My synopsis is spoilery, if you can call it that when the film itself is so short on actual story. I just thought I'd warn people anyway.
Synopsis:
I'm not entirely sure what to write - as I'll discuss in my review, one of Kaze, Ghost Warrior's biggest problems is that it's more tell than show. Not much happens during its 22 minutes.
The film is set in what appears to be something along the lines of feudal Japan, except instead of people there are furries (anthropomorphic animal characters - think Disney's Robin Hood). It starts off with an innkeeper telling the story of the royal family. Sometime in the past, the entire family, including Bay, was killed. Bay and Kaze, a guardsman, were in love, and it is said that Kaze still roams the land, looking for Bay's murderers.
An anthropomorphic tiger character, who we later learn is Kaze, enters the inn, and a rowdy group that I'm pretty sure works for the ones who killed the royal family tries to goad him into a fight. Kaze saves the server they dragged into the fight and gets one of the villains to tell him who he works for. After the fight is over, the innkeeper, who is still loyal to the royal family, treats Kaze's wounds. He gets Kaze to admit his true identity by revealing the picture of Bay he keeps hidden. Kaze thanks him and leaves to mourn Bay and is attacked again by the villains. Although he would have preferred not to, Kaze kills them all. I think. This film was...a little confusing.
Review:
IMDb has one sentence that sums up what drove this film's creation: “Made by one person, on two home computers, in six months of production for $5,000.” The ending credits are unintentionally hilarious, separately listing every role and task (music, production design, director of photography, etc.), almost always with Timothy Albee's name.
Back when this first came out, I saw a few screenshots and thought they looked gorgeous. When I heard that Kaze, Ghost Warrior was intended to show that one person could, in a reasonable amount of time, create an animated movie on par with movies in the past that have taken dozens or more people to create, I was excited. I can't remember what other details Albee gave out at the time, but I do remember somehow getting the impression, possibly due to my assumptions about the word “movie” and the DVD's price tag (a whopping $17.95), that it was a full-length movie. The film's 22-minute length was a disappointment, but I might still have been happy if those 22 minutes had actually been good. Unfortunately, they weren't.
