Nan00k

In response to the first reviewer: I've seen Squirm and Slither. I liked Squirm and I loved Slither, but Growth was a mess. The difference is the former two didn't take themselves too seriously and it seemed they were made with more care than this.

Growth starts out with an interesting premise, and actually very good dialogue and characters. Unfortunately, the story and editing made me sorry I got my hopes up at all. First of all, the film takes itself deadly seriously, and suffers for it. Not that I wanted a horror/comedy, but the script just couldn't pull off a straight horror story, alas.

The other main complaints with the film are as previously mentioned, characters make bizarre decisions beyond the typical "stupid horror character decisions" and are not explained. The effects of the parasites are too amorphous: do they affect the will of the victim? And the weak story too heavily relies on flashbacks.

On the positives, I actually thought the CGI was decently well done, the dialogue/script believable and the casting was not objectionable.

I can see the director doesn't have much experience, so team him up with a better story editor and I'd see the next one.

I'm not an anime fan. I started to go in to why, but deleted it and decided to write about why I like Dead Leaves. How I am going to do that is by saying that even though I am not a fan of the genre, FLCL is one of my all time favorite viewing experiences. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it, and have owned various DVD releases of it and watched them many times, each viewing finding something new. Until tonight, I was disconsolate that no other anime would ever make me sit up and take notice.

Now, Dead Leaves is not quite to FLCL's level, IMO; however, they are kindred spirits. First of all, it's a short, just over 3/4 of an hour, so it didn't have the time to develop its characters or plot as well, neither does it have the bittersweet, weird love story of FLCL, nor the coming of age subtext rife with adolescent realizations that makes FLCL so special, but then again, it doesn't want or need any of these. What it does have are tons of LOL, WTF and "AWESOME!" moments, packed in so tightly, this is something that will need to be watched again and again. It also shares FLCL's humor, twisted sensibility and style.

Another comment indicates that the director of Dead Leaves also worked on FLCL, but I can't find confirmation of that here on IMDb; however, I would not be surprised in the slightest that that was the case.

This short has given me hope that Japan hasn't only made one anime that I can appreciate. It is confirmed that it has now made at least two.