Here's a little charmer from the 2014 Anime Mirai set of OVAs: Parol no Miraijima (Parol's Island of the Future). This is the last of the four OVAs to be available in English. macros74 translated the French subtitles into English. Moho checked the translation against the original Japanese, and convexity checked the song. macros74 timed the script and typeset it, I edited, and we both QC'd with help from Eternal_Blizzard. The raw is from Sunsub, a Czech fansub group. The result is an Orphan-M74 coproduction, joining such classics as Submarine 707.
The story in Parol no Miraijima is simple. A group of fur-covered humanoid creatures (with protruding bellybuttons) live in innocent isolation on an island far from civilization. A girl on the island named Rikotto becomes intrigued with a picture of the human world that washes up on the shore. She persuades her two best friends, Parol and Zuzu, to set off with her in a rickety boat to find the world corresponding to the photograph. They reach human civilization during a festival, so their fur-covered skin is mistaken for costumes. They are befriended, betrayed, and captured. They barely escape with their hides intact, having witnessed at first hand the wonders and terrors of civilization as we humans know it.
The animation is gorgeous, with smooth action shots, vibrant colors, and a great sense of slapstick timing. Just watch the opening sequence where Rikotto and Parol set off to visit Zuzu, swimming through a stream, body surfing through rapids, and ultimately taking a suspended cable car across a vertiginous landscape to reach the island's shore. It has an exuberance and originality that puts most contemporary anime to shame. The director, Imai Kazuaki, and animation director, Kameda Yoshimichi, are veteran animators, but this is one of their first assignments at the top level.
So here's the "orphan" of Anime Mirai 2014. Enjoy!
Update: thanks to the generosity of Commie Subs, we were able to encode a 1080p version directly from the Blu-Ray source. Many thanks to bananadoyouwanna for the encode and herkz for the original source material.
The story in Parol no Miraijima is simple. A group of fur-covered humanoid creatures (with protruding bellybuttons) live in innocent isolation on an island far from civilization. A girl on the island named Rikotto becomes intrigued with a picture of the human world that washes up on the shore. She persuades her two best friends, Parol and Zuzu, to set off with her in a rickety boat to find the world corresponding to the photograph. They reach human civilization during a festival, so their fur-covered skin is mistaken for costumes. They are befriended, betrayed, and captured. They barely escape with their hides intact, having witnessed at first hand the wonders and terrors of civilization as we humans know it.
The animation is gorgeous, with smooth action shots, vibrant colors, and a great sense of slapstick timing. Just watch the opening sequence where Rikotto and Parol set off to visit Zuzu, swimming through a stream, body surfing through rapids, and ultimately taking a suspended cable car across a vertiginous landscape to reach the island's shore. It has an exuberance and originality that puts most contemporary anime to shame. The director, Imai Kazuaki, and animation director, Kameda Yoshimichi, are veteran animators, but this is one of their first assignments at the top level.
So here's the "orphan" of Anime Mirai 2014. Enjoy!
Update: thanks to the generosity of Commie Subs, we were able to encode a 1080p version directly from the Blu-Ray source. Many thanks to bananadoyouwanna for the encode and herkz for the original source material.