Anime: Dead Leaves

One could describe Dead Leaves in so many words. Crazy, over the top, wacky, crude, insane, bizarre, crazy, energetic, confusing, relentless, manic, vulgar, mindless, and loud. All of these words describe Dead Leaves perfectly. But it would leave little to be desired if that was the only way I described it. So let's jump into it.

The plot follows two people awaken naked on Earth, a man with a TV for a head called Retro and a woman called Pandy, named for her panda patched eyes, with no recollection their past. Not even having the clothes on their backs, out two main characters embark on a crime spree in search of food, clothes, and transportation, and are soon captured by the authorities and are sent to the infamous lunar penitentiary called Dead Leaves. While they try to escape the penitentiary with the aid of their fellow inmates, they soon find out that it has a few secrets along the way.

From the outset, It's really easy to tell that Dead Leaves is from Production I.G., and especially from director and key animator Hiroyuki Imaishi, being a stepping stone from his previous work, such as being a key animator on an episode of FLCL, along with the ending credits of Paradise Kiss, to what his animation style and presentation would become later with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Kill la Kill. Dead Leaves is where Hiroyuki's style becomes defined, but not quite as polished as his later works.

The animation moves by at a lightening speed, leaving little room for slow moments outside of it's initial opening scene. So much of this is blink-and-you'll-miss-it animation that it'll take a second or even third watching with you skipping frame by frame to be able to see all of the background characters and events.

Since it's so short and so fast paced, it doesn't leave much room for character development or a lot of plot, but that isn't really the point of this OVA. It wants to go fast, and that's what it does. It doesn't care if can't or won't keep up with it, it just wants to move from scene to scene to scene without trying to put too much focus on the wacky antics that are going on. It stars out crazy from out the outset, and it keeps up it's fast pace, all while it gets progressively weirder and weirder the further it goes on.

While it doesn't leave much for character development, it does tell a relatively cohesive story with what time it has. There is some mild open plot threads, but it doesn't leave much to interpretation. It's not trying to have depth or meaning. It just wants to be entertaining for the sake of being entertaining.

The music is also pretty good, good enough that at some point I might throw it in my rotation of music I put in the background when I'm doing something like playing a fast paced video game or going out on a run.

There isn't much I'll spoil here because it's so short and it's something you really have to see yourself just to take everything in.

Dead Leaves might be a love it or hate it anime aimed at a fairly niche audience, and is not something I would call amazing in any sense of the word, but it gets what it's trying to get across incredibly well and the audience it's aimed at would absolutely love what Dead Leaves is. A crazy, over the top, wacky, crude, insane, bizarre, crazy, energetic, confusing, relentless, manic, vulgar, mindless, and loud short film.

This is an action packed, chaotic, and frankly mental piece of 45 minute-long anime. At first I thought it was an FLCL copy, but fortunately I found it turned out to be different, fun and exhilirating.

Visuals:
This is a very debatable aspect of the anime. Overall, I've personally labelled the visuals as "above average", but they can understandably be considered excellent OR dire. On the plus side, the animation is fluid and the colours are vibrant. There are some great character and world designs, and the style of the anime is reflected in the style of the visuals. But on the negative side, the style of the visuals is also a hinderance when trying to distinguish what you're seeing. The art direction is such that it becomes very very difficult to simply realise what's on screen. The chaos is so extreme that it turns messy. The style is almost identicle to an american comic book or graffiti pictures, but moving. In a book, you can take a few moments to study the picture and fully absorb what you're looking at, but here it moves along so fast that some of the greatness is lost in the action. The jagged styling of the onscreen objects and the dynamic shading requires time to focus on to appreciate it, but the anime chooses to never really stand still so it becomes impossible. HOWEVER, the chaos of the anime is a unique and fun factor of the visuals despite the difficulties it causes. I've never seen anything like it. It often walks the fine line between being like the splat of a paintball or the splat of vomit, thankfully choosing the more pleasant option for the majority of the time.

Sound:
I can't fault the sound of Dead Leaves. Musically, the makers have studied each scene in depth and scored it in a way to approriately enhance what's onscreen at that time. Whilst I agree that this should be the obvious case in most anime, for an anime as chaotic as this it would have been very easy to put any old upbeat or noisey music to it *cough-FLCL-cough*. The music here is a combination of techno, pop, and rock. The voice acting and sound effects in the anime are excellent, with suitably insane voices and insane effects provided at the right times.

Story:
The PLOT is of a below average nature, and takes a definate back seat to the visuals. At first, it seems difficult to even fathom that a plot could possibly emerge from all this insanity, but towards the end it takes shape (to a degree). Unfortunately it's not all that interesting, and instead I felt happier just to see the chaos and where it would lead rather than the anime try to justify it. What's good about the story is the world and character designs. All the gadgets and technology throughout Dead Leaves is engaging and entertaining, and the ridiculous characters are very interesting (see below). The settings and various environments that span the duration of the anime are as crazy as everything else - from an odd planet to an even odder space station prison - things just get even more mental as the whole chaos progresses. 15 minutes into it though, and I found myself strangely settled into this bizaare world, and ready for whatever it threw at me next. Finally, just to clairfy, the anime is often quite funny.

Characters:
Headline: Dead Leaves is almost completely devoid of character depth or real development. But to counter balance this, the characters are nutty and fun to watch. The 2 protagonists, Pandy and Retro, and excellent together and really likable. They are very different from each other - Pandy seemingly a quieter and mature female, and Retro being the loud brash and immature male - but they have a wonderfully electrifying chemistry. The secondary characters, are absolutely mental, in mentality and design (eg there's a guy with a huge Drill for his member). Almost all the characters have some form of super ablities with robotic enhancements coming out of their limbs and insane personalities. Whilst the anime takes hardly any time out to establish the purpose of all these ridiculous things, for once I felt it didn't matter.

Value:
Being only 45 minutes long, this highly charged anime has an equally high replay value. Putting it on resembles what I believe would be the closest thing to a low-yield 45 minute-long explosion. The only reason the replay value isn't perfect is because the anime itself isn't of a better standard overall.

Enjoyment:
After the first 5 mintues, I thought "Oh no, it's like FLCL on acid", but 10 minutes later I realised it wasn't at all and I became severely entertained. The over the top gore and sexual references grabbed my attention even more, and the odd nature of the anime in general made me laugh often. If only the visuals had more clarity, the story more depth, and the characters more establishment, this would have been one of the best animes out there. As it stands, it's left as being "great fun and exhilirating".

Note: Wasn't gonna post this here because it refers so heavily to the reviews on animenfo, but the two reviews that are here are both a little short. I figure a review that some people might not understand the context of is better than nothing. Still, read at your own risk :P.

Overall
Yikes. In terms of anime I’ve enjoyed, this is by far the lowest average I’ve ever seen on animenfo. There is so much unified hate towards this short little OVA that it’s difficult to really give a standard critique of the show that rates each category in the abstract.

Instead, it’s obligatory to start with why I think animenfo’s score is so ridiculously low. In short, this is an anime that flips the audience the middle finger. The creators make a conscious decision that story, characters, or any real meaning whatsoever are completely unimportant. What's more, the humor is beyond tasteless, the character designs are far from appealing, and the show feels almost like a visual assault in the way it barrages the audience with flashy colors, sharp edges and constant motion.

This mix, I think, alienates just about anyone who would ever watch the thing. Pure action lovers will have never heard of such an obscure title, people who watch anime for things like “story” or “character development” are going to be sorely disappointed by an almost total lack of either, and even fans of abstract, demented stuff are going to be disgusted when they find that the show has no meat in it to analyze.

In addition, this is a show that is impossible to take the higher ground with. Unlike similar (but completely different!) works like FLCL, Paranoia Agent, or Texhnolyze, no one can get away with saying pompous shit like, “oh you didn’t like it because you didn’t understand the deep and philosophical meaning behind it.”

The problem is that Dead Leaves has no message whatsover, let alone a hidden one; everything that the OVA brings to the table is as brutally obvious as that one guy’s giant, metallic penis.

So why, in spite of all of this, did I enjoy the OVA? I think the answer is that I appreciate the raw, prodigious talent that went into making this. The creators are so skillful at what they set out to do, so completely in tune with their own personal vision, that I enjoyed the work despite its numerous flaws.

In the end, the creators’ total commitment to making something completely unique wins out. Even if the core concept is patently retarded, the fact that an idea that has never been done before is executed so flawlessly makes the anime worth the small amount of time that it asks.

As a side note, if I had the option of putting "N/A" for the storyline, I would do so while lowering my scores for value and enjoyment. Unfortunately, I can't, so these weird scores that don't really reflect my opinion will have to do.

Animation
I think people place far too much value in the traditional anime look – the disproportionate girls with giant, insectoid eyes, the generic male protagonist with spiky hair, etc. I’ve found the look to be somewhat tiresome and uninspired after the 2 hundredth or so iteration.

Dead Leaves, on the other hand, has a strikingly different visual style, a far departure from anything I’ve seen. A lot of people have called this style ugly, but I loved it. It’s edgy, bold, and very memorable.

That, and the actual animation is absolutely top notch – this has the most fluid, inventive, and frenetic work I’ve seen since… ever?

Sound
Thumping techno + weird voice acting. Generally solid.

Story
Huh?

Character
Buh?

Value
I think many people who have enjoyed this might be staying silent in the face of so much negative buzz. After all, saying, “Yeah the story and characters suck, but the action was good and I liked it!” is very difficult to do without sounding like a complete dipshit. As evidence for this theory, I point to the comparatively high average on AniDB, where the voting is anonymous and doesn’t require an actual review.

A friend of mine recommended me this one saying it was like all the good parts about "Furi Kuri" collected in one single movie...But what should I say?
This movie can seem pointless if it wasnt for the excellent animation. To me it seemed like it was just a bunch of fancy animated sequences tied together by a plotso weak even a firstgrade student could come up with something better. Nevertheless I've been finding myself watching this movie over and over again, and its probably for all the action scenes. This movie is extremly violent and all the 50 minutes it lasts is filled with non-stop action.

So my conclusion is that if your in for a mindless actionanime this is it, if your in to a little more that just action you should find something else.

The first time I heard about Dead Leaves and saw a bit of it, I thought it was quite incredible that it comes from Production I.G., mostly because their films and series are known for trademark perfect animation with post-modern production techniques, and with predominantly gloomy seriousness, and philosophical depth.
Dead Leaves is none of these, rather it can be described a a total explosion of color and forms. First of all, the animation, while digitally produced, looks quite amateurish. But that quality is of course, intentional, because it fits with the uncontrollable burst of energy that this movie offers. There is always something happening, scenes change at a breakneck speed, often the screen is separated to 3 or four sub-frames where things take place simultaneously.
"Dead Leaves" is also extremely violent. There's always some character getting splattered on the wall or ground, thus becoming a bloody mess, mutants get hacked in halves, and there are guns blasting all the time. There are really few moral constrains in this movie, but the highly-stylized animation and the overall unobtrusive and fun element are somewhat of a remedy to all the violence.
The sound effects were simplistic but pretty good and the voice-acting was interesting. The music was mostly high-energy techno with blasting beats, but there were also some strange and sooky slower pieces and a few bizzare renditions of familiar songs.
I'd say that overall the film is very much worth seeing and it is not a Production I.G. throwaway. It is experimental in nature, very non-traditional, but at the same time a lot of fun in a strange, psychedelic sort of way.
I would have enjoyed it much more, however, if it really went all the way into uncharted territory and offered us a more wildly-developed plot-line rather than Dead Leaves' trivial, but nevertheless amusing, story.