Anime: Atama Yama

You will either fall in love with this short animation, or simply say "wtf?" because it's too weird. Chances are though, if you loved Being John Malkovich, you'll like this one too. It has the same kind of self-loophole, surreal and bizarre humor to it :) No wonder it made it up to the Academy Awards nominations.

The pencil-sketched designs and water colors of this movie are quite distinctive and a work of patience that took six years to produce. The result is an interesting, though jerky, animation that is made up of many overly detailed close-ups, as if we were looking through a magnifying glass at everything the main character does and touches. Pretty weird, but I liked it.

The sound is the most interesting aspect. It's purely Japanese rakugo, where a man semi-chants the story accompanied by his shamisen. You'll either love or hate this too, depending on your taste, but if you do get the humor of it, you'll find yourself laughing out loud all the way. The end of the song (and the movie too) is simply hilarious :) There is also a lot of sound effects that some would consider gross (when the man eats you feel like you hear everything from inside his head), but I felt it added to the "it's for real" feeling of this movie.

Story ,eheh. A greedy loner picks up all the garbage and trash because it might still be useful and have value. One day he picks up his favorites, cherries, and eats all of them, seeds included. The next day he finds himself with a cherry tree growing on top of his head. A year passes, and with the spring blossoms you get to look at the hordes of drunken people celebrating under the sakura on his head, and of course, they are simply annoying to this dirty loner, and angry him to the point that...

This has the no nonsense quality of children's stories, and a somewhat cliché but very funny "villain", yet it does have a message hidden in it (like most fairy tales). Here Yamamura said about his own work that he was "hoping to express the theme of identity and social involvement as far as the constant thought about the enigma of world existence". Yeah, OK, whatever, I didn't get it the first time and I still enjoyed this short movie a lot :)

Do give it a try and test the limits of your sense of humor :)