Within the infinity of the gray spectrum of each art form, there are necessarily manifestations of terminal states and absolute extremes beyond which nothing seems to lie. The hyperrealism of Ron Muek’s sculptures, the paintings of Will Cotton, and Raphael Spence stretched out in the opposing corners of an equilateral triangle created with the fate of cold, nameless proto-industrial minimalism and methodically flirting with the culture of mass consumption of pop art. The fury of high-speed Czech dance pornogurogrinda is in stiff binary opposition to the drone's unique minimalism.
And among all these conventional and obvious extremes, Colorful finds its place. The object of absolutization in this series is Ecchi - one of the full currents in the ocean of Japanese animation. Sixteen six-minute series are united by a common theme and are practically not connected with each other by any common plot. Yes, some individual situations and characters are repeated, but these are rather specific refrains that do not allow to weaken the mites of the common motive. The pursuit of a woman’s body, loosely covered with scraps of clothing, does not compare even with such titans as the absolutely insolent Ikkitousen or shamelessly stupid, punching in the forehead of Umisho – but leaves them far, far behind. Not due to frankness, but due to the complete all-consuming irrational concentration of screen space and staging on fan service.
Freed from narrative tinsel and the need to tell a story as such, Colorful focuses entirely on finding visual means to implement on-screen total eccia madness.
Strictly speaking, within the framework of the main plots, the graphics and drawings are not something unusual. Traditional reduction of backgrounds, hypertrophied manifestation of emotions coexist with inhuman attention to drawing small details of interiors and motion animation. Women, elevated to the rank of icons, serve as an antithesis to openly caricatured men. The greatest interest in the video series is a significant layer of information noise, realized through a set of randomly cut from other television programs episodes, excerpts of music videos, animation, futuristic screensavers. And all this visionary wealth is mounted and processed in the best traditions of haphazard noise symphony for television and orchestra. A real sobering optical-noise shower, hitting all the senses at once, even a metallic taste appears on the tongue and the fingers are pleasantly tingling. The main value of Colorful is that it, being not attached to any primary source, furiously and talentedly going beyond the limits of everyday life, completely parody the self-sufficient layer of visual culture.
The apogee and climax naturally occur in a series of closing episodes that depart from the manner of the semi-domestic situational pseudo-narrative and turn towards truly cyclopean forms, managing to deploy a six-minute piece of screen time multi-line hyperbolistic parody quoting not only of Ecchi, but of the entire industry - from Evangelion to traditional mystical stories - while remaining within the outline of the manner of presentation characteristic of the entire series.