To coincide with the Japanese DVD release of Howls Moving Castle, Ghibli released a DVD compilation of a number of their short films. Running at around 42 minutes in length, it ranges from TV eyecatches and adverts to music videos, without touching much of the ground inbetween. There are only really a few works of any real interest or significance on there (really, there isn’t much value in on-off ten second TV advert), but there is still some interesting stuff on here.

The highlight for most, and the reason I expect a lot of people will be picking up the DVD other than blind Ghibli fanboyism, is On Your Marks. On Your Marks was a seven minute long music video directed by Hayao Miyazaki and set to music by pop duo Chage and Aska (urr, they did the ED for the live action Street Fighter movie), and was shown alongside the wonderful Whisper of the Heart on its original cinema release. I was actually lucky enough to see On Your Marks alongside Whisper of the Heart about four years ago as part of a series of Ghibli cinema screenings they held over here, which I only mention to show-off ^^;

Anyway, being set as a music video we can only really guess at what the plot actually is via the visuals, not to mention the fact that its not strictly linear, occasionally jumping backwards and forwards a bit, as well as saving our heroes from death at one point. From what we can see, it appears that the world (or at least the country in which its set) has been polluted with radiation (or at least the populace believe), and people now live in huge, ugly radiation shielded buildings. Chage and Aska are cops, and they are part of a raid on a building of a religious cult which dress rather like Neo Atlanis from Nadia. In a room full of dead cultists, they discover an angel lying in the corner (surrounded by empty Coca-cola cans).

Chage and Aska obviously do the heroic and proper thing by dragging her out of there and giving her something to drink, but a group of radiation suited guys turn up, seal her into a stretcher and cart her off somewhere. This seems to leave a bit of a bad taste in our heroes mouths, and they decide to break into the lab and rescue her.

They successfully break in and make off with the girl in a bright yellow construction vehicle, but they get attacked by flying craft which collapse the bridge they are on, causing them to plunge to their deaths – but not, as it replays from the start in fast-forward, but this time they have rocket boosters! So, they escape, drive out of the city and allow the girl to fly back into the sky. The end.

On Your Marks is a rather lovely piece of animation. In technical terms, its pretty much on par with any of Miyazakis theatrical movies – it simply looks great, which beautiful background art and some fantastic design work. The attack on the cultist building at the beginning kind of makes me sad that Miyazaki doesn’t do anything in the way of action movies – I think he could do a really kick-ass war movie. Musically, its alright. The song is vaguely catchy, but not particularly interesting. Curiously, the DVD also includes the English version. Castles in the Air, which was produced for the Chage and Aska tribute album One Voice. Arguable, its a better mix of the song, and the track isn’t full of painful Engrish, but with the arrangement being fairly different to the original the tone doesn’t fit quite as well.

My favorites of the adverts on the DVD are those for House Foodstuffs. They’re just really small slice-of-life clips of days gone by, but the subtle use of CG for the backgrounds is really astonishing well done, with sketchy and watercolour stylings. Its entirely understated, but it looks brilliant.

I’ve got no idea what this is all actually about, but we have a girl with a big guitar walking around, and a world full of bugs. She walks around strumming her guitar and singing, and thats about it. Its cute.

Thats the Guitar girl in RL, by the way. Also cute. The song from this video (nothing especially interesting, to be honest) came on a CD alongside ths DVD release.

The final and rather pleasant surprise on the disk were these three short films, produced in association with Contemode, which I’m assuming is a music artist or label. Stylistically, its different, somewhat resembling the angular sketches produced by fashion designers. Despite this, the animation itself is rather understated, and there isn’t much which really jumps out at the screen at you, but from a technical standpoint is really rather outstanding. Sure, I have no damn idea whats going on, but it sure looks good whilst confusing me, and the girl is cute ^^

There are a few extras on the DVD – the storyboards to On Your Marks (as a video stream in time to what the actual end product was), a couple of making-of or background detail-type things (with the Guitar girl), and short versions of two of the final music video trilogy.