legorhin#8888

This might be one of the worst things I have ever watched.

Let's get two things out of the way. Undeniably, this video looks good. It's well drawn, well animated, and is certainly eye catching with its colorful visuals and impressively imaginative landscapes. As music, this is not something that's suited to me, but I can at least understand people who think that Porter's music is palatable to them.

My problem with this piece is not related to the audiovisuals but rather with the idea that this should be taken as a story or a music video that is trying to be something more than just Porter's music meshed with beautifully animated sequences. I understand that these criticisms are often held back by the difficulties of critiquing something that isn't overtly concerned with story, but in a piece so unabashedly attempting to draw sympathy, there's fair ground here to levy some serious concerns.

Shelter exemplifies everything that is wrong with storytelling in anime, namely that rather attempting to tell a real story developed with content and meaningful emotion, it takes the most abusive shortcut by designing a cute character, throwing her into a position of bittersweet melancholy, and using that as a means of manipulating our basest emotions into believing there is something meaningful and tragic to be said.

People are praising the emotional resonance in the story and its ability to bring out the loneliness lost in the profundity of memory. Yet, consider a world where the main character is not a beautiful teenage girl, lost and confused in a world completely foreign to her. When you remove that physical appearance that makes us so inexplicably attracted to her stake in the story, there is ultimately no reason for us to feel sympathy. It is completely superficial.

One might say that it's only a six minute short, but the fact that Shelter goes out of its way to show for a split second the main character's letter from her father, to invoke the community to spend time and read it on a second watch, tells me that there is a serious intent to manifest some semblance of a meaningful story. However, that is undermined precisely by the video's own neglect of that story. Much like many other anime designed purely for cheap tears and easy pity, we are given not substance, but rather a montage of a young innocent girl cherishing sweet memories with someone we barely meet.

Sure it can be cute, but that does not preclude it from being utterly trite. Shelter offends its audience by presenting us with its fascinating visuals, the ostensible undertones of a post-apocalyptic world, the perceived loneliness of being potentially the last human in the universe, but gives us nothing more than the lowest common denominator of a story, one that galvanizes its sympathies out of the most mundane and pathetic tricks in the book, and half-expects us to take it seriously. I cannot in good conscience, recommend this music video to anyone.