Episode 1 · Daicon Opening Animations

Daicon Opening Animations

A masked figure steps off a spaceship and hands a young girl a cup of water. One job: carry it to a radish and pour. She says yes without blinking. Then the robots show up. So do the monsters, the starfighters, the soldiers, all of them lining up to stop one kid with a cup. She dodges, runs, gets knocked around, and keeps moving, because the radish is not going to water itself. Will she make it there with anything left in the cup? Two years later the same girl is back, older now, and wearing a Playboy bunny suit. The first stretch of the film runs through what happened last time, then it lets go of plot entirely. She trades lightsaber swings with aliens, rides the magic sword Stormbringer like a surfboard, and tears through one opponent after another while Electric Light Orchestra's Twilight pounds away underneath. No story, just a barrage of images and a hundred characters you have seen before somewhere. Both shorts were made by fans for the Osaka science fiction convention, and you can feel the hand of people who grew up on this stuff. So what exactly is she fighting for this time, and who is the one pulling the strings?