Neo-Tokyo

Originally created in 1989, this offbeat collection of animated Japanese shorts is a strange hybrid: two separate and distinct films, one of which actually contains three disparate stories, the other carrying on in the standard tradition of Akira-esque incomprehensibility. The film opens with a young girl's plunge, as in Through the Looking Glass, into a disturbing world of “The Labyrinth,” a shadowed alleyway filled with phantasmic clowns and capering ghosts. Brilliantly shot in an atypical (for Japanimation, anyway) style, this weird little chunk of Disney on Acid ends up being the best of the lot. It makes very little sense, natch, but then that's never been much of a concern for Japanese animators -- the striking images and relentless sense of “What's going on here?” only add to the skewed enjoyment. “The Order to Shut Down,” is a lighter and more straightforward piece of work, involving a clueless and harried corporate underling sent into the literal jungle to halt production at an all-robot facility. Awash in broad humor, it's an amusing if light take on the ever-present question of humanity versus computers, and what to do when the machines try to take over. The second half of Neo-Tokyo -- titled Moebius -- is unfortunately an hour-long exercise trapped in the Akira Syndrome: too much going on with little or no explanation for all the blood, carnage, and shapeshifting. Tentatively the story of a group of earthbound witches which acts as a planetary line of defense against encroaching demons, Moebius is gorgeous to look at, but like the aforementioned Akira (and it was created by some of the same people), it's all fire and thunder, with little in the way of memorable characterizations or original ideas to support it. Japanimation frequently suffers from the notion of losing something important in the cultural crossing, and Neo-Tokyo, for all of its brilliant images, is no different.