seemed oddly real suddenly. 'Toujin Kit' may not look it but is actually a bit of an odd-one-out in the 'Genius Party'- project, because it never was supposed to be part of it. But when director Fumihiko Sori (of 'Ping Pong' and 'Vexille' fame) discovered what his friend Tanaka was working on as a pet project, he approached Studio 4ºC and requested that 'Toujin Kit' be allowed to participate as a 'Genius Party' segment. After the production team saw what Tatsuyuki Tanaka had already achieved he was allowed to participate. Still under the impression that he was going to finish this segment by himself, Tanaka was surprised to suddenly see animators assigned by Studio 4ºC show up to help him get his film finished on schedule! All of this is fun trivia but this troubled long road cannot be seen in the end result whatsoever. 'Toujin Kit' is of such high quality that I hope someone gives Tatsuyuki Tanaka a chance to do a full feature. This is just stellar animation all the way, and may just be my favorite segment of this film.

5: Dimension Bomb (dir: Koji Morimoto)
A jumbled set of impressions, memories and confused feelings of a teenage boy when he recalls a girl he liked. When he looks back on the moment when she told him she hated him, things get very intense indeed.... Morimoto is a constant factor in the 'Genius Party' shorts, as he was helping people left and right on different segments. But 'Dimension Bomb' is his own baby, and he cuts loose with a vengeance. His short is one of the longest, most baffling, but also most gloriously invigorating of all twelve 'Genius party'-project segments. Constructed like a videoclip around Juno Reactor's alternatively pumping, then soothing soundtrack, 'Dimension Bomb' defies easy description. For all I know the interpretation I put up as 'plot' may be a completely wrong one, but it doesn't matter. A normal narrative is obviously the last thing on director's Morimoto's mind, instead he goes straight for your audio-visual jugular. The surprising thing is how well he succeeds! Normally a film this incomprehensible would totally lose me, but this time I was too mesmerized by the incredible imagery on the screen. For lack of a better word it just 'flows' from beginning till end. Highly detailed, wildly abstract in places, but always impeccably drawn and boldly mixing styles, this is without a doubt the most exhilirating short on the disc. A fever-dream without the fever.

This product was added to our catalog on Wednesday 22 December, 2010.