demon said:
Anything similar to it, or just equally strange?
Not enough, alas. However, your timing is pretty good: on Tuesday the ADV is going to re-issue Neo-Tokyo (or
Manie Manie/Labyrinth Tales), a collection of three animated shorts:
- Labyrinth by Rintaro - This is the closest to Cat Soup, with a little girl going through the looking glass (so to speak) and high weirdness happening from there.
- Running Man by Yoshiaki "Ninja Scroll, Wicked City" Kawajiri - A short cyberpunk ghost story, with heavy noir trappings and Kawajiri's clean, distinctive style.
- The Order to Stop Construction by Katsuhiro "Akira" Otomo - Robots gone haywire in the strongest short of the three.
In a similar vein, while not containing anything particularly like Cat Soup, you should watch Memories, another three-part anthology, featuring different directors interpreting the short manga of Katsuhiro Otomo:
- Magnetic Rose - A lovely hard SF fable of technological ghosts and opera, with a haunting ending and a lovely soundtrack by Yoko Kanno.
- Stink Bomb - Wacky, deadly hijinx featuring a corporate drone, medication gone horribly wrong, and chemical warfare. The ska soundtrack is glorious.
- Cannon Fodder - Otomo himself wraps everything up with a fable about warfare, done in a style reminiscent of European comics. Heavy handed, but it looks freakin' phenomenal.
To be honest, if you want Cat Soup levels of strangeness, you probably want to look to the West. A couple of favorites:
- The Fleischer Brothers' early shorts featuring Koko the Clown, Bimbo the Dog, and Betty Boop are gloriously surreal, with sex and drug references abounding and terrific soundtracks by the best jazz musicians of the day. After censorship kicked it it was all downhill, but from the late teens through around the mid-30s you're golden. The Betty Boop DVDs out there are a mixed bag at best; you're better off hunting down the old Definitive Collection VHS volumes, particularly
Vol 2: Pre-Code (which contains their gloriosu 1934 rendition of "Snow White") and
Vol 3: Surrealism (with plenty of classics, including the immortal "Bimbo's Initiation").
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Allegro non Troppo is a hysterical Italian parody of Fantasia, with slapstick live-action segments bridging blackly humorous animated commentary on the human condition. In particular, life emerging from a Coca-Cola bottle and marching steadily towards it's destiny in the "Bolero" sequence is astonishing. As a bonus, the DVD releaese contains a bunch of Bozzetto's animated shorts. Highly, highly recomended, especially if you're a fan of Fantasia.
FnordChan
