Since the third episode of Genius Party isn’t out yet, I went on to number four: Doorbell. This one may seem like the odd one amongst the different movies, as it’s been directed by a manga-artist: Yoji Fukuyama. The only thing the guy is famous for is for doing the art of a part of the very first “nouvelle manga“. This guy could be the total opposite of Shoji Kawamori, in a way.
In any case, Doorbell is a very quiet movie, combining slice of life with a “what’s going on”-mystery type of story. There’s not a lot that happens, and the fifteen minutes in this movie will be over before you know it, but its message is an interesting one when it gets revealed in the end. The art style is very plain, which fits the movie perfectly.
The problem with this movie is that the Yoji Fukuyama tried a bit too much to make this guy look like your average Joe. Through the movie, I found no reason to care about the guy: we hardly lear anything about him or his life. Heck, it takes ages before we even get to hear his name. It’s rather hard to identify with someone like that.
There’s also a strange minute wasted on a random old lady who doesn’t add anything to the storyline. I guess that if this short would have had just a couple of more minutes to establish its characters properly, it would have been much better. There’s a huge contrast between Doorbell and the first two shots of Genius Party that I’ve seen so far, which is always a good thing. The quality has been surprisingly consistent so far: the three shorts I’ve seen so far have all been nothing special, with a few things missing here and there, but interesting in their own way. I’m interested to see how the rest of the shorts will turn out, because there still are lots of talented directors left.
| Storytelling: | 8/10 |
| Characters: | 7/10 |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 |
| Setting: | 7/10 |
