Since the dawn of mankind, when the ongoing process of life finally gave birth to a being who was capable of questioning his existence and observing the universe, there’s one question we’ve found ourselves asking, time and again, as the answers hung just out of reach. What awaits us in the afterlife? Will we experience paradise in heaven? Suffer endlessly in hell? Reincarnate into a newborn baby? Or will we exist as spirits, wandering between worlds for all eternity? And if so, would eternity be boring? Lonely? Whatever the case, we are human, and whether in this world or the next, there’s nothing like a chance encounter with a kindred soul to brighten our afterlife.
One of my favorite things about anime is the variety of different forms it can come in... There’s your standard serials and movies, but there are also ONAs, OVAs and other assorted specials, but one of the most interesting forms of anime is the online short. Usually produced either independently or for promotional purposes, these little wonders can often fly under the radar, but in some cases, like with the infamous Me!Me!Me! they can take the world by storm. I’ve always had a fascination with these, and I don’t think they get enough love, so I’ve decided to start reviewing them... These are going to be shorter, less formal reviews, but I hope you still enjoy them.
For my first subject, I’d like to take you back to last year, where I was watching a Media Share event hosted by Vtuber Projekt Melody when one of her viewers submitted a curious short about a ghost girl tap dancing. She had to mute her stream for this for copyright reasons, but when I looked up the video on Youtube, I found one of the most adorable gosh darn things I’ve ever seen. Originally created for a Japanese animation festival called Frenz2013, where it had the honor of being one of the last clips to air, this clip has been around for nearly a decade. This video is titled Gisoku no Moses, which can translate to either Prosthetic Moses or Shoes of Moses depending on your preference. I’m just going to call it Moses, if that’s okay.
Moses has long been tied to a rumor that the creator made it as a tribute to his dead daughter who wanted to be a dancer, but from what research I’ve done, that doesn’t seem to be the case, or at least I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Using Bing Translate from Japanese to English has taken me down something of a rabbit hole since I started looking into creator Gagame(translation, Long Time Ago), but I haven’t found any personal information about them. I don’t even know what their gender identity is, which is why I'm using they/them pronouns. From what little I’ve seen, they’ve been trying to break out for around a decade, and they’ve possibly been dealing with some depression over their failure to get their creative endeavors off the ground, which I can quite frankly relate to going back to my blogging days.
Well, depression is understandable, but Gagame has some unbelievable levels of talent. They have dozens of videos up on youtube, mostly short animation projects and test clips of a video game they’ve been trying to make... Which, believe it or not, is a pretty damn cute 2D platformer based on the Moses short. I’m not even kidding, Ghost-chan is the protagonist, and she uses her shoes like boomerang style weapons and exploration tools. It looks fairly basic, likely down to Gagame’s limited resources, and I was unfortunately unable to download the demo myself, but hell, I’d buy it if it ever showed up in my Xbox store.
The song from this short is Moses Supposes, from the soundtrack of the 1952 film Singing in the Rain, which is one of the most fun movies of all time. The context behind it is that Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor are attending speech therapy, and the tongue twister the doctor gives them has a nice rhyme scheme, so they turn it into a spur-of-the-moment tap-dancing routine. It sounds like a pretty dumb idea on paper, but it works brilliantly in practice; Which is the only thing it really has in common with Moses the animation, and to be fair, it’s still a stretch. Still, the video is littered with Singing in the Rain references, which at least tells us that Gagame is a fan of the movie, and didn’t just pick the song at random.
Moses opens with a lonely ghost girl sitting alone on a stump, when she starts following a pair of tap shoes walking along on their own. This remind me immediately of an old Saturday morning Disney cartoon called Recess, where in one episode one of the characters gets really into yo-yos and performs a legendary technique where he uses two yo-yos to hit a pair of shoes from behind, one after the other, to create the illusion of an invisible man walking. Of course, it also reminds me of the cartoon shoe that got dipped into acid in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is nowhere near as happy a memory.
The shoes begin tapping in rhythm to the song... Perfectly, I might add, like, the timing of their movements is flawless. The shoes are CG, and they match the song so accurately that you’d swear Gagame must have some tap dancing experience themselves. Anyway, the ghost joins them, trying to add an upper body to their routine, and they resist at first, before finally allowing her to dance with them, and while there’s nothing particularly deep about any of this on a story or writing level, this is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. The ghost girl is highly expressive, the shoes seem to have their own slightly different personalities, and all three entities move dynamically throughout the short.
I can’t even imagine the time and effort it must have taken to animate so much in such a short time frame. In less than three minutes, I don’t think the ghost girl repeats a single pose from segment to segment. She walks along with the shoes, she crawls after them on the ground like a cat, there’s a blink and you’ll miss it frame where she has to fix her hat, everything she does complements the shoes perfectly, and it never gets repetitive. It’s funny watching her try to get the shoes to cooperate with her, and once they do, everything moves so fast until the end, where they jut stop... And she stops as well, with the bittersweet smile of someone who knows that the life changing event they just experienced is over and about to become a memory.
One of the strongest aspects of Moses is how it uses contradiction to it’s advantage. The ghost is very clearly Japanese in design, all the way down to the fact that she’s a legless ghost(a staple of Japanese folklore), dancing to an extremely American song in tribute to an equally American movie. The ghost is drawn in 2D, but the shoes are 3D. The protagonist is dead, and yet she’s extremely lively, kind of having the time of her afterlife. We never find out why the shoes are able to move on their own, which is actually a good thing, because I feel like even the best explanation would just be distracting.
Like most dialogue-free shorts, Moses is kind of hard to describe with words alone. It’s something you just have to see, and the best part is, you can see it really easily. You can always go to Gagame’s youtube page, or, the entire short is available on Anilist as the ‘trailer’ of the anime. I’d highly recommend checking this out, and as short as it is, you can view the entire thing in the time it takes to microwave most frozen dinners. I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, I mean it does have a pretty mediocre score on the site so far, but I absolutely love it.
I give Gisoku no Moses a 9/10.