Robot Carnival: The Anime Anthology of Machine Dreams

Here is the brief that produced Robot Carnival: robots. That is the entire brief. Nine animators, one word, no unifying story, no house style, no framing narrator explaining what you are about to see. The producers at A.P.P.P. handed out the word and the money and got out of the way, and what came back in 1987 is the strongest case Japanese animation has ever made for the anthology as a form.

It also arrived exactly one year before Akira, which is why almost nobody in the West saw it, and why the people who did have never stopped going on about it.

What is actually in it

The wrapper is the thing everyone remembers. Katsuhiro Ōtomo and Atsuko Fukushima’s opening and closing segments give the film its title: an enormous, filthy, rusting mechanical carnival that drags itself across a desert toward a village, dispensing spectacle and death in roughly equal measure, while the villagers flee ahead of it. It is a superb piece of design — the carnival is a machine whose only function is to arrive — and Ōtomo shoots it with the same appetite for scale and rubble that would define Akira twelve months later.

Between the bookends sit seven films that agree on nothing:

Franken’s Gears (Kōji Morimoto) is the Frankenstein scene played as slapstick and then as tragedy, in a lightning-lit attic. Deprive (Hidetoshi Ōmori) is a straight-ahead action piece, and the weakest thing here. Presence (Yasuomi Umetsu) is the masterpiece, and I will come back to it. Star Light Angel (Hiroyuki Kitazume) is a romance in a theme park, all eighties gloss and heartbreak. Cloud (Manabu Ōhashi) is wordless: a small figure walking left to right for eight minutes while the sky behind it becomes the entire history of the world. A Tale of Two Robots (Hiroyuki Kitakubo) is a Meiji-era comedy in which a Japanese wooden robot fights a Western steam robot over a harbour town. Nightmare (Takashi Nakamura) is a city at night overrun by machines that assemble themselves from streetlights and rubbish.

No two of these belong in the same film. That is the point.

Why anthologies usually fail, and why this one does not

Here is the craft argument.

Anthology films almost always die of their wrapper. The framing device exists to reassure the audience — a narrator, a book, a crypt-keeper — and its actual function is to sand the segments down into a house tone, so that a portmanteau ends up being one mediocre film in seven pieces rather than seven films. The Amicus portmanteau tradition is the great English example of the trap: superbly entertaining, tonally identical throughout, and the frame is doing the flattening.

Robot Carnival has no frame. Ōtomo’s carnival opens and closes and never comments, never introduces, never returns between segments. The film simply cuts from a Meiji-era slapstick harbour battle to a wordless eight-minute meditation on a walking figure, with no transition and no apology, and the whiplash is the experience. You are not watching a film with seven chapters. You are watching seven directors argue about a word.

And the argument is legible, which is what makes it worth your time. Put Deprive next to Cloud and you can see two animators who understand “robot” to mean utterly incompatible things — a weapon, a soul — and the film’s refusal to adjudicate is the most respectful thing it could possibly do. Joe Hisaishi’s contributions to the score do the only unifying work anyone attempts, and even that is loose: his music for the opening and for the quieter segments has the melancholy, slightly ceremonial quality he was bringing to Miyazaki in the same period, and it gives the whole thing an emotional through-line that the images flatly refuse to supply.

Presence

The reason to watch, in the end, is one segment.

Yasuomi Umetsu’s Presence is set in a retro-future English village — brick, hedges, a wife, a bicycle — where a man has secretly built an android girl in a workshop nobody knows about. She becomes aware. She asks him for things. What he does about that is the segment, and I will leave it there.

The animation is the finest in the film and among the finest of the decade. Umetsu draws the girl with a specificity that is genuinely uncomfortable — she is not stylised into cuteness, she has weight and hesitation and a face that thinks — and the workshop scenes are staged with a stillness that no other segment attempts. The whole thing runs on the gap between how carefully she is animated and how carelessly she is treated.

What makes it devastating is the structure. Umetsu gives the segment an entire lifetime in about twenty minutes, and its decisive event lands at the halfway mark, which means the second half is pure consequence: a man growing old inside a decision. Animation almost never does this. The form’s economics push everything toward incident, and Presence spends half its runtime on a man simply having done something and being unable to stop having done it.

It is also, quietly, the most complete statement in the anthology about the word everyone was given. The robot is a person because someone made her want things and then found the wanting inconvenient. Nothing else in the film gets near it.

What it is really descended from

The collector’s note is Fantasia.

Not in style — in structure and permission. Disney’s 1940 film is the ancestor of every animation anthology that trusts an audience to sit through a wordless sequence and derive meaning from image and music alone, and Cloud in particular is directly downstream: eight minutes, no dialogue, one walking figure, the entire argument delivered through what changes behind it. Ōhashi’s segment would be unthinkable without a precedent for an animated feature that simply stops telling stories for a while, and Fantasia is the precedent.

The nearer ancestor is Ōtomo’s own trajectory. Robot Carnival sits one year before the film that sold the West on the form, and the carnival wrapper is visibly the same sensibility rehearsing: enormous machines, granular rubble, a crowd running from something that does not care about them.

And the direct descendant is easy to name. Memories, the 1995 Ōtomo-produced triptych, is Robot Carnival’s child in every respect — the same producer instinct, the same refusal to unify, several of the same animators, and Morimoto graduating from a Frankenstein sketch here to one of the finest things anime has produced there. For the desk’s other end of this argument, Angel’s Egg is what happens when the wordless mode gets a whole feature to itself.

The case against

It is uneven, obviously, and unevenness in an anthology is not a bug you can design out. Deprive is generic and Star Light Angel is slight, and between them that is a substantial fraction of the runtime spent on competent nothing. A Tale of Two Robots is fun and goes on considerably longer than the joke can carry.

The film also has no cumulative effect. The best anthologies build — the last segment reframes the first — and Robot Carnival is a set of unconnected excellences, which means it finishes rather than concludes. You leave with two or three segments and no film.

And it must be said that the film’s great strength is invisible to a newcomer. If you do not know that these are nine distinct authors with nine distinct signatures, the whole thing reads as a scattered curio. The pleasure is substantially a connoisseur’s pleasure, which is a real limitation and the reason it has never broken out.

Where it stands

It stands as the best pure demonstration of what Japanese animation could do in the exact moment before the world started paying attention. Every animator in it went on to matter — Morimoto, Umetsu, Nakamura, Kitakubo, Ōtomo — and Robot Carnival is the only place you can watch all of them working at full stretch on the same word with nobody standing over them.

Watch it for Presence, which is one of the great short films in any medium. Watch it for Cloud, which is eight minutes of proof that animation can do things live action cannot reach. Watch it for Ōtomo’s carnival, grinding across the desert a year early, carrying everything he was about to unleash.

It has had a restored disc release after decades of grey-market VHS; the transfer matters enormously on Cloud, where the whole segment is texture.

Spoilers below

Presence is the one that needs discussing, because its ending is the film’s real subject and it is easy to get wrong.

The engineer destroys the girl in a moment of panic, and the segment then follows him for the rest of his life — marriage, age, a village that never learns what happened in the workshop. In his final years she returns. She appears to him as she was, unchanged, and he goes with her, and the segment ends with the old man and the girl walking away together.

The obvious reading is reunion, and it is wrong, or at least it is only half. Umetsu stages the return with a deliberate ambiguity that nothing in the segment resolves: she may be real, or a hallucination of a dying mind, or simply the thing he has been rehearsing for sixty years. What is unambiguous is the arithmetic. She is exactly as he made her, and he is old, and the reunion he is granted is a reunion with his own creation on his own terms, one last time. He is not forgiven. He is indulged.

That is why the segment survives the sentiment its last minute appears to be reaching for. Everything before it has established that this man’s crime was building someone who wanted things and then finding that unbearable, and the ending hands him a version of her who wants only him. It is the fantasy that caused the murder, delivered as a deathbed mercy. Umetsu draws it beautifully and with total tenderness, and the tenderness is what makes it cold.

Ōtomo’s closing bookend does the other necessary thing. The carnival, having crossed the desert and delivered its spectacle, finally breaks down — the great machine grinds to a halt in the sand and simply comes apart, and the villagers who spent the opening running from it in terror pick over the wreckage and walk away unimpressed. Nine directors spent ninety minutes arguing about whether the machine has a soul, and Ōtomo closes the film by burying one in the desert while children poke at it with sticks. It is the only ending an anthology with no thesis could honestly have: the question is left in pieces, in the sand, for whoever wants to pick it up.