When animator Katsuhiro Otomo isn't supervising some new anime film or collecting checks from Akira merchandising, he occasionally finds the time to participate in one of those novel animated anthology films. One of these is the 1987 Original Video Animation Robot Carnival, a simple collection of animated shorts revolving around the theme of robots. Producer Kazufumi Nomura just snagged a few of his pals in the Japanese animation industry and slapped this project together. Keeping that in mind, I think it's fair to rate each of these separately as well as scoring the film as a whole.

Opening/Ending
The short bookend segments from Robot Carnival were the work of director Katsuhiro Otomo and character designer Atsuko Fukushima. They depict a humongous, traveling title sequence jubilantly making its way into an isolated desert community and wrecking havoc. Though there's something Pythonesque about the dark humor employed, the whole thing is too short to be anything more than mildly amusing.
Rating: ***

Starlight Angel
This piece of shoujo fluff was helmed by Hiroyuki Kitazume, creator of Moldiver and Genesis Surviver Gaiarth (neither of which I'm familiar with) and character designer for a few Gundam spinoffs (which I'm way too familiar with). It's all about two girls who spend the day at an amusement park run by robots. When the two friends get separated, one of the 'bots turns out to be her knight in shining armor. Nice and sweet and feels like a lost commercial for Rainbow Brite. A scary mechanical monster shows up to try and look evil for a few seconds and then disappears back to the Go Nagai show from whence it probably came.
Rating: **

Cloud
The piece furthest removed from typical anime stylings is the creation of Mao Lamdo so it's probably not surprising that I'm unable to find any further works to his credit. A robotic child born from a cloud walks past a perpetually changing skyscape. At first, the clouds seem to resemble scenes of serenity. Then they begin to portray figures like dragons, cherubs, and a weeping female. The imagery disperses when a thunderstorm acts up and then reprises in the form of a mushroom cloud, rockets, rabbits, and hats morphing into flying saucers. The sun finally emerges and the young robot is transformed into a human boy. Most everything unfolds like illustrations in a children's book. Certainly the most ponderous work in the anthology, Cloud will either fill you with a sense of inner calm or have you fast forwarding to find something flashier.
Rating: ***

Deprive
The complete opposite of the last segment, Deprive is much closer to generic 80's sci-fi anime than anything else on the tape. In much the same way that Starlight Angel is chick fluff, Hidetoshi Omori (character designer on the crappy Guyver animated video series) simply presents a work that consists of boring action sequences to wake up those of us with testosterone. In the wake of an alien invasion, a girl is kidnapped away from her android companion. The android upgrades itself and heads out to blow stuff up and kick some booty. The typically stylish look and feel of sci-fi anime that Deprive almost entirely relies on can't save it because it lacks the epic scope so many of those same shows had. The genre doesn't really work when you try to compress the story into the same space of time you'd afford a music video.
Rating: **

Franken's Gears
Kouji Morimoto, director of the "Magnetic Rose" segment from Memories, brings us a mad scientist animating a robot. Er, why?
Rating: **

Presence
Now here's a short worth a few viewings. The first of two films in the collection containing dialogue, we're introduced to a lovesick man living in a futuristic England that very much resembles the Victorian-era. Through the use of voiceover narration, we learn that he grew up without parents and his successful wife is too busy at work to pay him any attention. So, in secret, he constructs a female android, human in every detail. When it appears to manifest feelings such as love for him, he panics, pulls the plug, and spends the rest of his life regretting it. Unlike most of the people involved with Robot Carnival, Yasuomi Umetsu (director of the controversial femme action anime feature Kite) succeeds in making you care about the characters in a short space of time.
Rating: ****

A Tale Of Two Robots - Chapter 3: "Foreign Invasion"
To liven up the tone, a comedy segment was slipped into the mix. It's a fair parody of the mecha/giant robot genre from a steampunk point of view. Meaning that even though the story is set in 19th Century Japan, they have advanced technology run by cumbersome steam engines and gears instead of electronics. Here, a crazy, bug-eyed evil genius has invaded Japan piloting a clumsy giant robot with which he plans to conquer and destroy. His only opposition is a band of young would-be heroes who take their own large robot into action. This is the second short to feature dialogue and, once again, it comes off better than most of the silent segments. The man in charge here, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, went on to do things like the lowbrow OVA series Golden Boy, Roujin Z, and the good (albeit short) 2000 anime feature Blood: The Last Vampire so he's sort of hit-and-miss as a director. But A Tale Of Two Robots comes as something of a relief.
Rating: ****

Nightmare (aka Chicken Man And Red Neck)
The most imaginative sequence comes last. From Takashi Nakamura, the guy behind the warped family anime feature Catnapped!, we get a vignette about a horde of mechanical monsters who take over a city and a drunken man who awakens in the middle of it all. A scrawny, flying robot spots him and a long chase scene through the new dystopia ensues. Appropriately dark and claustrophobic, Nightmare is the best overall piece in the anthology.
Rating: *****

I wouldn't say that Robot Carnival is essential anime by any means. Sure, with the exception of Cloud, the animation is great all around but the concepts behind most of the segments are more of an afterthought than anything. It definitely pales compared to Otomo's later anime anthology feature Memories (which still hasn't been released in the USA, reportedly because the rights are too expensive for any American company to purchase).

The music is done by Joe Hisaishi (resident composer for both Hayao Miyazaki and Beat Takeshi), Masahisa Takeichi and Isaku Fujita. I can't tell who composed what but I didn't care much for the 80's synth in the background, especially during the first few shorts. The better ones tend to have better music. Presence and Opening/Ending probably come out on top in that aspect.

Anime feature films (and one-shot OVA's like Robot Carnival) tend to be most people's first introduction to the genre. That's unfortunate because, outside of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the format is a mixed bag for anime. It compounds matters since anime films tend to be more widely distributed than anime done in the series format (tv and OVA), probably because anime films take up less shelf space at Blockbuster. Creators in the genre work best, in my opinion, when they have much more time to let a story unfold rather than when they have to cram things into the space of 2 hours. That being the case, pass Robot Carnival up and find something much more worth your time like Serial Experiments Lain, Cowboy Bebop, or Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS