DESCRIPTION

REVIEWS

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  Neenan

  100/100
  Hideaki Anno could never make something this thought provoking.

  Southpaw is a new age masterpiece

  I'm sure, if you're reading this review, you have likely seen @Jdinkleberg's review of Gokiburi Taisou. It's a brilliant short film and has a brilliant synopsys and thought provoking piece written about it by one of my dearest friends. Beyond that, let's talk about the matter at hand, how Southpaw is a piece of art designed to dive into the human psyche and show us our innermost desires and dreams.

  Part 1: A Technical Masterpiece

  Southpaw is completely hand drawn and animated by director Sawako Kabuki. A visionary in this modern age, Kabuki tends to draw most of her films and music shorts by hand. Most of her productions are built around showing the "dirty" side of human nature. From her AniList description:

  "Sawako Kabuki's work pushes the boundaries of comfortability by depicting female bodies masturbating, defecating, and even puking."

  Southpaw is no different. It's unconvential color pallete, filled with clashing colors, followed by the objectively poorly drawn characters dancing on screen, truly does push the boundaries of comfortability. The characters, most of which are very similar to the female cockroaches from her other work Gokiburi Taisou. Although the characters are designed to be grotesque and challenging to look at, they have a certain charm to them. You can truly tell that love and care was put into creating these characters.

  Considering Southpaw is considered "Music", that means there is obviously a musical element to it. The score for Southpaw was performed by the Kuricorder Quartet. The Kuricorder Quartet is a four man quartet composed of Masaki Kurihara, Yoshiyuki Kawaguchi, Kenji Kondo, and Takero Sekizima all playing recorders; they did and excellent job performing Southpaw. It's no question as to why looking at their previous works. Performing music for the TV Short Nanami-chan and the 2012 fishing-themed anime Tsuritama, they have quite the powerful track record behind them.

  With the musical prowess of the Kuricorder Quartet, combined with the artistic vision of Sawako Kabuki, it's no question that Southpaw has the visual and audio ability to be great, however, how does the actual plot of the story compare?

  Part 2: Human Motivation

  Before we begin talking about Southpaw, we first need to look at a graph. It isn't math class, but it's important to have a concept of flow and motivation for personal projects.

  

  The above graph represents a person's desire to complete a personal goal relative to the amount of time they dedicate to such a task. This is reflected within Southpaw. The music starts off with an opening recorder fanfare. As such, it is quite similar to the composition style of many famous march composers such as John Phillip Sousa or Kenneth J. Alford. Much like famous the pieces The Washington Post March or The Diplomat March, it has a bombastic opening, before setting into a groove. The mimics our graph nicely. The opening peak shows the viewers desire to watch, consume, and enjoy life. This changes as the video goes on.

  As the video continues, the background colors begin to change, the characters slow down a little. This represents the first "valley" of the chart. However, of course, as time progresses, the arc will inevitably approach, and the characters begin moving with more fluidity and more passion. Not only does this show the peak of our chart, which will inevitably continue as time progresses, it begins to show the human desire.

  Part 3: The Human Desire

  Human people desire many things. Health, Money, Happiness, Company. Most of all, people desire peace of mind. All of these small nuances can be combined into the human desire of peace of mind. Kabuki knew this while creating Southpaw. Each character is dancing, the dancing represents the human brain, it's chaotic frenzy of emotions and electricity flowing. The colors also reflect this. As each character dances, it is in a groove, a flow. Pixar's Soul describes this as "The Zone". A place where someone is completely focused and in the moment. For lack of better term, we will use "The Zone".

  

  Each character is within The Zone as they dance. Although at first they are all doing dances separate from each other, with seemingly little coordination, they come together as time goes on. These characters have peace of mind, they are not concerned with what others are doing and are only concerned about their own enjoyment, even with demented colors and figures moving in the background.

  The characters in Southpaw may have piece of mind, but the area they dance is chaotic. The colors change very often. This is remedied as time goes on. Eventually, a character opens a black void while drawing others in. The music seems like it is calming down, the two characters in the center are calming down and dancing slowly. We are potentially reaching our second peak in our motivation chart. This is not the case. Very quickly things turn south. Peace of mind is shattered. No person can enter The Zone forever, and especially in such a metaphorical work as this, our characters will sadly not stay in their collective Zone forever.

  Part 4: A Chaotic Finale

  Our viewing experience reaches it's climax as the recorders enter a massive fortissimo trill. If we were to compare this to our flow diagram, we are rapidly descending down from our final peak and approaching the bottom of our motivation supply. While our characters go berserk, the background changes constantly. There is, however, a harmony in their chaos. A method to their madness, if you will. As more characters appear on screen, they begin to repeat dances, creating a large collage of movement. Once more, showing the chaos of the brain and the downward spiral someone may go on while losing motivation in a task.

  

  In the final few seconds of the song, the harmony drops. We are left without a lower bass part, and the melody returns to the original phrase from the start of the film. The film concludes with a brief tag, representing someone completely running out of emotion on our chart, and giving up.

  Parte Final: In Summary

  

  To summarize, Southpaw is a cinematic masterpiece. It has splendid visual animation, an extremely talented group of musical artists performing, coupled with a deep reflection into the human emotion and desire. The visual style is indicative of classical Kabuki pieces such as Gokiburi Taisou, and the musical style relates to great works by those such as Sousa. The emotions presented relate to those of Pixar and are representative of something as complex and in depth as the human brain, something the worlds top scientists still don't fully understand. All in all, Southpaw is a brilliant work of art that is deserving of a perfect score, something I do not give out lightly. It's a lifechanging film that everyone should watch at least once in their life.

  Similar Recommendations:

  If you liked Southpaw, I would recommend such works as:

  https://anilist.co/anime/5081/Bakemonogatari/

  https://anilist.co/anime/32/Neon-Genesis-Evangelion-The-End-of-Evangelion/

  They both attempt to create similar explorations of the human mind, though neither are quite as good.

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