Genius Party Beyond

This 2008 anthology from Studio 4°C follows the previous year's Genius Party and consists of five short films. There is no shared story or theme; each director takes his own form as far as it will go. Mahiro Maeda works in classic anime language, Kazuto Nakazawa builds something close to urban sketching, Shinya Ohira creates a bedlam driven almost entirely by colour and movement, and Tatsuyuki Tanaka constructs a cyberpunk world. The results are not of equal strength and some segments look pale beside others. But consistency is not the point of the collection; showing what animators can do without commercial constraint is. It is a solid entry point to the experimental end of Japanese animation. Who it's for: viewers who like art animation and short film anthologies. Who it's not for: anyone looking for narrative and character; most of these segments are not trying to tell a story.