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This might be one of the best things I have ever watched.

Let's get two things out of the way. Undeniably, this video looks good. It's well drawn, well animated, and is certainly eye catching with its colorful visuals and impressively imaginative landscapes. As music, this is something that is suited to me, but I can at least understand people who think that Porter's music is unpalatable to them.

My praise for this piece is not related to the audiovisuals but rather for the idea that this should be taken as a story or a music video that is trying to be something more than just ... Porter's music meshed with beautifully animated sequences. I understand that this praise is often held back by the difficulties of critiquing something that isn't overtly concerned with story, but in a piece so unabashedly attempting to evoke sympathy, there's fair ground here to levy some serious critique.

Shelter exemplifies everything that is wonderful about storytelling in anime, namely that rather than attempting to tell a fake story developed with tropes and meaningless emotion, it takes the most effective path by designing a wonderful character, throwing her into a position of bittersweet melancholy, and using that as a means of evoking our deepest emotions and convincing us there is something meaningful and tragic to be said.

People are praising the emotional resonance in the story and its ability to bring out the loneliness lost in the profundity [sic] of memory. Yet, consider a world where the main character is not a beautiful teenage girl, lost and confused in a world completely foreign to her. When you remove that physical appearance that you would think makes us so inexplicably attracted to her stake in the story, there is ultimately the same reason for us to feel sympathy. It is anything but superficial.

One might say that it's only a six minute short, but the fact that Shelter goes out of its way to show for a split second the main character's letter from her father, to invoke the community to spend time and read it on a second watch, tells me that there is a serious intent to manifest a meaningful story. In addition, that is supported precisely by the video's own conciseness in telling that story. As opposed to many other anime designed purely for cheap tears and easy pity, we are given substance through a montage of a young innocent girl cherishing sweet memories with someone we barely meet, but still recognize fully as a parent.

Sure it can be cute, but that does not preclude it from being meaningful. Shelter captivates its audience by presenting us with its fascinating visuals, the ostensible undertones of a post-apocalyptic world, the loneliness of being potentially the last human in the universe, and gives us the deepest common denominator of a story, one that galvanizes its sympathies out of the most fundamental and intrinsic emotions we have, and beckons for us to understand. I can, in good conscience, recommend this music video to anyone.

P.S: This is a satirical version of the current "most helpful" review of Shelter.