Bâan: The Boundary of Adulthood

I have no hate towards Gigguk/Garnt, as I love his videos, but this short film was all over the place and trying to be too many things at once while doing none of it right. The concept of fantasy elements and homesickness was a unique and good idea, but when you only have 18 minutes, it's very hard to pull off correctly. The fantasy elements were just not properly explained; we only got to see a minute or 2 of the happenings of this other world, and this isn't like Made in Abyss, where that mystery is intriguing and fosters a sense of adventure. This feels more like I like fantasy, so I will just throw it in there even though it doesn't really add to the main point of homesickness. As compared to the greatest inspiration, Shelter, where the "fantasy"-like elements added to the theme of loneliness as she is drifting alone in space, it fosters a similar feeling of parental bond in a third of the time and hits at a much more emotional level. The main point of the short film is homesickness, and we did not have NEARLY enough buildupfor us to be able to feel for Rin; instead of spending more time on her office life and maybe why she may be struggling in life and maybe why she wants to go home to her father after a long time, we waste valuable time on the fantasy elements that weren't even done well anyways. Link Click is a great example of how in a short time they are able to show the struggles of office work and the homesickness of a girl who has just been abused and overworked. The characters of this show do not feel right. We saw at the start that Daichi had a fight with his mother and is leaving on his own but never saw his conclusion. Did he end up going home? Did he just seclude himself after finding Rin? We will never know because there was no time to show this; again, they should have cut the fantasy element to better flesh out the character. Rin, while more developed as a character compared to Daichi, felt like she just speedran life and all the character buildup. We immediately see her finding Daichi office work. At least show a little bit of what happened right after they met and how they ended up growing his daughter-father bond. Some opinionated gripes now... After watching this, I had a sudden urge to rewatch Shelter, as it was my favorite anime at one point (still up there) and felt really similar to this both as a passion project and somewhat with the theming too. Despite being a third of its runtime, it manages to build a way better narrative and show us a very deep and emotional bond between father and daughter much more than Baan. As much as I love Kevin's work with anime like Made In Abyss, the music did not hit NEARLY as hard as Shelter did, where it really told the story without having much dialogue at all. The animation in Baan feels a lot more choppy and unpolished, especially if we compare it to Shelter. Granted, obviously a longer span means more work, and more steps might be skipped because of it. You can tell there are like half the frames of a regular anime; maybe because I watched this on YouTube or something, but this did not look that great (then again, Shelter was on YouTube, and it looked fantastic, and that was 8 years ago now). TLDR/Conclusion: Overall the theme is a great idea, but in the short time he had, he could not tell a good fantasy nor a good homesickness story. I understand that this is his first time writing a story, but it would not be fair to cut it some slack when reviewing an anime because of it. If he had just focused on the idea of homesickness and just removed the fantasy elements of it, he would have been able to tell a much more compelling character story with more emotional depth, but instead most of that time for building those things went into trying to build this fantasy world that didn't even get properly explained anyways. You are left with a show that has poorly written fantasy elements and had little to no time for emotional investment of Rin to feel for the homesickness aspect of the show. If you want something better with very similar themes, I recommend Link Click and Shelter. Link Click with its incredible episode on homesickness and shelter on how a passion project could have been and the emotional impact of a parental bond.