Anime: Cencoroll

Within the first 2 minutes this one outright tells you that it is pure and simple and is about a random conflict, with random pacing, random storytelling and random people. I am not kidding.

Now with a bit of backstory from this project: this was made by one guy. It was for an up-and-coming young talents project which involves independent animators and small studios, and since he decided this is a cool thing to join he decided to get one idea out of the paper and made a short out of it. After much praise, he then singlehandlely created this film on its own. The results are quite impressive, right? Yes, no? Let's see how impressive it actually is.


And this is Cencoroll, an obscure, underrated anime with a generic setting with dreadful atmosphere, secretive plot that happens on bizarre events and the ones that are involved in said events are random people you'll most likely never remember them again without any sort of backstory with random characterization getting involved on a bigger conflict. And since it is inspired by Morioh Kitoh's elements it handles them very poorly. So if you have a thing for the visuals and just want to see the brilliance of a masterpiece just because of those pretty colors then go ahead for this one. If you otherwise want a truly thrilling series about a bigger conflict with lots of depth and characterization then try out Bokurano, Narutaru or any shit Morioh Kitoh makes instead. They are a lot more atmospheric and intensifying than this one.

Seeing a great piece downrated just because people didn't get it, or expected way too much from it really makes me sad.

Forget for a bit about Cencoroll being an "indie production" or a "movie". Don't expect it to explain every single detail of it's world within a less-than-30 min screen time. Treat it like a first episode of some series. That's when it'll really show you all it's got.

Animation:

You know, this is the first series in a very very long time, which made me really care about the characters just from the way they were drawn and animated.

Creators selected a low-key pastel color scheme. This color scheme stands in sharp contrast to the shouting colors of most other anime productions, and conveys the feeling of something completely alien right from the get-go.
From there, they proceed to animate characters with great care. Facial expressions, body postures, movements - all of this is drawn and brought to life with great style.
The action scenes are all awesome. They are poignant, fast and are just the right level of messy.
In short, as far as the things that actually matter are concerned, the animation work done is perfect.

The downside is that the creators paid very little attention to stuff like backgrounds and character costumes. Whether it's the result of artistic vision or lack of budget is up in the air, but it's still a minus one point.

That leaves us with "perfect, given the budget" mark - 9/10

Sound
The sound does the job right, and goes well with the visual style chosen. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

There is a good amount of sound effects, all carefully chosen for the scene at hand - from the chirping of cicadas in the school backyard during midday summer, to the "slurpy" sounds of inside-the-blob-belly-land. There is also a little bit of music thrown in. Nothing too fancy, but quite enough to set the rhythm and mood of the scenes it accompanies.

The voice acting follows the similar approach of supporting the visual style. If voices could be described as "pastel", that would be it. It's plain, somewhat bland, with minimal amount of shouting and general loudness. The authors let the body postures and faces deal with emotions, but when characters speak, we hear voices of people who are trying to maintain a grip on a situation, no matter how stupid or desperate it gets.
Very japanese-like.

The sound goes well with the artistic vision and supports it in creating a very good atmosphere, if you can appreciate the vision itself.

The problem, however, is that it does not do anything more than this. A sound done right will convey it's own vision, inspire awe and will succeed in creating a mood before you actually see any visuals. Cencoroll's sound is simply not like that. While i felt the soundwork is above average, supporting the artistic approach very well, it still plays second fiddle to the great animation.

Sound verdict - great, but not awesome, 7/10

Story
A great story for a 30-min episode of some show. Obviously not enough story for a complete movie.

Much how the animation and sound are all tailored to focus you on what's actually happening, the story is meant to be enjoyed in the present, and does not answer any of the questions about what happened in the past and what will come after.

However, it still has it's own share of conflict, betrayals, decisions and revelations. There are no wasted scenes at all. Everything that happens serves to drive the narrative forward. By the time it ends, you want to know more. It is a great short story.

The problem is on the other side of the coin. As the story goes, you constantly feel that you need to know more about what's happening to understand it. As the story ends, you feel it's incomplete. Both are serious offenses, which keep the story from becoming truly awesome.

Verdict - good story for an anime episode, nothing more, nothing less 7 / 10.

Characters
If you like your characters being defined by the way they look and by what they say, you probably won't get Cencoroll. In most shounen, the protagonist is the protagonist just by the virtue of having something unusual and catchy somewhere in his image, and by being able to spout some righteous nonsense with a straight face. Then they proceed to prove their right to spout said nonsense for the rest of the show.

In Cencoroll, it's in reverse. Characters are defined by what they do, and only after they prove themselves capable of action, they get to tell other characters what to do.

It's actually refreshing to see :D

Yes, it's somewhat primitive. We don't see any deep human drama unfold in front of our eyes. We also don't here any big words being said or teachings being preached. Cencoroll is simply not about that.

Cencoroll is about actions and consequences. It's about how what happens in the now affects the next moment in your life, and how different kinds of people and creatures deal with what's right in front of them, and how it affects them and people around them.

By the time the 30 minutes are over, all three of the main characters (the ones you see on the picture on the show's page) change in some way, which means the character development is very much in place, and is a whole level stronger than character development we see in most other adventure series.

Now, the problem is, that the characters on the opposing side as well as a single side-character do not seem to develop at all. They seem to exist only to act out their roles, push the main guys towards their own paths, and then vanish. That's minus two points in my books.

Therefore, character verdict - strong main cast, weak (but not pointless) supporting cast. 8/10.

Value
I feel this anime is a step in a whole new direction on many levels.
It is also the first work of it's author, and i'll be sure to keep an eye on what he does next.
The only way it could have higher value is if it was released by a major studio and not an indie guy. 9/10

Enjoyment
Loved it almost completely. Not knowing the backstory hurt a bit, though, so minus one point for that. But otherwise, it was bloody awesome. 9/10

Cencoroll: Because ‘Indy’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’.

Cencoroll is a a low-budget 2009 anime original film made as part of a showcase of young, up-and-coming talent from outside the major animation houses, Cencoroll clocks in at about 23 minutes and tells the story of a boy and his shape-shifting blob, called Cencoroll, who fights another boy and his blob. Due to the film’s short duration, the entire fight is fought almost entirely without context and explanations, probably depending heavily on the ‘freshness factor’ of the film rather than any objective proficiency in storytelling, structure, characters or similar.

So, having had an afternoon to waste, I watched it. And I come away… Having pretty much consigned the whole thing away into the more dustier recesses of my mind already and it’s just been about an hour (or six) since I did it. This sort of tells you just how impressionable this film was.

Animation and Graphics: 6/10 – Generic character models and flat, flat backgrounds. Blob looks halfway interesting, though.

Ok, so the backgrounds are mostly static and consist much of what appear to be smears that’s supposed to be trees. The buildings are cubic and low-detailed, and certainly don’t hold up to, say, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. The sky is mostly a grey background, and the locales overall don’t look very impressive. The humans look very basic and have practically nothing that distinguishes them.

So, why the six? The blobs themselves, mainly. Their designs, while hardly the most original (they look like they’ve been snorted out of Spirited Away, or possibly some of the Evangelion angels as done by the artist of Spirited Away) are fairly well-done, their animation is actually pretty ok and the one fight scene they do get isn’t half-bad. So I’m going to give them that.

Audio: 4/10 – Generic voiceovers and no music to speak of.

The audio experience Cencoroll is minimalist… At best. The show has no music at all; the whole film goes with silenced backgrounds and the SFX is almost equally not-there. As for the voice actors, they too don’t give much of an impressive voice; the male protagonist and the villain sound like pretty much any high school boy side character in X number of shows, and the girl protagonist equally so (only, of course, like *girl* side characters…). There’s nothing really to be said about it, good or bad, as none of them get enough lines for me to give them anything more than the ‘standard’ tag – they certainly don’t excel in the line of duty in any way and in the interests of fairness I should add they don’t make any major screw-ups too.

Story: 3/10 – A what, now?

So, basically, Cencoroll is about a blob monster that appears out of a black hole on a building in Tokyo. There’s some other kid who has another, smaller blob monster, who meets some random girl. And a kid who controls the big blob monster has another small one that can turn invisible. The two monsters have a fight; the one kid’s blob monster eats his arm and defects to the girl, gets eaten by the big monster and turns into a giant vat of pudding. And then the JSDF destroy the pudding. And the blob monster turns into the guy’s arm, even though it’s still controlled by the girl.

Errr, yeah. Looking back at that paragraph, I can’t believe I actually wrote that with a straight face. And that I didn’t make any of it up either (apart of course from presenting it in a way that takes the piss out of it). Cencoroll’s story borders between ‘non-existent’ and just ‘bloody incomprehensible’ – it’s basically a selection of vaguely unrelated and disjointed scenes telling the story of two guys with magical blobs that are beating each other up for no adequately explored reason. Hints are dropped that this is apparently some sort of everyday occurrence or something, which doesn’t really help as the continued lack of context just annoyed me further. Like I complained about in my earlier RahXephon review, for the two of you who have read it, the lack of a ‘why’ in a story very quickly wears me thin.

I mean, I realize there’s a time limit on the 23 minutes, but at least *try* to make something out of it. The whole thing just struck me as a mess. It’s not even that original a mess; the whole ordeal could pretty much have been an episode of Narutaru… A very nonsensical one (even by Narutaru’s standards) with less blood, angst and rape, but nonetheless. It still can’t reach Kurozuka down there in the bottom of the story quality pile, but it gets pretty damn close – but unlike the former, Cencoroll lacks enough hackneyed plot elements to actively repulse or anger me (hence the higher score) and would probably look *better* if they made more of it – it just got me mostly bemused and apathetic.

Characters: 3/10 – When the blob that eats rocks is the most interesting character, you know something’s not right.

As for the characters, we have boy main character, who is sullen and introspective for no reason, and of course the show doesn’t have the time to tell you why. We have his blob that is mute and communicating only by eating stuff. We have no idea what it is, only that it’s called Cencoroll. We have the girl main character, who is… There. She acts pretty much normal, if someone who reacts to shapeshifting blobs in the manner she does can be called ‘normal’. Then again, nobody else seem to care about them either.

Like the story, the characters are pretty much patchwork: They have absolutely no character development, no real depth and even lack defining surface attributes apart from Boy’s obstinant personality, which just annoyed me. Perhaps seeing better shows like Evangelion has horribly spoiled me or something, but I like to have some meat on the character's bones and when people act like that right off the bat I like to get some reasons as to why, even if you only have 23 minutes to do it in. Charm is pretty much also non-existent; apart from Cencoroll’s kind of “mildly cute, in a freakish blob-ish sort of way” none of them made me so much as bat an eye for a second. Well, except in annoyance.

Value: 4/10 – At least it’s over quickly.

As I touched upon earlier, Cencoroll basically is an episode of Narutaru, down to the incomprehensible characters and its attempt at seriousness, though lacking slightly in some of the latter’s more disgusting moments. Pokémon on acid, in other words. And lacking a back-story. The time limit which criminally undermines the story and characters at least makes looking through it an easy task, albeit one I undertook with great disinterest and have no intention of ever repeating.

Looking at it was somewhat like looking like a charm-less and nonsensical version of some Ghibli film, and for some reason it made me want to watch Dennou Coil again… If only to wash the taste from my brain with a similarly-‘feeling’ anime (hard for me to quantify how, let me just say I got reminded of it) that basically does right in everything this does wrong in.

Enjoyment: 4/10 – Booooo-ring.

In short, watching Cencoroll for the entertainment factor is not an experience I’d advise without the use of major mind-altering substances; it has really little going for it both in charm (near none), interesting characters and storyline (not enough time to develop one), or originality or ‘oooh’ factor. The first fight scene is a bit neat, but without any context the whole thing ultimately feels pointless – much like the rest of the film.

At the same time I can’t actually *dislike* it… That much. I mean, clocking in at just 23 minutes it’s not worth the bloody effort to summon up the energy to care about, for good and bad.

Final Score: 4/10 – A tale told by a pretentious art major, lacking in sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Cencoroll isn’t precisely *bad*, but it failed to entertain me and the ‘art’ aspect of the thing is lessened by its somewhat low originality factor – speaking crudely, the whole thing just seems like someone’s demented fantasy, and if I want demented fantasia I get better energy and amusement out of pretty much anything SHAFT’s made, or even my own imagination. The whole thing was pretty much a viewing exercise in apathy and indifference for me at least, though I can imagine those with slightly higher tolerance for these kinds of affair may look at it more favourably.

In summary, Cencoroll was either way too ambitious for its timescale and budget and just unaware of how little it actually accomplished, or a hodgepodge of random story- and character elements hastily stitched together and hastily set loose on the world like some freakish anime frankenstein’s monster in the hopes of making people think it’s ‘art’; on some level I kind of want to pity it, but mostly I just wanted it to be put down. I know I’m supposed to foster and encourage tomorrow’s talents, which is why I would encourage the ones who made Cencoroll to next time try to inject some more sense into the story and some more charm and believability into the characters – and if they have to labour under the same constraints again, aim a little lower. After all, neither Evangelion or RahXephon were built on one episode, and if they had been...

Well, they'd still look better than this. But still.

This short 25 minute feature feels more like an artistic summary of an average children’s adventure series than an actual full story. You get to see things a normal series would spend 12 episodes depicting. And no, that doesn’t mean it has a good pacing because it skips a lot of events and explanations to the point it feels hollow.

The funny part is how this short feature is part of a project to aid upcoming new artists and not some major funded mainstream anime aiming to sell like crazy. If that is the case, then please do not give a second chance to the guys who made this. If the project is meant to find new talents with fresh ideas and uncommon ways to tell a story, these here followed the formula as tightly as possible.

Visually, Cencoroll is very pleasing. Everything feels like it was painted with watercolors and oil paints and even the outlines of the characters are not clear outlines. This gave to the feature an artistic feeling most suited for fluid animation. The setting of the story is a generic Japanese city and a typical school yet the colors made them feel special. Plus, half of the duration is battles between transforming critters. The action is very well done with lots of vitality and attention given to physics. Also, the monsters have a plethora of attacks that are not just laser beams that blow things up (a cheap way to show big explosions without actually animating anything) but grabbing and throwing objects, jumping, transforming and running. The same thing can be said about the characters, who although don’t do anything extreme still have a very pleasing body language most titles sacrifice in order to save money by making still images.

Acoustically, Cencoroll remains at the basics. There is almost no background music heard in the entire duration with an average pop song during the ending titles reminding you what you were not listening to all this time. I feel like the producers decided to leave out the music just to make the viewers focus solely on the characters and their talking. It is a neat trick but it takes more than that. The dialogues and the story were never anything special so the absence of music does help you to sympathize with the characters more while at the same time making you feel bored in case you want atmosphere. Beyond that, the voice acting was decent although as I said, the context of the dialogues was pretty standard stuff you see in stories with teenagers pairing with monsters, so it still feels blunt.

In the same manner, the story in Cencoroll is a fast forward summary of an average children-paired-with-monsters story. If you have seen Pokemon or Narutaru you know what to expect. Two kids control monsters and decide to have a showdown. How they found them or why they fight is almost not mentioned so all you are left to see is them fighting before the feature ends in an almost tie. Yes, it is an open ending, leaving room for a sequel.

The cast in Cencoroll is pleasing to watch albeit generic. It is very interesting to see them moving and talking to each other with the lack of music or even a background story not distracting you from what they are doing. Still, their motivation is very blunt as is the reason they fight or acting so cynical all the time. This feature is so esoteric, you are supposed to do nothing other than looking at their mentality but not at their reasoning for being as such. The whole deal is basically four people, two males controlling and fighting, one female that keeps interfering for no given reason and her schoolmate female friend who is essentially not doing anything. So I say this feature wins in terms of portraying its cast in a wonderful way but does a messy job at actually explaining why they act the way they act. Maybe it is a pilot to a future series, maybe it didn’t matter for the producers. No matter the reason, the cast is nothing more than pleasing archetypes. As for all the rest, there are no other people present besides the main characters. The city feels empty even when the army stars bombarding the area. There are no bystanders running around in panic amongst all the destruction the monsters do. Well, there is one who just closes the window so big deal. Just like the music, the world in the feature seems to be given no attention so that the viewers will focus solely on the characters.

In all, Cencoroll is pleasing to watch but quite a bother to actually rewatch. It is so short and simple that you have little to gain by watching it again. Still, the first time will most likely please you to the most part with its artistic depiction and esoteric approach to its characters.