The Mummy's Dream

If you like the sound of loud, industrial machinery raping your eardrums, along with a couple of black and white buildings (you can't miss them, Itou's constantly panning in and out of said buildings, just in case you missed it the first ten times), then oh boy, do I have the anime short for you. Takashi Itou is known for his Avant Garde experimental shorts, which generally make use of flashing lights, floating images, time lapse and stop motion techniques, and sound that seemingly leaves the ears ringing afterwards. A connoisseur of the likes or a highly interested individual in this sort of work, maybe able to appreciate it more, but I'm thinking your average fan is going to find this to be irredeemable trash. What does one even take out of something like this? If someone came to me and said they enjoyed this, enough to give it a positive score, I would immediately think they were being dishonest with me AND themselves. There's an article titled, Poetics of an Urban Darkness: Takashi Ito's Spectral Cinema, and 90% of it is just ramblings about creative techniques and his "artistic expression", which seems to be the driving force behind his fans interest. While that aspect may be impressive, especially for it's time, the actual "anime" itself is devoid of substance, mindless and just plain boring AF. Though I'm sure I'm just missing the "bigger picture" here, have a read of this short paragraph from said quoted article. "The camera zooms into vast spaces only to visually smash into architecture with vehemence, like a battering ram, crashing into corners, pillars, walls, and rocks. As if it was trying to open a hole into the surface, as if to dig beyond, as if to awaken some other spirit, dormant and lurking beneath layers of reality. Perhaps this subdued allegory is about some being from the past, a mummy. Perhaps this mummy has fears of a present that revolves around property—a present repressing deeper meanings in life." Hey, more power to this person, if you can sit there and watch something like this, and can even come up with a take, doesn't even have to be a reasonable take, then I doff my cap to you. Myself, I read that and roll my eyes at such pretentious garbage, but I'm not the target lol...