The opening premise is simple: Mozzman (Hiro Super) was sent to Earth to perform a mission… that he cannot remember because his ship malfunctioned and he is now lost in Japan. As the short opens, Mozzman sets off on a walk to try and figure out exactly what is going on; what his mission could be.
I’ll freely admit that I didn’t “get” what was going on here. To me, the story that exists was less a predetermined one, and something that grew out of footage that was accrued by having the main character walk around. Sure, the amusement park COULD have some deeper philosophical meaning in the overall story, but it FELT like there just so happened to be an amusement park around, and why not try to incorporate it into the story by forcing some meaning onto it? Got a dog that likes playing catch with a ball, why not make the ball important somehow? While this is not a bad skill for a filmmaker to have (you should do the most with what is at your disposal), it didn’t work for me.
To me, this is a 13 minute short that could’ve easily gotten in at 3 or 4 minutes, and then used the rest of the time to express a real narrative or story. Watching Mozzman pose around town while screen captions and subtitles provide exposition or explanation just didn’t do it. That too adds to that narrative-after-fact feeling; if all the strange visuals just get explained away by a short burst of text, with no real visual context or other explanation, then ANY narrative could be thrust up on the short. In this case, even the narrative that does exist doesn’t seem to make sense.
This is experimental narrative, sure, but it also feels like implied meaning by coolness proxy; the more “important” things look, the more important they must be. To someone else, this could be a philosophical tone poem on the repetition of a life spent without knowledge of our true purpose, and a longing for that secret to be revealed. I can see how that COULD be in there. For me, though, it’s a guy in cool makeup wandering around town, hanging with a dog, visiting an amusement park and eating rice balls. The pace and mood of the trailer below is more interesting to me than the final film.
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