Anime Review: Short Peace

This month, indeed tomorrow, if this goes up as scheduled, the Anime Explorations Podcast episode where we’ll be discussing Robot Carnival will go live. Appropriately enough, among the options I received for this year’s Anime Secret Santa was Short Peace, the fourth, and as of today, final anime anthology film that Katsuhiro Otomo has been involved in, coming after Memories. So, it felt right to choose that film as my pick for this year.

Short Peace is definitely short, clocking in at just over an hour, only slightly longer than Labyrinth Tales. It also hints at having a frame narrative like it and Robot Carnival, before abandoning the concept in favor of going straight to the credits. This leaves us with four short stories, which generally tend towards the dark and violent.

Still from the Short Peace short "Possessions"

The biggest misstep of the collection is its choice in the first part. Not because it’s bad, it’s quite good. Rather, because for an opening story that theoretically sets the tone for the larger work, it’s a lot warmer and fluffier than everything else. The story, “Possessions”, is about a man in feudal Japan who shelters from the rain in a shrine, where it turns out to be inhabited by numerous Tsukumogami, spirits that emerge from discarded and abandoned tools and household objects. Except the man is a repairman, and he sets to work fixing them up and setting their spirits to rest. It’s wholesome and warm, and it’s easy to see why this short got an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short.

Then there’s the rest. There’s, “Combustible” the story of a woman who reunites with her beloved who became a firefighter in the Edo period when she accidentally starts a fire in her home, only for her, through not getting away from the fire to wait for him, to end up getting killed in the conflagration. There’s, “Gambo” the story of an “oni” (actually a space alien), who crash lands on Earth and starts forcing impregnating local women in his spaceship, who is then killed by a local kami in the form of a polar bear (who also mercy kills all the women and destroys the ruins of the spaceship), but it’s a pyrric victory because the kami is also killed in the battle. Finally, there’s “Farewell to Weapons”, the story of a weapon disposal/salvage team in post-apocalyptic Japan who encounters an automated tank and get killed by it, with only one of their numbers surviving because the tank thinks it’s a non combatant (and even they are forcibly stripped naked as a decontamination procedure).

It’s all so bleak and depressing. The fact that those three stories are all back-to-back doesn’t help. Had “Possessions” been somewhere in the middle, it would have set expectations for the overall tone and would have made for a pleasant surprise before the film’s conclusion.

That said, the writing for all of these stories is well done, even if “Farewell to Weapons” does aggressively wave some death flags for characters going in. The animation is also fantastic for all of these.

If I had a gripe outside of the order of the stories, it’s that we don’t have space really for an “artsy” one. Robot Carnival has Clouds. Labyrinth Tales has the framing narrative. Memories has one that’s in one long take. Short Piece has maybe a portion of the frame story, and there’s another story that’s sort of letterboxed in the context of a scroll, but otherwise it’s very conventional.

To be clear, I enjoyed this film, and it’s a good continuation of Otomo’s anthology films, and it’s more approachable than something like Genius Party. However, I feel like the earlier films are stronger recommendations. They have a better mix of tone and style, and are presented better.

Short Peace is available as a physical release from (Affliate Link) Crunchyroll.

Short Peace is available for streaming on: