Shelter (Music)

A short 6 min music video. Why this is even considered anime at all is beyond me but if the site says so ill bite since ive seen it. This site also says you need a minimum amount of text for reviews. But that doesnt work well here. Theres just no justification to have more than maybe 5-6 sentences to review. People making long ass reviews are either taking the Piss out of this or chasing ghosts pretending theres a story or this being deep. Well its not. I dont know if the text so far is enough to make up for the short review ... so ill play it safe and add some ehhhs to it. Or maybe ill go full Japanese with som etoooo instead.

Shelter is visually pleasing etoooo but theres no story etoooo but the song is actually great etoooo so for that i enjoyed it. Ill give it an 8 etooo which is 99% for the song and 1 % for the visuals. If i didnt like the song it would be meaningless.

I was quite amused of the popularity of this in my region, and so many said they cried watching this. So, I decided to give it a try.

This turns out to be way worse than what I expected.

Story - 6: They fail at this. They really do. It's seriously hard to understand the freaking whole story, and after understandng it, it really sucks tbh. [SPOILERS?] There's a man that has a daughter and he sacrifices (?) himself to save the daughter and sent her to a planet and live on her own bla bla.. That's all. It's seriously nonsense. I couldn't even cry. I mean, ... I can never.

Art - 8: Not a fan of this kind of art, but it's not bad, but not too good either.

Sound - 8: Well this is music so yeah it must be good eh? But imo, it's too loud and dazzling, doesn't fit my choice.

Character - 6: Not good. Only 2 main characters as I see - the man and the daughter. But nothing special about them.

Enjoyment - 6: Did not enjoy this at all; if I did, then maybe just a teeny tiny little bit.

In conclusion: They call it a masterpiece, I call it an average. My personal opinion: Better just leave the music alone. Don't try to put a low-number-minutes anime and mix them together. Just made it worse.

It's music videos like Porter Robinson and A1-Pictures' 'Shelter' that remind me that when it comes to profiteering, passionless entertainment thrown together shoddily, it's not the technical ability you have to examine, it's the cheap, tacky, disingenuous, and quite frankly offensive elements of it you have to judge.

Because it is quite absurd to me that so many people seem to hail Shelter as some revolutionary, influential piece of art when I fail to see anything Shelter has done different from other emotional shows. And to call it emotional is such a disservice to all the shows that invoke emotions using the well-structured plot and relatability. ... What has Shelter done differently from Clannad, AnoHana, and PlaMemo but be worse and almost condescending in nature?

I won't give it the usual structured review with Story: x, Art: x, Sound: x, Character: x, and Enjoyment: x.

The substance, while one could certainly say is there, has to be examined closely. Why do you feel for the heroine of the short? Is it because she is relatable? Is it because she is cute? Is it because her situation in of itself is just sad? Whatever the answer, for me, I come to the conclusion that I don't even feel for her. It's a character I was just introduced to whom I have no idea of her motivations, desires, or even personality. Then her whole conflict is that she has been separated from the rest of humanity, except we don't focus on the humanity part, we focus on her father. Another character who I really don't care for...

I don't even know what kind of situation her story is applicable in in real life. Is it the profound pain that we find in memory? Because if so, Shelter has not convinced me one bit. I see her pain and I understand her pain but I can't feel it. I can't feel it because of how abundantly clear it is to me that the character I'm seeing are inside of a screen, nothing more than artworks for my entertainment. With no humanization, I struggle to truly resonate with the plot and characters. Although I suppose if I at least did get a message out of it, Shelter did its job somewhat.

I don't care for the music that much. It's background noise to me and even when I do focus in on it, it's hard for me to praise it sonically for sounding above average or experimenting at all.

And we arrive at the most offensive part of the short. The 6-minute short is condescending. It may sound like a stretch, but it offends me how the show manages to be so lowest common denominator and yet suck it's own metaphorical penis for being so emotional and melodramatic. It's like they know that this animation was drawn for nothing more than cheap feels and money to pair with Porter's music while also knowing that fans who don't look for more will accept it as is. I can't look at this and say it did anything special worthy of it's mean score on MAL.

It's colorful, fluid, and bright. But underneath all that is something truly disturbing. A half-assed story masqueraded as an emotional rollercoaster that looks its nose down upon you and says "yeah, I just did that. I just made the most generic thing ever and you ate it right up." The precedent this sets is a little more than terrifying.

But if we manage to ignore all of that flagrant disregard and lack of appreciation for true storytelling, I guess Shelter surmises as a serviceable short that surprisingly delivers on its premise right until the very end. But personally, it's offensive and egregious and if I didn't feel guilty about it due to some strong suits it holds (namely art), I'd give it a 1/10.

Forgettable, melodramatic, generic, non-essential but still at the very least watchable.

Feeling a 2-3/10 on this.