CHAINSAW MAID

DESCRIPTION

CAST

SPECIAL ComedyChainsaw Maid Episode 0

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  70/100
  When there's no room left in the fire, clay will walk the earth.

  It was a bright and sunny morning. The skies were clear, the birds were singing, and a poor little girl was sick in bed, relaxing as her beloved family maid served her breakfast, enjoying a view out the window with her. This was a quiet house, belonging to a happy family, who wanted nothing more than to enjoy a lazy, peaceful sunday, but fate had other plans. Just as the man of the house was about to enjoy a staff meeting with his faithful maid, there was a knock on the door... And what was waiting for them on the other side would change their lives forever. As a strange disease ravages the human race, the dead rise from their grave, and the living must take up arms to avoid joining them... For on this fateful day when hell runs out of room, the dead will walk the earth.

  Well, I told you I wasn’t done reviewing anime shorts, and as the prophecy foretold, I’m back, and this time I’m taking a look at a short horror piece by director Takena Nagao. If you haven’t heard that name, it’s probably because his work is a little outside of the mainstream... He’s an independent director, and he does the vast majority of his work using the art form of Claymation. I found out about his work late last year, just in time to binge it for Halloween, and luckily for me, nearly everything he’s ever made is free to watch on youtube! I’ll admit that it’s a little weird for youtube-exclusive animations to be listed as official anime on Anilist... Or any site like Anilist, for that matter... But weird or not, you’re not going to hear me complain about it.

  There isn’t a whole lot of information available about Nagao, he’s apparently a really private person... There’s evidence to suggest that he’s acquainted with, and possibly even real life friends with, a circle of other stop motion animators who took inspiration from him on Youtube, and his page on Myanimelist has accrued quite a few comments that just say “Fucking genius.” I’ll be honest, I’m not really interested in what kind of a person he is, mainly because you can already tell a lot about him just from his work. There seems to be a strong inspiration from the works of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, as well as grindhouse horror movies in general, and I’m pretty sure he was paying homage to western cinema as a whole when he made the decision to have the father character’s newspaper be printed in the English language.

  If you watch his work from the beginning, from all the way back in 2006 when he uploaded his first project, you’ll notice that he’s come a long way as a director and animator. You can see in real time how his cinematography and style have evolved... He’s learned a lot about camerawork, cinematic language, story-writing and sound design, and while Chainsaw Maid isn’t his best work... It came out in 2013, and he’s improved dramatically since then... There’s still a level of competence that you just can’t see in his earliest works. I don’t know for a fact that he was a film student, but it’s a bet that I’d be willing to make. Having said that, there are conventions in his work that have been there since the beginning... Obviously there’s the lovely crafted blood and gore, but more importantly, with a nod to Tarantino, he likes to focus on female protagonists(often with chin-length haircuts) in life-threatening situations who are forced to take up arms against their attackers.

  Stop Motion tends to get used in horror a lot, going all the way back to the depiction of dinosaurs, mythical beasts and other kinds of scary monsters before CGI started to come into its own, but even when it’s used in the most innocuous settings, it can still feel really unsettling for a variety of reasons... This is especially true for claymation, where you have odd facsimiles of human beings who were created by human hands, but are completely devoid of humanity themselves, and no amount of polishing or love can ever completely smooth these characters out for an entire feature. There will always be bumps and cracks, which can take you directly to the depths of the uncanny valley. I never saw Wallace and Gromit as a kid, but I saw The Adventures of Mark Twain, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the infamous Mysterious Stranger sequence wasn’t the only part that gave me nightmares.

  Nagao takes all of the horror potential of claymation and exploits the hell out of it. His character designs are rudimentary, but with very little exception(namely a couple of weird wrestling matches) they improve every time. The characters in this particular short are at least among his most visually appealing, and while they may look a tad bland and generic, that’s really not the point of his work. The point of his work is graphic, explicit gorey violence, and he delivers tenfold. Our first glimpse of gore comes when the woman who barges into their house to warn them of the oncoming threat, already looking beaten and bitten herself, dies, right after falling to her knees and vomiting up an inhuman amount of entrails. This sequence isn’t bloody or anything, but it’s still something I can’t say I’ve ever seen in zombie media before, which alone makes it a disturbingly memorable shot.

  As for the story, it’s simple, but it’s effective. After a quick moment of dark humor... That may have worked for you, but it kinda fell flat for me... That’s when the zombie action begins, as the woman who warned them, followed by a trio of graphically detailed zombies at the door and one fat one bursting through a window, all try to attack the family, forcing the maid to pick up a chainsaw that’s been conveniently left in an otherwise empty closet(a nod to the contrivances of the genre, perhaps?) and the whole short from there is just hardcore gore, pushing the capacity of clay to portray the eviscerated human anatomy to its absolute limits. Nagao doesn’t go for easy kills, like decapitations and the like, he finds more creative ways for the zombies to be sliced up, with one poor ghoul even losing his jaw after receiving a joker cut. You really do have to see all of this to believe it.

  There’s a ton of excess detail throughout the story... Moments that added so much to the experience even though they really didn’t need to be there. The father’s newspaper foreshadowing the events of the short... A freshly killed zombie still twitching at the maid’s feet as she awaits the others... There’s even a moment of genuine suspense and tension as she stands there, snarling, chainsaw in hand, waiting for them to break down the door. It’s moments like that which lead me to one of very few complaints that I have, which is the lack of music. I know this was an independent project, and there wasn’t any studio backing or even any kind of budget, but there’s so much grindhouse grittiness to this film that the right instrumental track could have definitely kicked things up a notch. I also should kind of point out that while the ending was great for the most part, there’s something that was set up early on and never paid off, even though it’s both established as a rule of this story AND something any pre-existing zombie fan would consider an obvious choice.

  Issues like this are kind of resolved in a fan-made sequel, but that’s unofficial, and frankly, I am not a fan of Lee Hardcastle’s work. It feels a lot more gore-porny than anything Nagao has made, and yeah, there's a difference, I'll go into detail on that next time. Anyway, I guess I should let the cat out of the bag that I’ve never especially been into gore OR stop motion animation... I’m not against them, but they’re usually not my favorite things in the world, and I only really enjoy either element if it’s used in a genuinely well-written and engaging way, and while it may only be seven minutes long, I do think Chainsaw Maid fits that bill. I don’t think it’s Nagao’s best work, but I can totally understand why it’s his most popular. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who’s younger, or easily disturbed, but it’s pretty cool if you have the stomach for it. I’m planning to review a few more of Takena Nagao’s works in the near future(Not including Shitcom, please don't ask), but it felt appropriate touching on this one first.

  I give Chainsaw Maid a 7/10.

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