A collection of 15 short episodes depicting the magic world of Phantasmagoria.
__A Piece of PHANTASMAGORIA. __ _This review contains no spoilers, feel free to read._ It's a very mystifying experience that is 'A piece of PHANTASMAGORIA' it would possibly be 'Curious mystical dreams with an interstellar touch.' or "Humanity has long passed the days of its growth period and now we are here in this mysterious land where things have grown quite far out of how normal people might see them be." PHANTASMAGORIA is a series of shorts surrounding the planet..Phantasmagoria! Every short is a different small adventure where you get to explore. The anime says that this is something that you find in your dreams hidden away. But really what is this work like? well.. it's very tender. It's quiet. It's collected. Its peaceful. Mystifying. A fantasy series that has a kind of child-like wonder imbued in its stories. A little log, a series of chapters depicting this wonderous planet and its humourous senses. Even the sensation of the star that will go soon is suddenly turned into something funny as his tale is turned on its head do a drop of the... You might be looking at this review completely blind, not knowing whether it will actually deliver on what it has to show, its short synopsis on the page leaves you itching at your head. Its poster is a bit fantastical. But I can tell you it will deliver. All its elements dance in beat to each other to give you a tender experience. Its art style, its subdued animation, its calming music and of course its narrator and the voice actors of said characters sell the idea perfectly. It all dances in tone with each other. Shigeru Tamura's minimalistic drawings are like the ones most will remember from their youths. The stories often follow a sweet soft old man. The animation is limited but it is limited with reason to feed into the sensations of the whole. I don't think one can get bored easily by it, even if it is a little silent. Surely you will feel something from this moving children's picture book. For the youth, it's youth. For the old, it's memory. To return to a part of your young self, that's what it's for me. Quite a bit of shots are distant, so we get a whole overview of the scene. Through the medium-wide shots, we see all kinds of little things happening. Little. Everything has been made so small. Lightbulbs are huge. The story is in our little hands. Sometimes we are hit with the close-up and those close-ups feel incredibly tender. Its framing really ends up representing the feelings of the scenes well. Like a professor sending a sick girl, his progress is obviously accompanied by a tender smaller frame of him writing. Perfect. I'd say if you have a particular knack for this kind of subdued, mystical, dreamy anime with a neat sense of humor. Then this is for you. While traveling the realms of dreams. I found a little planned called "Phantasmagoria" this has been a story from that planet. Goodbye.
Tamura Shigeru’s _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_ is an odd anime, even considered alongside its contemporaries in the diverse landscape of 1990s OVAs. A collection of 15 “episodes”, running approximately 5 minutes each, it plays out a bit like a leisurely travel guide to the Phantasmagoria of its title: a small planet existing somewhere on the border between fantastic science fiction and surreal dream. Each of the 15 parts that make up the OVA introduces a new “small story” from the planet. Some of them are narrated by a voiceover (performed by [Agata Morio](https://anilist.co/staff/288816/Morio-Agata) and [Cano Caoli](https://anilist.co/staff/149057/Caoli-Cano)), while others have only intertitle narration, of the sort you might see in a silent film, accompanied by [Teshikai Utollo](https://anilist.co/staff/196568/Utollo-Teshikai)'s enchanting soundtrack. The narration often takes on the tone of an observer dispassionately chronicling events. The first part, for example, simply follows the daily life of the operator responsible for projecting the stars onto the night sky. Occasionally, they take on a more personal tone. One such part is narrated from the perspective of a scientist, Dr. Hoop, recording his attempts to build an artificial moon and his correspondence with a sick child. All of the stories have a strange feeling of both distance and intimacy; like hearing a private anecdote about a friend of a friend, or looking through a window onto a scene that feels simultaneously mysterious and nostalgic. The unusual format of the OVA is largely a consequence of _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_’s gestation in the earlier manga and picture books of its creator, Tamura Shigeru, as well as its previous incarnation as a CD-ROM "game". _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_ can certainly be enjoyed as the singular and mysterious experience that it is, but intrigued viewers will find that English-language information about it is hard to come by. If you are approaching the OVA for the first time, and are more interested in getting a flavor of what it's actually like, then I recommend the [other review here on Anilist](https://anilist.co/review/21795). What I hope to provide with this review is a chronology, filling in the currently missing context that will be of interest to anyone wanting to learn about _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_, its creator, and how the OVA came to exist in this unusual form. ~~~[ img400(https://i.imgur.com/u6yb8yi.png) ](https://i.imgur.com/u6yb8yi.png)~~~ Tamura Shigeru is probably best known in the English-speaking anime community for his short OVA [_Glassy Ocean_](https://anilist.co/anime/1204/Glassy-Ocean/) (1998). Together with _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_ (1999) and an earlier OVA, [_Ginga no Uo: Ursa Minor Blue_](https://anilist.co/anime/3518/Ginga-no-Uo-URSA-minor-BLUE/) (1993), these anime from the 1990s were the culmination and development of a larger body of visual work that started in the late 1970s among the pages of legendary alt-manga magazine Garo. "Phantasmagoria" itself first appeared as the title of a series of oneshots published in Garo during the first half of the 1980s. In the series, Tamura developed the world and the style with which his name and his planet, Phantasmagoria, are now associated: slow, gentle, mysterious, evocative, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy, always imbued with a casual but infectious curiosity for the undeniably unusual but beautiful world of which each individual story shows only a small part. ~~~[ img400(https://i.imgur.com/no7BObb.png) ](https://i.imgur.com/no7BObb.png) ####_An example of Tamura's manga:「クジラの跳躍」from 1985, later adapted in the_ Glassy Ocean _OVA._~~~ Following the release of two anthologies collecting his manga from Garo and elsewhere—_Small Planet_ and _Suishou-Gari_, published in 1985 and 86 respectively—Tamura began to move away from drawing manga and towards more illustration work. Phantasmagoria's first depiction as a planet followed shortly after, when it appeared, already almost fully formed, on a [promotional calendar](https://i.imgur.com/V4V6j04.jpeg) included in a 1987 issue of the magazine Takusan no Fushigi. Two years later, Tamura published an art book, simply titled _Phantasmagoria_ (1989). As well as collecting selected images from Tamura’s picture books, short comic strips, miscellaneous art projects, and sketches, the book contains a section titled “Planet” which depicts various locations from around Phantasmagoria, along with short snippets of information about them. Tamura credits the core idea to the book's designer, Okamoto Issen, who apparently suggested formatting the contents page of the art book as a map of the planet. Tamura took up this idea, using the calendar illustration, and stitching together the disparate scenes shown in his illustrations and manga. This was the major step towards the creation of the unified, interconnected world seen in _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_, and established the direction of much of Tamura's subsequent work. ~~~[ img400(https://i.imgur.com/2Pmlcld.jpeg) ](https://i.imgur.com/2Pmlcld.jpeg) ####_Phantasmagoria as seen on the contents pages of the art book, and two pages showing locations on the Glassy Ocean._~~~ The publication of the _Phantasmagoria_ art book marked another turning point in Tamura's career after his move away from manga, as he soon began developing animated versions of his stories. First came the previously mentioned _Ginga no Uo: Ursa Minor Blue_ OVA in 1993, adapted from his 1980 manga oneshot of the same name and directed by Tamura himself. Soon after, the production supervisor on that OVA, Shionaga Mitsuo, approached Tamura with the idea of creating a CD-ROM "game" that would take Tamura's illustrations and transform them into an animated atlas of sorts. In this simple point-and-click game, released in 1995 and advertised as "an interactive way to enjoy the art and stories of Phantasmagoria", the player can travel to the various locations on the planet, see the small happenings of its environments and inhabitants, and occasionally interact with them to learn more. ~~~[ img400(https://i.imgur.com/VkUFv3I.png) ](https://i.imgur.com/VkUFv3I.png) ####*"The Star Fish seem happy", from the _Phantasmagoria_ CD-ROM.*~~~ It was from this CD-ROM that the _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_ OVA was assembled. The animations for the CD-ROM were created in Macromedia Director, a precursor to the later ubiquitous Adobe Flash, and primarily consist of small loops that are triggered when the player visits the various locations. Released four years later, in 1999, the OVA utilizes these same animations, as well as Teshikai's soundtrack, but adds the voiceover and narrative structure to create the 15 short stories that make up the OVA. The unusual format and style of the OVA are a result of its construction out of the materials originally produced for the CD-ROM. Just as the _Phantasmagoria_ art book built on the locations depicted in Tamura's early manga, and the CD-ROM expanded upon the illustrations from the art book, the OVA iterated on the development of Phantasmagoria again by offering a closer look at some of the characters that had appeared previously only fleetingly. Indeed, it was initially promoted as this expansion of Tamura's world, aimed at fans who perhaps had read the book, or played the CD-ROM, and wondered about the stories behind the planet's inhabitants. ~~~[ img400(https://i.imgur.com/oSmBL6G.png) ](https://i.imgur.com/oSmBL6G.png) ####_A Star Head visits the Liquor Shop while trying to find the Altair Bar; an example of how the locations from the game were edited together to produce the stories in the OVA._~~~ As I mentioned near the top of this review, I think that _A Piece of Phantasmagoria_ can be enjoyed simply as a singular and mysterious experience; a charming and enigmatic example of anime doing something different from the norm, deeply nostalgic yet enticingly strange. While it is that, it is also a development of ideas that had been present already in the various formats in which Phantasmagoria had appeared. This is a development that began in Tamura's early manga and continued beyond the release of the OVA: a year later, Tamura returned to drawing manga for the twelve adventures of Dr. Hoop and his robot assistant, Lancelot, contained in [_Phantasmagoria Days_](https://anilist.co/manga/107679/). As far as I'm aware, outside of some scattered illustrations, _Phantasmagoria Days_ was the last time that Tamura emerged from the realm of dreams with tales of his small planet. English-speaking fans can be thankful, however, that most of his manga is not yet available at all in English. This means that while Tamura hasn't had a recent opportunity to show us more of his world, many of Phantasmagoria's mysteries, only hinted at in the OVA, are yet to be unearthed. ~~~img120(https://i.imgur.com/Qw9qtaS.gif)~~~