Most of Genius Party’s animation is hand drawn or animated with cells. Deathtic 4 instead is nearly entirely CG, and feels the most like a platform to try out new CGI techniques. On top of that, the characters are all zombies and talk in some strange kind of Scandinavian-ish language that nobody can understand. The director is Shinji Kimura, a guy who mostly is involved with background art for big hitting movies as Akira, Angel’s Egg, My Neighbor Totoro, Steam Boy, Tekkkon Kinkreet and Prime Rose, and he also took care of the art of the first short of the Gotham Knight movie.
So as expected, the background art is very good. I didn’t notice it at first, but the he designed a very original city that at the same time doesn’t distract from the real art in the foreground. You can see that a lot of time went in designing every single building. On the opposite side though, the story and characters feel among the dullest of what Genius Party has to offer. It’s straightforward, there’s no real symbolism or depth to the story. It just feels flat.
But this is really the power of Genius Party: because it has directors with so many different backgrounds, there’s lots of stuff that you can see. Baby Blue had a director who is excellent at characterization, and so that short had the best characters. Instead shorts like this one, Toujin Kit and Wanwa the Doggy that are directed by animators and background artists have a very distinctive visual style instead. This is why I’m a fan of these compilation movies, and I can only hope that in the future, more of them are going to be released.
On a side-note, anyone know what happened to Le Manchot melomane?
| Storytelling: | 7/10 |
| Characters: | 7/10 |
| Production-Values: | 9/10 |
| Setting: | 8/10 |
Ah, low score. The story was very simple, but it didn’t need to be complex in the space of ten minutes, did it? The characters are funny and move the story forward, and I don’t know how you could give the frickin’ ZOMBIE POLICE a 7/10. It was cute and fun, if a little gross, but the unique and more interesting aspects of the setting should’ve made up for that. And bah, symbolism shouldn’t get that much credit. I honestly thought it was one of the more solid entries in the first part.
Would you mind elaborating more on how this got a lower score than Wanwa, which you complained about?
The zombie police was indeed kickass, but my gripe was the lead characters, who were really ennoying, especially that lead zombie. His acting felt stiff, and lacked the comedic timing. Wanwa the Doggy, while it was weird and freaked me out, still was also charming in the end, even though at this point I’m still not exactly sure why. But indeed, that score was a tad too high. *goes to fix*
I presume you watched this RAW, or was it subbed?
Denizen: it was subbed. BSS released the missing two shorts a few days ago. You can find them in their batch fo the first Genius Party.
Oh, awesome. Thank god for BSS, i’ll get those now.
I hope Genius Party stays a Studio 4c tradition.
They were speaking swedish at some point in the short.
they speak Swedish all the time in the movie. the young zombie who has the main role talks like an immigrant with a broken accent. but he who farts speaks with no real words including he how is on fire