Animation can be so wonderful. To make it wonderful is pretty labour-intensive, but even crappy animation takes some pretty hard work. Why is it then that Japan can churn so many crappy, superficial and formulaic anime every year, I do not know. There are a few exceptions, though: one guy who never disappoints is Masaaki Yuasa. I just love his artwork (think Egon Schiele meet Bill Plympton), and his stories often strike the perfect balance between genre-tropes, heartfelt character-studies and sheer madness (Kemonozume will forever remain with me).
My Year of Dicks is not--a priori--something that should appeal to me: I'm usually warry of profanities in titles (not because I'm a prude but because it's so often a cheap marketing gimmick). Like so many people I have grown tired of coming-of-age stories (all too often an excuse for indulging the grown-ups' taste for soapy tropes). I'm also an old-ish dude, and worst of all, I don't remember my teenage years well enough to feel any kind nostalgia about them.
And yet as soon as I saw the art style, which echoes with the aforementioned Masaaki Yuasa, I knew I had to give this a spin! I was not disappointed: understated hand-drawn characters with great body-language, abstract and expressive framing and some expressionistic angles, a variety of colouring techniques, a bit of montage, some bravura bodily distortion, this is one of the best animation work I've seen in a long while! Even the 90s aesthetics, whose ubiquity typically annoys me, felt 'right' (yes, I know, a great many things annoy me. The MYoD team should make a music video for that other 90s-themed project I tolerate, 1000gecs.)
But what's even more incredible, is that all this wonderful animation fits perfectly with a story, that is funny, moving, introspective, honest, and short (without being too short). The voice acting is spot on, the rhythm is good an the writing is mostly unobtrusive but also has its moments ('the talk' with 'the dad'). Perhaps there was a few too many facile subculture references for my taste (did we really need *both* a goth skater *and* a straight-edge?) But perhaps that's what life really was in the nineties? And really this is a tiny speck that I had to rake my brain to come up with. If you have not watched MYoD yet, you should drop everything and go see it now.
My Year of Dicks is not--a priori--something that should appeal to me: I'm usually warry of profanities in titles (not because I'm a prude but because it's so often a cheap marketing gimmick). Like so many people I have grown tired of coming-of-age stories (all too often an excuse for indulging the grown-ups' taste for soapy tropes). I'm also an old-ish dude, and worst of all, I don't remember my teenage years well enough to feel any kind nostalgia about them.
And yet as soon as I saw the art style, which echoes with the aforementioned Masaaki Yuasa, I knew I had to give this a spin! I was not disappointed: understated hand-drawn characters with great body-language, abstract and expressive framing and some expressionistic angles, a variety of colouring techniques, a bit of montage, some bravura bodily distortion, this is one of the best animation work I've seen in a long while! Even the 90s aesthetics, whose ubiquity typically annoys me, felt 'right' (yes, I know, a great many things annoy me. The MYoD team should make a music video for that other 90s-themed project I tolerate, 1000gecs.)
But what's even more incredible, is that all this wonderful animation fits perfectly with a story, that is funny, moving, introspective, honest, and short (without being too short). The voice acting is spot on, the rhythm is good an the writing is mostly unobtrusive but also has its moments ('the talk' with 'the dad'). Perhaps there was a few too many facile subculture references for my taste (did we really need *both* a goth skater *and* a straight-edge?) But perhaps that's what life really was in the nineties? And really this is a tiny speck that I had to rake my brain to come up with. If you have not watched MYoD yet, you should drop everything and go see it now.