Japanese animated films have become enough of a cult item for the Film Forum 2 to have organized an entire three-week festival devoted to them. "Robot Carnival," which opens the festival today, is an anthology of eight short works by leading Japanese animators organized around the theme of robotics. All eight of the shorts offer a lot more visual pizzazz than Saturday-morning cartoons on television, but only two of the eight begin to transcend the genre.
Its visual flair cannot redeem a piece as trite and precious as Hiroyuki Kitazume's "Starlight Angel," a confusing kiddie soap opera in which Barbie and Ken look-alikes battle a mechanical demon. If the phosphorescent magentas that explode through Hidetoshi Ohmori's "Deprive" give his film a psychedelic glow, they don't deepen the scenario of mindless, nonstop violence.
Somewhat more palatable are Hiroyuki Kitakubo's fable "A Tale of Two Robots," which is set in the 19th century and shows some plucky children defeating a mad scientist who operates an unwieldy, old-fashioned killing machine. If there are moments of visual cleverness in Kouji Morimoto's "Franken's Gear," which focuses on the elaborate, Rube Goldberg-like machinery it takes to create a humanoid monster, it is a joke without a punch line. Takashi Nakamura's "Nightmare," a feverish dream about an immaculate city that is visited by a malevolent spidery extraterrestrial, also lacks narrative coherence.
The anthology's wittiest segment, Mao Lamdo's "Cloud," is an allegory told in line drawings, in which a cloud expands and contracts into all kinds of weather that besets a youthful android. The handsomest short, Yasuomi Umetsu's "Presence," uses Cezanne-like drawings of unusual coloristic subtlety as the backdrops for a confused "Pygmalion"-like story of an inventor and the lovelorn android he has created.
Framing the individual segments are sequences created by Atsuko Fukushima and Katsuhiro Otomo in which a giant, ominous, tanklike contraption erupts from a barren wasteland and turns into an entertainment machine. Robot Carnival Animated shorts directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Atsuko Fukushima, Kouji Morimoto, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Mao Lamdo, Hidetoshi Ohmori, Yasuomi Umetsu, Hiroyuki Kitakubo and Takashi Nakamura; directors of photography, Toshiaki Morita, K. Torigoe and Yukio Sugiyama; edited by Naotoshi Ogata, Yukiko Itoh and Nao Toyosaki. At Film Forum 2, 209 West Houston Street in Manhattan. Running time: 90 minutes. These films have no rating.
