Fans will especially warm to ‘Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker,’
a farcical bit of about 7 minutes in length by animator Stefan Mueller. The short dramatizes the travails of a pointdexterish little man at an apartment complex, who summons a bulldoggish, lantern-jawed policeman to quiet his crazy neighbors down – completely unaware of the perverted shenanigans happening behind the closed doors of the complex; the segment ingeniously uses rewind to play the same events from two different perspectives and ends with one of the goofiest acid trips ever committed to celluloid.
 
Judge’s package also includes animator Georges Schwizgebel’s mesmerizing “Jeu” (or “Game”), a Swiss-produced tour through a series of pastel-colored geometric abstractions that transform themselves into Daumier-like paintings of sportsmen and orchestral performers. And, though it will not win any points for aesthetic (the visuals are cruder than even Dr. Katz), Steve Dildarian’s ‘Angry Unpaid Hooker’ (now in the process of becoming its own animated series on HBO, ‘The Life and Times of Tim’) scores double for one of the funniest animated narratives in ages, about a guy whose girlfriend returns from vacation and finds a black whore on the couch. The low-down prostie then sees fit to relay the kinky details of her sordid night with the in-denial boyfriend. And the whole compilation hits its peak with the closer: ‘This Way Up’ by Smith and Foulkes, a funny, evocative and visually resplendent sketch (with more than a hint of Rube Goldberg influence) about two wizened British pallbearers who set out to bury a casket and wind up jetting down the River Styx toward the fiery cauldron of hell. Each of these segments is so wonderful that it could stand alone – and the package contains several additional shorts of like brilliance.

If only Judge and co. had limited it to those. Unfortunately, they did not - and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an omnibus film where one segment so ruins the rest of the movie – in this case, a god-awful claymation bit called “Yompi,” by animator Corky Quakenbush. Demented, obnoxious and nauseating, it’s a one-joke outing that suggests Davey and Goliath on crack – in which the deceptively cute little creature of the title (who resembles a yellow version of the Pillsbury dough boy and sounds like Cartman when he sings the opening jingle) silently prances and dances his way around unsuspecting human characters, charms them to no end, then opens his mouth to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth and bites each horrified victim on the crotch. One casualty is even a sweet and helpless old lady on a park bench. It is excruciatingly unfunny to watch the first time, and to make matters worse, executive producer Judge sees fit to bring that plump little bastard back two additional times, with the same “joke” on each occasion. Shame on him for doing so. Likewise for his decision to include three episodes of a sub-par animation series from Australia by Dave Carter, called Psychotown, in which two dung-brained, sloppily-drawn characters proceed to drive each other around the bend in moronic ways. Each of the said segments may only last a couple of minutes, but they drag the film, and the audience, through the gutter with sheer ignorance – and feel particularly unforgivable in light of the wonderful international animations that could have been used to replace them.

The film’s most overarching weakness lies in the inconsistency of tone present – it is pretty difficult to justify moving from the perversion of Yompi directly into John and Karen, a sweet and irresistibly pleasant, low-key British fable by Matthew Walker about a polar bear and a penguin sharing a house together. (In fact, audiences who like one of the two will almost invariably hate the other). But that’s exactly the sort of thing that this compilation does, from first segment to last. Apparently Mr. Judge has some truly schizoid taste, and that doesn’t serve him well.

Overall, The Animation Show 4 has enough dazzle and raw invention to keep animation hounds glued to their seats, but some viewers may find it easier to watch on DVD – where they can skip over the barrel-bottom segments and go straight for the gold.

Rumors are flying that ADV is about to go the way of Geneon and shut down, and unsubstantiated speculation is rampant. Some forum-based gossip even claims that ADV is bankrupt from pouring too much money into the live action Neon Genesis Evangelion movie, which began development in 2003 but has been on hold for the past three years. That all seems pretty unlikely though. If ADV is indeed trimming a whole crap load of anime titles out of their distribution list, and are going forward with a pop-culture magazine that broadens its coverage to deal with more than just anime, then it sounds like ADV is just changing focus, and tweaking its place in the market. The anime titles that have suddenly gone missing from the website are almost all relatively obscure stateside — not shows that have generated major cult followings or been snatched up by Cartoon Network. Looks like they just don’t plan on continuing to include the hardcore otaku in their consumer base. It sucks, but that’s what fansubs are for.

It’s the premise for the anime series Welcome to the NHK, which came out on DVD in the US in October, but the phenomenon is real. According to the New York Times, about a million Japanese people – mostly young men – are thought to suffer from hikikomori, a condition wherein the person holes up in their room and rarely or never comes out for years, or sometimes decades.

While plenty of people in other industrialized countries suffer from social anxiety and agoraphobia, according to the BBC, hikikomori is specific to Japan, probably for a number of reasons, not least of which is that parents will allow it. They’ll even bring their hikikomori (the word describes both the condition and the sufferer) three meals a day. In the States, your child’s room is still your property because it’s in your house, but that mentality doesn’t really exist in Japan. A young man (or, in rare cases, woman) has the autonomy to refuse his parents entry into his space, and to stay there in lieu of going to school, studying for the intense litany of standardized tests that determine an individual’s future in Japan, and engaging in face-to-face relationships. Parents don’t want to draw attention to the fact that there’s an anomaly in their family because conformity is a virtue in Japanese culture, so they’re frequently reluctant to seek outside help. The intense pressure to fit in is often a major component of what makes someone become a hikikomori in the first place, and the cycle can result in a guy never leaving his room for years.

NHK, based on a manga that debuted in Japan in 2002, appears to be among the first anime series to focus on the syndrome and call it by name, but hikikomori have been references in various books and films in Japan since the early 2000’s. The main character in the anime series Rozen Maiden is also a hikikomori.

As adapted from Satrapi’s popular autobiographical graphic novel, the film dramatizes the tale of a young Iranian girl persecuted for vocalizing her iconoclastic beliefs during the Iranian revolution. The simplistic quality of the animation gives it a stark, foreboding quality and a lyrical asceticism that makes the trailer supremely haunting.

Now comes the sticky part. Evidently two versions of this film exist - an original French-language version sporting the vocal talents of such European superstars as Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux (the grand dame of French Cinema, who just celebrated her 90th birthday), and a re-looped version with the said actresses reprising their roles in English, plus the added voices of Sean Penn, Iggy Pop and Gena Rowlands. It remains to be seen if Sony will release two versions in the U.S., one with a French language audio track and English subtitles, but frankly, I’m unsure what the point is of avoiding subtitles. After all, it isn’t as if the crowd that would frequent this film is unaccustomed to reading subtitles, and the use of foreign language looks as if it may add to the film’s effect by imbuing it with an alien quality.

At least Sony had the wisdom and intelligence to pick this up - and because it constitutes France’s official selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008, it may clock in as one of the rare animated contenders for that Oscar in the history of the Academy.

That mostly indiscernible ending was the reason all the movies thus far were made: to retell key parts of the story and provide the literal ending to the series, since it wasn’t at all clear from the wild allegorical imagery that comprised those last few episodes what actually happened to the characters. Also, according to urban legend, the studio received death threats for airing an ending that was so bewildering, even by anime standards. Anyway, the four-part film series that Evangelion 1.0 is planned to spearhead is called Rebuild of Evangelion, and its aim is to — you guessed it — retell the story of the original series. This first film roughly comprises episodes 1-6.

This seems a little weird to me, but apparently not to Japanese fans, who paid generously to prove their satisfaction with the movie. Word on the street is that Rebuild is meant to simplify that death-threat-inspiringly complex story for new fans, and offer more impressive visual effects than the original budget could afford. This would indeed seem to be the case based on the trailer, which doesn’t appear to include any new footage at all, and on early reviews, which confirm that each frame is essentially taken shot-for-prettier-shot from the show. I guess maybe a franchise that tackles such complicated stuff doesn’t have to do much to help people get more out of it. No word yet on who’ll license Evangelion 1.0 in the States.