#3 Deathtic 4

If you've got talent and you want to make an anime feature that raises the bar, the first thing to do is call Shinji Kimura. He's handled the background art for Akira and My Neighbor Totoro (among many others) and created the worlds we see in Steamboy, Tekkonkinkreet and Batman: Gotham Knight (among many others).  His pioneering use of CGI has kept him at the forefront of development and today, he is quite simply one of the most accomplished artists around.

Deathtic 4 - the third instalment in the Genius Party - marks Shinji Kimura's directorial debut, which, in music terms is like letting the drummer in a well established band have a go at singing a song. The story is set in a parallel universe where zombies speak some bastardized Swedish dialect, eat worms for breakfast, are generally terrified of the living but are thankfully protected by Zombie Police.

Our protagonist Rått (presumably a by-product of the translation process with no pun intended) is a typical teenage zombie setting out on his way to school. The enormous tornado/black hole in the sky doesn't look quite right, and it catches his attention. He stares at it, in awe, until he notices a little frog fall from it, landing in a pool of water... and it's ALIVE.

Rått puts the frog in his bag and heads to school. He wants to help it get back home, and so he enlists the help of a superhero zombie gang that resembles the Rugrats more than the Watchmen. There's Ashe - the fire-starter, Blåse - water-douser and Råse - the masked hero with flatulence issues. Together, they run shit-scared as soon as the red, blob-like Zombie Police get wind of what they're up to and chase them on their Yamaha Tricycles (true).

Predictably, when Shinji Kimura is given total control the result is aesthetically awesome. He has a field day flying through the world he's created, the focus between the foreground and background constantly changing, creating for us a heightened sense of a third dimension, just like in the real world.

If all drummers could sing this way then by all means, let them sing.

Shinji Kimura

Art director Shinji Kimura is regarded as Japan's greatest talent in animation art. In 1981, he joined Kobayashi Production and worked on Space Adventure Cobra (directed by Osamu Dezaki) and Venus Wars (directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko), among others. He made contributions as background artist in feature films such as Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer (directed by Mamoru Oshii) and Angel's Egg. He debuted as art director with Project A-ko (directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima/1986), and it was his accomplishments in Catnapped! The Movie (directed by Takashi Nakamura), Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece Steamboy and Tekkon Kinkreet that gained him appraisal worldwide. Also active outside the anime industry, he is known for the artwork in Katsuhiro Otomo's picture book Hipira: The Little Vampire which was published in 2002.

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THE GENIUS PARTY IS BRILLIANT FOR SEVEN REASONS. HERE'S #1

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