Kikumana
I recently ordered and received the BD version of Time of Eve from Amazon Japan. Yes, it remains one of my all time top ten anime, but the BD case must have just about the ugliest cover art I've ever seen. The BD itself has a choice of eight different insert designs, all of which are far superior to the crap on the box. Nevermind. I now have a licensed disk copy of each of my top ten anime.
I also recently discovered a short film that I'd never heard of by Yasuhiro Yoshiura - the directer of Time of Eve. You won't find Kikumana in the ANN encyclopaedia but you can look it up on Yoshiura's Studio Rikka website - a google translated version of the page is here. You can watch it by searching the obvious place. Predating Aquatic Language by a year it consists of a sequence of images of a young woman, the titular Kikumana, in a room full of books. She may be dreaming or perhaps her imagination is let loose. She is connected to the world but connected to no one; experiencing all sorts of the things, while experiencing nothing. It seems to me to be a surreal commentary on our lives in the digital age. In tone it has an affinity with Pale Cocoon, although the artwork (in grey tones) is nowhere near as sophisticated. As with Makoto Shinkai, a director whose career Yasuhiro Yoshiura parallels, it's fascinating to see his craft develop. Yoshiura's early stuff isn't as accessible but it's more interesting than Shinkai's. Time of Eve was an enormous leap forward for him, the way it presents his complex ideas while being simultaneously immensely entertaining. I think he has entirely leapfrogged Shinkai.
