Throughout the 2000s, several Japanese studios premiered Anime movies With high budgets, huge teams and risky visual decisions. Many did not find the public they expected. A review published by CBR brings together ten of those titles —Steamboy, , Redline, , Princess Earrings, , Tekkonkreet or The Sky Crawlers— And leaves an uncomfortable question: why are they remembered so little?
There is not a single answer. Some arrived years behind their announcement, others ran into a market that no longer looked at Motorsport or author anime, and several were left without a decent distribution outside of Japan. What they share is ambition: experimental animation, rare scripts and proper names that today weigh much more than in its premiere.
Steamboy: Akira’s shadow on Katsuhiro Otomo
Katsuhiro Otomo directed Steamboy after Akira, and the comparison cost him dearly. The film is set in an alternative Europe of the 19th century where a young inventor named Ray just got into the steam machinery business. Impossible machines and giant sets give it an air of playful adventure.
The data that best measures its weight: the production lasted more than a decade and, in its 2004 premiere, it was the most expensive Japanese production to date, with more than 180,000 drawings and nearly 450 computer-generated cuts. Sunrise and Bandai Visual are listed in the production.
The problem was the context. Opportunities to reach the public outside of Japan were limited, and whoever entered hoping for bodily horror and psychic powers in the style Akira There was a story of steam and inventions.
Redline and Hells: Two Madhouse Visual Bets
Redline It proposes a race without rules that is held every five years at a venue that is revealed shortly before departure. This time he plays Roboworld, and his military government refuses to allow the event.
Fluent style and worldbuilding hold the passage of time, but the wait played against: years of production since the announcement, an interest in the falling Motorsport since the 1990s and 1990s, and a Japanese audience reduced to adults who are fans of speed and science fiction. The huge budget that Madhouse moved was left mostly unrecovered.
Hells, also from Madhouse, starts with Rinne Amagane dying in an accident on the way to his first day of class. Wake up in hell, where his companions turn out to be demons, and he ends up building a strange bond with them.
Its overactive animation and exaggerated character design work as a seal, but also as a barrier: the result looks more like a Western cartoon than the anime of the time, and details such as director Helvis’ skewers are difficult to digest.
Studio 4°C anime movies that passed without noise
Tekkonkreet Follow Black and White, two resources without resources who survive in Treasure Town. When a mega company threatens to demolish the neighborhood to build an amusement park, the two fight over how little they have. Below is a psychological reading about childhood trauma and distorted perception, and the study gets animation, art and plot to form a single piece.
Studio 4°C also signed Princess Earrings In 2001, one of his most visually careful anime films: a princess locked in a tower by her father, the king, while the suitors look for jewelry and magical objects from a race of missing sorcerers. When the Sorcerer Boax catches her in her dungeon no savior appears, so she has to escape alone. The soundtrack is provided by Taeko Onuki and Origa.
The same studio produced Mind game, Masaaki Yuasa’s feature film released in 2004. Nishi visits his former high school love, Myon, and discovers that he is about to marry another. A run-in with the yakuza at the family’s noodle bar ends with him dead; Nishi asks God for another chance and returns to the bar just before the hit.
Early digital animation continues to surprise and the film advances through quick associations, as if Yuasa’s thoughts had been thrown on the screen. one hour and forty-five minutes with more production than it appears.
Big names, discreet results
The place promised in our early days It was Makoto Shinkai’s long debut in 2004, and remains one of his least-watched anime films. His alternative story starts from a Soviet occupation of Hokkaido and a Japan divided into two: two childhood friends separate when a third friend disappears and crosses again when a tower built by the union begins to exchange matter with other universes.
The subsequent success of Shinkai, especially with your name, buried this first feature film. Whoever comes from his most recent titles rarely looks back, and the melancholic tone does not help catch the casual audience either.
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and produced by Madhouse, follows D in the search for the vampire Meier Link, who has kidnapped a human woman. Along the way, he crosses the Marcus Brothers, a family of hunters after the same reward. Rejected by vampires for his trade and by humans for his blood, D advances between hostile forces.
The film arrived at a bad time and dragged the ballast of a loose predecessor. When the Western audience began to receive more powerful series and titles, bloodlust He had already lost his place.
The Sky Crawlers, by Mamoru Oshii and Production I.G, poses an apparently peaceful world where Rostock and Lautern corporations wage a privatized war. The pilots are Kildren, genetically modified humans only to fight, and their innocence loss occurs above the clouds. It is one of Oshii’s anime films that are said the least: prizes and good reviews arrived, but the slow pace and the duration distance a part of the public, and her other films continue to cover her up.
Remains Dead Leaves, from Production I.G and Manga Entertainment: Two unknown naked people wake up in the ground without memory, one with a television per head and the other with some patches that give it a name. His escape ends in a lunar prison. The colors and art direction separated her from the rest of the anime movies of the decade, although for years it was difficult to find on the Internet.
Ten titles, a decade and a pattern that repeats itself: anime movies that did not find public by calendar, marketing or distribution more than because of what was on screen. Reviewing them today serves to check how much of what is celebrated now was there.
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Source: CBR Anime
