When I was about 3 or 4 years old, my family would go out on Friday nights and rent lazerdiscs. For most of you, I bet you've never even heard of a lazerdisc before. It was a huge disk that would come in a cardboard sleeve, it wasn't able to hold a full movie so they would split it up into sections. 30 minutes you would have to flip the disk over and then 30 minutes later, you would have to put in the next disk. These disks were huge and expensive too. As kids, we were never allowed to touch them so if our parents put on a movie for us and then left for a date, we were screwed. They would have these shady rental places that only dealt with lazerdiscs too. I remember the one we went to was next to a pizza joint and it was a dark, dank place that had doll heads hanging from the ceiling. I got my first taste of animation age getto here. Some of the shows that we rented still sit in the back of my mind and a dark little corner while others such as Robot Carnival, I am glad that I was exposed to it at such an early age. I'd would go as far to say that robot carnival isn't a movie, it's moving art.
We had robot carnival on lazerdisc. I'm pretty sure it was an actual Japanese lazerdisc because it had no subtitles. We might have gotten it from one of my uncles that had lived in japan for a few years then since he had a few other Japanese lazerdiscs. I don't know if they were region coded or not though. It's been lost to us through the years though. As lazerdiscs died out, we sent all of ours off to thrift stores. It really upsets me. We still have a VHS copy of it because my parents had the lazerdisc player in their room and we'd usually be up early in the morning. My mother would put in a VHS in our room and go back to sleep. That and they didn't have to deal with that huge disk.
So, robot carnival was a collaboration of short animations from some of the top animators of the time with the concept of "robots." They had the freedom to take it any way they wanted. Some of the shorts have talking but most of them are silent, set to music by Joe Hisaishi. (you know this guy from the Ghibli movies) Some are really warm hearted and others question what it means to be alive and human. I sometimes think about how we don't have just experimental animation set to music now days. This movie influenced me at such a young age. I knew it was different from the other cartoons that were being shoveled into my brain at that time. To this day I just listen to music and come up with segments of stories in my head, they don't have words or anything. Just the music telling the story. To this day I dream of doing animation like that. Many people don't have the patience for such things though. I really can't express how much I love this film.
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