The Short Films of takena

On YouTube and Google Video you can find all sorts of interesting videos and clever animations, short films and student films of real worth and merit. There's also a tremendous amount of crap. It's rare, I think, to discover an artist on these sites who has matured and developed both as an artist and in both technique and style, in the time since these sites started over two years ago. One such artist is takena, a clay-mation animator (he uses the lower case t to spell his name online.)

takena's latest and best films are presented below. The first, Chainsaw Maid, is a colorful zombie gore fest that pays homage in equal parts to Raimi and Romero, with a small tip of the hat to David Lynch's favorite composer Angelo Badalamenti. What I really like about Chainsaw Maid is the small bits of character takena manages to squeeze out of his (mostly) silent characters. We are witness to a small family, Dad and Daughter, faithfully served by an attractive, anime-like maid. We learn that the Dad and the maid are lovers, only to be interrupted by the sudden appearance of Mom, who has been infected by a terrible plague. Mom bursts in, pukes her guts out, and dies. Dad and the Maid are horrified, but not as much as the daughter, who has left her bed to witness her mother's gruesome death.

Though characterization is slight, and often played for comic effect, it goes a long way towards creating the charm of this short film. The Maid's ability to deal with the zombie plague is nicely contrasted to Dad's complete inability. We get a short version here of J.M. Barries's play, "The Admirable Chrichton," in which a lowly butler is elevated to stalwart hero when a crew of high born aristocrats are stranded on a deserted island. The resilience and ability of the common worker is shown in both works to be more than equal to the preening helplessness of the bourgeois.

A step backwards in subtlety but still an interesting exercise is takena's Pussycat. Switching gears from zombie's to serial killers means leaving the visceral thrills of Evil Dead behind and entering a more psychological The Silence of the Lambs territory. Casting anthropomorphic animals instead of humans has the effect of making the short feel like a medieval morality play, or a fairy tale (there are intentional shades of The Three Little Pigs) but with modern, 1940's Warner Brothers cartoon sensibilities. There is plenty of violence and more overt sexiness (with a hint of rape) that makes this a much darker film than Chainsaw Maid. It lacks the characterization and manic fun, but is still a solid piece of work.



You can check of takena's website here. It's in Japanese, but it pays to look around and check out some of his earlier animations. His earliest stuff, cruder, but still violent and funny, can also be seen on YouTube, here.