Sol Levante

So, I'll keep this simple. A lot of people don't seem to understand what this short film is. It's an incredible artistic feat. This film is the first hand-drawn anime to be done in full 4K resolution and it has so much detail in the art, that it took 2 years to complete. I think a lot of people watching this probably think the whole thing is a computer graphic animation or something because of how high fidelity it is, but that's not the case. This was actually hand drawn. Appreciate it for being a historic artistic feat. Enjoy it like you would a painting,and you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of it. If you try to view it as some kind of full-story anime, then you will be disappointed. But as an art piece, this brief anime film is historic and groundbreaking, and truly a masterpiece example of what Production I.G's animators can do.

This 4 minute short, including 1 minute of end credits, was hyped up for me. There's about a 5 minute documentary somewhere on YouTube talking about how they made this short and when I saw that I was kind of excited to hear the audio work they did for it. The audio by far is the best part of this short, if you watch it for anything it should be the audio and you'll definitely want surround sound. While the art was beautiful, the main reason I wanted to make this review was because parts of the animation were awful. At times they use normal animationyou'd expect from anime, personally I thought those times were very good. But, whenever you see the main character they switch to a 2D marionette style of animation. While you may like that style of animation, which is completely fine and up to you, I hate it. That style of animation, for me, looks very unnatural and because of that I can't, in good faith, award this short anything above a 6.

This one-shot is 4 minutes long (with end credits). Well this felt more like trailer for anime or demo reel then actual anime but in the same time they never advertised this as more than experimental short. Also I don't have 4k TV so that's that. What about positives? I definitely appreciate effort to make 4K HDR anime because I can imagine this wasn't easy task and overall animation looked nice, if only there was more story to add context to what is happening. My score for this "episode" 3/5 - Like I said earlier I don't have 4k TV so I couldn't appreciate animation to the fullest, sowithout a plot the only thing I can rate is animation (and its fluidity), art style (which was not bad but nothing special) and music (which was forgettable). Even right now I have hard time to remember more than a few scenes. So I can easily imagine that in a few days I will completely forget about this anime. Like Jeremy Jahns would said "T-minus 1 Day, already forgotten" Overall score for Sol Levante 7/10 - Mainly for effort. I recommend also to watch "Behind the scenes" on Netflix yt channel, these videos are honestly more interesting (and longer) than actual anime. "The Making of Sol Levante, a 4K and HDR hand-drawn anime short | Netflix" and "The Sound of Sol Levante: Bringing Immersive Audio to 4K HDR Anime | Netflix"