The artwork renders the average (or sometimes even ugly) faces of its Japanese characters in a beautifully skilled way that shows amazing drawing ability top-notch understanding of how to draw stylized and cartoony yet also organic and subtly realistic characters, mixed together with the knowledge to make them move and emote naturally & believably. The animation is generally kick-ass and highly worked with only a few shortcuts used here and there (which you should forgive, for such a niche release). Imagine how insane and experimental this looked back then. The direction is outright FLCL-like in its craziness, despite this coming from 1987. The film was made as a tribute to the late and great Jazz musician Duke Ellington, and its strange, experimental yet at times very upbeat score perfectly fits the strange story and action. I suspect people wanted more dialogue, or even monologues, to give him more personality, but that would have completely ruined the atmosphere - the extremely expressive visual characterization is more than enough to understand what the character is going through. People complain the protagonist is "shallow", but he's simply a funny and charismatic everyman (not "charismatic"in the real-world sense, but in that he's entertaining and audiovisually engaging to watch all the way through) dealing with some absolutely maddening events that he's at the center of. And hey, that's the beauty of fantastical horror. The plot is solid and gets you interested completely in the strange premise, but you'll never know exactly what happened. and lore explanations that left viewers confused would've absolutely destroyed the willfully mysterious structure of the work (compare to Poe's similarly mysterious and inconclusive "Manuscript Found in a Bottle", "The Masque of the Red Death" and others). As far as I'm concerned, everything is perfect - it's conceptually sort of (I say "sort of" because it's always hard to simplify something extremely unique) like the kind of vague, unexplained short horror stories Edgar Allan Poe wrote, if made in the 80s, mixed with a ton of animated comedy and sci-fi elements. It's not "deep" or "high art for the elite" or any of those other pretentious descriptors, but it's a very inventive, experimental, stylish, spooky, funny and above all else mind-bendingly fun horror-comedy. Ignore the negative reception completely this OVA is amazing.
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