Movies - Robot Carnival

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	Movies - Robot Carnival

Robot Carnival is an Japanese anime film released in 1987. It is very akin to Disney's Fantasia in feeling and setup, in that it is a collection of seven shorts by several different directors, put together, and containing only music (albeit a few exceptions). The difference, as the title suggests, is that this feature focuses on robots, though seemingly the title takes "robots" to mean anything mechanical which moves.

The anthology has its opening and closing sequences set in the future in a desert. A boy finds a small poster advertising the Robot Carnival, and becomes frightened and agitated. He tries to get people in his village to take action, most likely to escape, when a huge machine with many robots performing in niches on its exterior grinds its way right thorough the village. Its mechanical orchestra plays and it sets off fireworks, but is a mindless engine of destruction.

The shorts come in a variety of styles. All but two are effectively silent.

One is rather a shōjo story, featuring teenaged girls at a Robot Entertainment complex who separate. One of the girls finds that her lover is not true to her. Her tears cause a short circuit of the machines, which start to become menacing. The visual style of this segment was heavily influenced by the classic music video for A-Ha's "Take on Me".

Another, in a grittier style, tries to tell the story of a man who makes a robot in the form of a girl and how he is drawn apart from his relations with his wife and other people. He seems to be British and of the early twentieth century, but the setting is either another planet or a future which has tried to bring back a former social structure. He ages; his robot does not. When he dies, it explodes.

An episode solecistically named "Deprive" has a robot in the form of 8-Man and a villain who is a typical lounging anime pretty boy who kidnaps the girl whom the robot was programmed to protect.

In another, a city is being taken over by machines. This features the recent Japanese myth that machines can grow by connecting onto other machines, regardless of the purposes for which they were designed (as seen in Roujin Z).

Another is set in the nineteenth century and features "giant robots" directed from within by a human crew. In the form of a movie serial of the sound era, a Westerner in his giant robot attempts to take over Japan, but is stopped by a "machine made for the festival," a Japanese giant robot.

One of the most poignant anime is the simple and simply drawn tale of a robot reminiscent of Astro Boy, walking through the segment without rest - who has survived the human race which had destroyed itself by nuclear weapons.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Robot Carnival ]

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Movies - Robot Carnival

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