Robot Carnival

Found this odd little '80s anime anthology movie on Amazon Prime. There's seven short films in all, plus an opening and closing sequence involving a giant, treaded machine rolling over a village in the desert while all its fireworks and mechanical ballerinas blowing up any homes and people not being trampled. Kind of a weird start.

Each film has its own style, each goes a different route. Most of them have no dialogue, except for "Presence" and "A Tale of Two Robots, Chapter 3: Foreign Invasion". That latter one is kind of funny, the only one that really tries for humor. This bunch of Japanese kids trying to use their coal-powered parade float mech to fend off some crazy European scientist and his battery-powered, brick-reinforced mech. Although the English voice actors seem to be doing bad parodies of racist imitations of Japanese people in how they pronounce stuff sometimes. Maybe Amazon Prime has the original version, with Japanese voice actors?

Visually, "Cloud" is probably the most unusual. It's presented as more like a drawing. In the lower left corner is the one constant character, walking towards the edge of the frame, head bowed, wind at her back. That remains largely the same, and the backgrounds change. From clouds, to face in the clouds (or spirits?), to a mushroom cloud, to a rocket blasting into space. The changes aren't abrupt, but they aren't quite smooth. You're supposed to notice that it changes, while this sad music plays in the background. I won't pretend I understand what it was getting at it, but it definitely caught my attention.

"Franken Gears" is the mad scientist not understanding his creation. "Starlight Angel" is some angsty teen romance thing, and the "robot" isn't even a real robot. Total rip-off. "Deprive" is a quick action thing about a robot saving the little girl he looks after from. . . I'm not sure how to describe the bad guy. David Bowie if he painted himself like a smurf? The bad guy from Voltron crossed with a member of the Mistfits from Jem? (I figure given when the movie was made, '80s cartoon references are appropriate.)

Here, you look at him and tell me what you'd say. I'd swear he looked bluer when I was watching than that image I found suggests.

"Presence", that one's a little odd. Where a Toymaker creates a robot, then freaks out when she asks him to give her a name, or to help her to be more alive. I couldn't shake the feeling the Toymaker was, himself, a robot. We see that there are perfectly human-passing robots in the world, but that they're broken bodies are discarded in the rubbish. He notes he never knew his mother, and that while he thought he'd found what he was looking for in marriage, he realized he wanted something more basic. Which I took to mean he wanted to create life himself. There's also a bit where he's started up all the old wind-up toys to distract himself from her questions, and one of them knocks another to the ground as he reaches for a wrench.

Maybe it's just that he was human, but not ready for the responsibility of guiding a life himself? Which would mean his wife did everything with the kids presumably (although there was something about how she was presented I can't get my head around.)

My favorite of the lot was "Nightmare", where some massive, partially constructed robot emerges from below the earth and tries to re-create or take over the world. It has a little assistant who flies around on something like a bicycle and zaps machinery so robots crawl out of it. There's one guy, asleep in an alley, who wakes up and gets chased around the city on his moped by the assistant, and in so doing ultimately ruins the whole thing.

It reminds me a lot of Fantasia, the part where the Devil rises from that mountain and sends all the shadow creatures over the landscape. Think I'm remembering that right. I just remember seeing that as a kid and it being the only part that didn't seem too much for babies for me by then (no idea what age I was at that point). I mean, when the chase reaches where the giant robot is, there are a bunch of the other demon/robots just dancing around, partying and celebrating in time with the gears and pistons that move around them. It feels very Disneyish, but in a way that's kind of creepy, and very cool.

One thing I was kind of interested to see overall was the similarities in how different shorts portrayed robots visually. A couple of them gave their robots one eye that was substantially larger than the other. And a couple would depict the forearms as having some outer covering, but the upper arms just look like exposed bone. No wires or blinking lights or armor, just an oddly human looking piece of anatomy.