frami.isaac - 2015-02-17 18:19:39

I know this sounds pretentious, but Dead Leaves is not for everyone. DL is juvenile, extremely fast paced, and quite disturbing in many layers. It's probably the most punk thing the anime industry has done at this point.

Dead Leaves is a cyberpunk anime that plays in the far-future, where we follow a lovely duo of protagonists to prison, found guilty of car theft, murder and robbery.

I go over the disturbing part quickly. In the world of DL, symphathy doesn't exist, and "good" characters (good as in, not a serial killer) are portrayed as weak and are heavily exploited, and as you can catch it in my synopsis, our main characters are quite the criminals themselves. In the 50 minutes of DL, more people die than in the Game of Thrones series, more blood is spillt than in any GTA game you ever played.

Every joke is a sex joke. Also probably the lowest ones, the whole thing is nothing but drilldicks (before TTGL!) and pooping. If you are looking for a comedy, you are looking at the wrong thing. What makes DL enjoyable is its pacing. Some reviews here compare it to FLCL, which is an okay comparsion, except that FLCL is a pro race driver going through a circuit, DL is an absolute madman on a superbike who is ready to die. Right from the beginning things happen really fast, and the director doesn't fuck around, he puts the pacing pedal to metal. Even after my fourth watchthrough, I still catched new things, not because the anime itself has that much depth or something like that, but because its so fucking FAST that you simply don't have time to enjoy the visuals.

But the visuals are probably the best part of the show. The whole thing oozes of style, still probably the most unique looking anime out there. The animation is slick and obnoxiously exaggerated. The color palette is great, it stays in a dark, cold blue the whole time, yet still, it never feels stale. I'd really like to point out the composition of the shots though. It's simply amazing, and a lot of people probably just look over it, since the director rarely allows you take a shot in.

The music is very fitting, although I have to admit, quite monotone, if you are not really into older (think late 90's) electronic music, you'll probably won't like it.

Dead Leaves is a fun, wild ride. It doesn' take itself seriously, yet still has a lot of artistic value in it.

collier.bert - 2014-03-30 20:07:10

Blood sweat tears and a fuckton of badassery. That about sums it up right. If you didn't like Panty and Stocking with gatherbelt or couldn't stand FLCL then I highly suggest you ignore this animated movie because it's definitely not your cup of tea, for me however, that's a different story.

It was sometime in late 2011 that a void in my heart had taken space. There was a lack of the complete f*cking shit, sex and fast paced action that was known as panty and stocking and I needed to find something that could hold me the way PSG held me and upon that I found myself DEAD LEAVES

• STORY

Lol story. Hahahah, ok, ok I'll try to make some logic out of this. The story takes place in this futuristic, fudged up earth between Retro and Pandy, two characters who don't know who they are or how they got where they were.

The plot in it's simiplist and most understandable form is as follows:

Boy and girl confused > boy and girl decides to rob bank > boy and girl gets thrown into prison > boy and girl decides to try to get out > then end

That's all.

And although it doesn't seem like much, it was ok because I enjoyed it.

• ANIMATION

OMO!!!! I loved the animation of this show. It

sort of like those old, past cartoonic styled it worked well, for me personally. Not to mention the action sequences didn't leave me wanting as some anime do.

Sound

On it's own, it leaves more to be desired that the explanation of what the story is about but it works well to tie in the ""mood"" in the show so I guess it could be described as acceptable.

Meh

Character

I loved both main characters Pandy and Retro. (Considering it's less than an hour long going into any sort of detail would practically kill the entire movie)

And the supporting characters were no joke either (other than the dick jokes they were all modeled after)

OVERALL ENJOYMENT

Screw all the bullshit, fuck all that needs to be fucked, understand nothing. I loved this and have watched it over several times.

Comedy's subjective so you may or may not like it. But I suggest you give it a try.

stoltenberg.jayne - 2013-10-19 02:44:08

This is a travesty , TV head-boy and his lesbian companion pretty much sums it up . I get it , your one of those "oppressive country" anime , the Straight Jackets and conveyor belts are over doing it a bit.

I've only seen this because it came on after "Tank Girl"(also absolute drek) on ShoTime , 6 years ago , I dont know why I remember this , but I do

How dare Hummingbird recommend this to me !

greenfelder.johnathon - 2013-07-19 06:24:41

One sentence can pretty much sum up how I feel about this movie - "They're having sex while chained up and in straight jackets..."I was introduced to Dead Leaves as a recommendation from liking FLCL and other similar animes. I enjoyed it, but it was definitely super strange and the animation style was too dated for my tastes. Not that the animation was bad, but it was a similar difference to when you have to choose between watching My Little Ponies from the 1980s and the reboot series that has gained insane popularity among all age groups and demographics.I'd recommend watching this if you enjoyed animes like FLCL and Soul Eater, but more as an homage to predecessors than anything.

rutherford.karley - 2013-05-18 10:39:36

I was told this anime was "FLCL, except worse". I found it hard to believe... how can anything be worse than "FLCL"?!Now that I've watched it, I'm sorry to say that, impossible though it may seem, this anime is truly more worse and more insane than "FLCL". If you despise "FLCL", then this anime is not for you. If you hate shows that are just crazy without making much sense, then this anime is not for you.I think there's meant to be some sort of story behind this, and if the everyone in it would stop pissing about so much then maybe I could figure out what. All I know is that it's something to do with a mutated gene. Maybe the plot is actually so full of holes they made everything really crazy so that you wouldn't understand it. If that's what they're aiming for, then by God they've certainly achieved it.Everyone in "Dead Leaves" act like asses, and should all be locked up in a mental institute till they rot. Just thinking about their voices make me shudder - can't any of these people talk in a normal tone? Ever? It's not just their voices that are odd. The character designs seem to be weird for the sake of weirdness - the main character's a guy with a TV for a head! It certainly gives the anime a... er... unique flavour - a flavour that makes me want to bash my head on my keyboard repeatedly. It's a show that thinks it's a lot funnier than it actually is. All the over the top craziness bored me much more than it entertained me. I can remember one bit that made me laugh, where during a jail break attempt, Guy-With-TV-For-Head gets his hands on a motorbike, and tells the other 20 or so prisoners to hold onto his bike as he's about to ride out of the prison, and they all just looked at him like this: O_o (in fact the animation is so rubbish their expressions were almost just like that). But that's it, that's the only part that I can remember being amused by. The rest were just a mad jumble of random situations backed up by random music that didn't fit it - the only time when the BGM (background music) actually matches the situation is during the final showdown moments when the "final boss" is revealed. Although admittedly, it probably would have been damn hard to come up with anything that would match 99% of the scenes in this poor excuse of a "show". Because the story had a couple of points of interest buried under the mountain of craziness, it's probably the only department that some saving grace... equivalent of saved from plunging into a painful death in lava to being plunged into a painful death in boiling oil instead - better, but not much better. This whole thing is so nonsensical that I suspect that the people who made it are either aliens who's thoughts we can't possibly comprehend, or were pumped up so full of drugs they had it leaking out of their asses... in the form of this anime. Maybe both. Anyway... don't come within a mile of this if you don't want your brain reduced to mush. And if someone gives this to you as a birthday present, you should kill them before they kill you cos it means they hate you THAT much.