Is it still steampunk if everything's made out of wood, or does it become woodpunk instead? I don't know, but the aesthetic of Hidari is cool, and as a short film that's basically just one action scene, it's entertaining. It feels like it does for samurai films what some recent Godzilla short films do for the kaiju genre; just delivering the goods within as short a runtime as possible, and it's a fun approach to take, even if it's inevitably not as fulfilling as something longer. But if Hidari is labeled a "pilot" film, then I feel like it's a pretty successful one, and this style could well work for a feature so long as it had a decently fleshed-out story (hell, it might even be watchable without a narrative, come to think of it... see the fairly recent Mad God, for example).
2 Reviews
Slam! Bash! Smash! Cut! Destroy!
cheathamg29 February 2024
The title of this review tells you pretty much all you need to know about this short film. I guess it is a traditional story of revenge in the samurai genre. There is a backstory hinted at but that's it. It is hinted at but what else can you do in six minutes? It is stop-motion animation and it is very animated; pretty much non-stop action. The artwork makes almost no attempt to be realistic. There is no setting in which the action takes place. If it were being presented in a theater it would be called "bare stage". The characters are so unrealistic as to be called grotesque. All that being said, it is a lot of fun.
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