Meikyû monogatari

I enjoyed these shorts, especially the Otomo one, but the first two were a little too strange for me. I give them extra points for being original and the animation in all three was stellar (I wish more TV anime was as impressive). It just didn't leave as much of an impression as Memories did. But if you're an anime or animation freak, it's worth checking out.

It's a shame this collection of short films is called "Neo Tokyo" when it has nothing to do with Akira, and was not intended to have anything to do with Akira. None of these shorts even take place in Neo Tokyo. Nonetheless, Neo Tokyo/Manie-Manie/Labyrinth Tales is a pretty cool collection of short films.

Labyrinth Labyrinthos, the first short in the collection, has the weakest story of the three, but the best visuals. The animation is insane. The short is both fun and incredibly unsettling throughout, but I didn't feel satisfied with the ending.

Running Man is probably the most "Neo Tokyo" of all of the shorts. It's gorgeous and horrifying. The story is fairly straightforward, but it'll leave you with a sad little pit in your stomach by the end.

Cancellation Order is my favorite. It has all of the bells and whistles that I love in a Katsuhiro Otomo film; cool and clever setting and character design and damn good writing/story. The way it uses environmental storytelling is fantastic.

All in all, if you like weird cartoons and have 50 minutes to spare, give Neo Tokyo a go. It's pretty great.

Neo Tokyo is an interesting, often surreal work of anime. It covers two rather dark science fiction pieces through the framework of a young girl's imaginings. Each piece was made by a different filmmaker, making for very different animation styles and narrative approaches.

The first piece "Labyrinth-Labyrinthos" is frankly surreal, and follows the daydreams of a young girl and her cat as they look into a mirror. The short is very imaginative, with borderline psychedelic imagery. Overall, it's a good piece, though the animation is at times headache inducing.

The second short, "The Running Man," has a much more obvious narrative structure, although very little dialogue. Following the story of a futuristic race car driver with some interesting abilities, it represents a 180 degree turn from Labyrinth. The animation is excellent, with very realistic and at times disturbing renderings of car accidents. However, the lack of dialogue in this short makes it somewhat difficult to follow, a matter compounded by the fact that parts of the film are dream sequences.

The third, and best, piece is "Order to Cancel Construction," which follows the attempt of an executive to shut down a robotic construction site. The robots, which have been programmed to follow a rigid schedule, defy the executive. What makes this piece good is the subtle irony that the executive ultimately becomes as single-minded in his task as the robots are in theirs.

Ultimately, this film is good, although not great, and worth a rent.

Is there a connection between these shorts? Do they take place in the same universe? No. Do they share a theme? No. Are they all sci-fi? Well, two are, but the first one isn't. The first two take place at night, but the last mostly during the day. Nothing on the surface is shared, although they each have a similar style and sense of imagination.

There's not much to say about this short movie. The stories are quite simple, although one is silent and vague. They're just quick glimpses into other worlds. But I liked each one of them. They're interesting, mysterious, and well-animated. There are better anthology films, but this is perfectly fine for a watch. If it interests you, give it a shot. There aren't too many movies like it.

"Labyrinth Tales" is a very peculiar art-house "mini-collection" of three short stories, one of which, perhaps, has become a classic. I won't say that this is the most pleasant and fascinating spectacle, but definitely quite original, not constrained by the clichés of the anime industry. The plot opens with a story in the atmosphere of "Something wicked this way comes" by Ray Bradbury about a girl and her cat who do not listen her mother and fall into an ominous carnival through the mirror. There they are shown two more stories, the first of which, "The Running Man", has taken on a life of its own.

This story, at one time, was rated as the weakest, but it is still looks the most impressive. First of all, due to its naturalistic cruelty, combined with static and meditativeness. But I would note psychology. The story is sustained in a gloomy cyberpunk style. The unbeaten champion of racing, having lost his former grip, is no longer able to withstand competitors. He is exhausted by the constant tension of the competition. But ambitions doe not let him go - these are all that is left of him. Therefore, he decides to win the losing race at any cost - by simply blowing up the cars of rivals with telekinesis. However, even left alone on the track, he cannot escape from the slavery of his ambitions. He is locked in a labyrinth of his own passions. It begins to seem to him that he is still being overtaken - by the younger ghost of himself. Monitor shows that his heart has stopped and the driver of the car is dead, but the dead man is the first (and only) to cross the finish line, continuing the race with his own ghost to complete self-destruction. The dead racer is driven only by his ambitions, which first made him to "remove the obstacles" to the goal - to murder other pilots - and then murdered him too.

The second story (Construction Cancellation Order) is more like an ironically absurd story by Robert Sheckley. A Japanese company employee arrives at a flood-damaged, jungle besieged automated construction site in a third world country to investigate what happened to the former site manager and decide to cancell construction or not. However, AI-controlled construction develops according to its own laws. It seems that the machines must withstand the chaos of the jungle advancing from all sides, but they only multiply the chaos themselves, going crazy in an attempt to realize a meaningless task. Ultimately, the new manager has to fight not so much with the life-affirming chaos of nature, but with the meaningless, self-destructive chaos of pseudo-intelligent machines, looking for the central computer in the labyrinth of mechanisms.

As for the girl and her cat, they themselves become part of the carnival chaos, seemingly never getting out of their labyrinth.