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Tuesday, April 30, 2024

SUMMER GHOST (2021)

There’s the Christian Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  There’s the Louisiana Trinity: Onions, Celery, Green Pepper.  And there’s the Japanese anime Trinity: Suicidal Thoughts, Mortal Illness, Social Alienation.  All covered in this visually impressive anime, a debut short from the self-named Loundraw, made under his own independent shingle.  More a statement of intent than a full-fledged project, it makes a bewitching first course that could lead to . . . ?  Ah, there’s the rub, as a well known Danish Prince once put it.  Lead to what?  As it stands, three 20-somethings link up thru the internet, meet at a diner, then head out to find their mutual interest: rumored sightings of a teen ghost said to appear at an abandoned airstrip, drawn like moths to a flame by firework sparklers.  (Once ubiquitous, now largely banned Stateside, sparklers were nearly as good as those puck-like glowing black snakes that left a semi-permanent mark on the sidewalk for the entire summer.  A real summer ghost.)  Coming in at a tidy 40 minutes, the storyline never quite synchs into place, which of the boys is dying?  Why did the ghost girl suicide?  But Loundraw’s striking technical finish is enough to fill the short running time.  Perhaps Loundraw (he explains the odd name in an interview on the disc) really needs the narrative constraints a commercial studio would force on him.  But this is certainly worth the modest time commitment.  (NOTE:  We've put a Family Friendly label on this, but keep the anime Trinity in mind.) 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Like characters in so much anime, the girl’s features ‘read’ as faintly Asian, while the boys not at all.  All alarmingly cute, of course, all with less nose than Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort.

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