Apartment!

Apartment is an over simplified piece of animation that simply fails at being remotely interesting.

Really, it is sad that this anime failed, because the story did hold quite an interesting premise that was to picture the whole apartment and those who live in it. However, despise that premise, it is clear that the man behind the project, Jun Aoki, was downright lazy when he produced this piece of animation. Don't get me wrong though, I am at no point criticizing the length of the anime which I think perfectly fits the style. On the contrary, I'm criticizing the lack of interest that the man actually ... put in his work. This to say, Apartment! does try to show the audience the repetitive and mundane life of living in apartment, and this with an humouristic touch, but it's all downright pointless. Even if the message is clear, watching a bunch of badly drawn cartoons doing simple tasks is an antonym to the word Entertainment.

The production value is also quite bad. Surely we can't blame him for being the only one behind the project and we certainly can't compare him to the big industries with tons of money, but still, following the same standards, it is still terrible. Let me remind you that anime such as Pale Cocoon, Voices of a Distant Star and There she Is!! are all projects with one mperson behind. Even in the non-anime style of drawing, I can find tons of animation shorts on Newgrounds better produced than Apartment!, and if not actually better as a whole. I can actually see what the man was trying to show with the simplified background and minimalistic animation, supporting the mundane life, but he was at the same time, trying too hard.

In the end, as mentionned in my introduction, Aoki tried too much to simplify everything in Apartment! when it wasn't actually needed. Per say, it doesn't hurt to watch it since it's only 5 minutes long.