Glassy Ocean

Time for kawaii ~nyan~ moe things! Or not. Or maybe! Depends on the viewer.

Director: Tamura Shigeru
Year of release: 1998
Country: Japan
Format/Subtitles: .avi/hardcoded English subtitles
Runtime: 23 minutes

Glassy Ocean is a short animated movie from Japan that I think is quite peculiar. To me this is more of a visual poetry than a narrated story. There seems to be two worlds here. One where everything is moving but is black and white, people are small universes (that's at least how I perceived it) and so on but there is also another, parallel, world where everything moves really, really slow. Both worlds are connected via ocean while one side views it as a constant moving thing the other side views it as a field of slow moving green glass. The "story" follows an event that both worlds are able to respectively observe which is an emergence of a whale.

Animations and movies like this usually polarize people's opinions because of its lack of coherence and firm narrative. I watched this a few years ago and didn't really enjoy it despite liking the art but recently I watched it again and now I think I enjoyed much better. I think that book Tarkovsky wrote helped but this is getting a bit off topic. There are a lot of subtle contemplative moments of life that can be observed here and that's probably why I like it so much. The beauty of surrealist art (for me) is that it can be interpreted in many ways and it actually depends on the viewer how it will be perceived. The focus here is more on the beauty and poetry of things rather than telling a strict coherent message. This makes this short film very relaxed in tone and pacing.

This is also a very beautifully crafted animated film with CGI and hand drawn animation. The sea is CG while the characters are hand drawn which gives them a lot warmth and energy. They felt alive and their soothing voices help a lot with this overall relaxed tone. Everything is in this peaceful zen-like state that strangely affects you as well if you're willing to let yourself go for these twenty minutes.

Overall I don't think this is the best thing ever made but I enjoyed it and maybe you will as well, if you're into this sort of thing.

Part one and two.