Underplayed Gems

Kimagure Robot (2004)

Kimagure Robot poster
Original title
きまぐれロボット
Genre
adventure film
Country
Japan
Runtime
2 min
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

Each short follows an eccentric scientist who builds robots meant to help humans in very specific ways. The robots' literal programming causes unexpected and funny problems when they interact with people.

quirkywhimsicallightheartedbriefinventivecomedicfuturisticplayful

What happens

Kimagure Robot (きまぐれロボット) is a series of ten two-minute shorts that were sponsored by Yahoo! as a free promotion for Yahoo! Japan. The episodes were broadcast in 2004 and most shorts were directed by a different Studio 4°C director. Plotlines were all developed by science fiction writer Shinichi Hoshi—renowned for having created more than a thousand shorts and known in Japan as the "God of Short Shorts". Because Hoshi was famous for being protective of the integrity of his works during his lifetime, the idea of releasing the series as a webcast was only proposed after Hoshi had died in the late 1990s. All ten episodes are characterized by a futuristic science-fiction setting in which an eccentric scientist with a genius for invention works to create a host of robots, each designed to help humans in a different but very particular and often counter intuitive manner. As the robots interact with their human masters and their surroundings in pre-programmed ways unanticipated problems arise and provide for a variety of comedic situations. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

This page is from Underplayed Gems. Not quite it? You can browse by genre, country and year, or take this one into the 3D catalogue and ask the Catbot for something closer.