Tamura Shigeru’s A Piece of Phantasmagoria is an odd anime, even considered alongside its contemporaries in the diverse landscape of 1990s OVAs. A collection of 15 “episodes”, running approximately 5 minutes each, it plays out a bit like a leisurely travel guide to the Phantasmagoria of its title: a small planet existing somewhere on the border between fantastic science fiction and surreal dream.

Each of the 15 parts that make up the OVA introduces a new “small story” from the planet. Some of them are narrated by a voiceover (performed by Agata Morio and Cano Caoli), while others have only intertitle narration, of the sort you might see in a silent film, accompanied by Teshikai Utollo's enchanting soundtrack.

The narration often takes on the tone of an observer dispassionately chronicling events. The first part, for example, simply follows the daily life of the operator responsible for projecting the stars onto the night sky. Occasionally, they take on a more personal tone. One such part is narrated from the perspective of a scientist, Dr. Hoop, recording his attempts to build an artificial moon and his correspondence with a sick child.

All of the stories have a strange feeling of both distance and intimacy; like hearing a private anecdote about a friend of a friend, or looking through a window onto a scene that feels simultaneously mysterious and nostalgic.

The unusual format of the OVA is largely a consequence of A Piece of Phantasmagoria’s gestation in the earlier manga and picture books of its creator, Tamura Shigeru, as well as its previous incarnation as a CD-ROM "game". A Piece of Phantasmagoria can certainly be enjoyed as the singular and mysterious experience that it is, but intrigued viewers will find that English-language information about it is hard to come by. If you are approaching the OVA for the first time, and are more interested in getting a flavor of what it's actually like, then I recommend the other review here on Anilist. What I hope to provide with this review is a chronology, filling in the currently missing context that will be of interest to anyone wanting to learn about A Piece of Phantasmagoria, its creator, and how the OVA came to exist in this unusual form.

Tamura Shigeru is probably best known in the English-speaking anime community for his short OVA Glassy Ocean (1998). Together with A Piece of Phantasmagoria (1999) and an earlier OVA, Ginga no Uo: Ursa Minor Blue (1993), these anime from the 1990s were the culmination and development of a larger body of visual work that started in the late 1970s among the pages of legendary alt-manga magazine Garo.

"Phantasmagoria" itself first appeared as the title of a series of oneshots published in Garo during the first half of the 1980s. In the series, Tamura developed the world and the style with which his name and his planet, Phantasmagoria, are now associated: slow, gentle, mysterious, evocative, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy, always imbued with a casual but infectious curiosity for the undeniably unusual but beautiful world of which each individual story shows only a small part.

####An example of Tamura's manga:「クジラの跳躍」from 1985, later adapted in the Glassy Ocean OVA. ‍ Following the release of two anthologies collecting his manga from Garo and elsewhere—Small Planet and Suishou-Gari, published in 1985 and 86 respectively—Tamura began to move away from drawing manga and towards more illustration work. Phantasmagoria's first depiction as a planet followed shortly after, when it appeared, already almost fully formed, on a promotional calendar included in a 1987 issue of the magazine Takusan no Fushigi.

Two years later, Tamura published an art book, simply titled Phantasmagoria (1989). As well as collecting selected images from Tamura’s picture books, short comic strips, miscellaneous art projects, and sketches, the book contains a section titled “Planet” which depicts various locations from around Phantasmagoria, along with short snippets of information about them.

Tamura credits the core idea to the book's designer, Okamoto Issen, who apparently suggested formatting the contents page of the art book as a map of the planet. Tamura took up this idea, using the calendar illustration, and stitching together the disparate scenes shown in his illustrations and manga. This was the major step towards the creation of the unified, interconnected world seen in A Piece of Phantasmagoria, and established the direction of much of Tamura's subsequent work.

####Phantasmagoria as seen on the contents pages of the art book, and two pages showing locations on the Glassy Ocean. ‍ The publication of the Phantasmagoria art book marked another turning point in Tamura's career after his move away from manga, as he soon began developing animated versions of his stories. First came the previously mentioned Ginga no Uo: Ursa Minor Blue OVA in 1993, adapted from his 1980 manga oneshot of the same name and directed by Tamura himself.

Soon after, the producer of that OVA, Shionaga Mitsuo, approached Tamura with the idea of creating a CD-ROM "game" that would take Tamura's illustrations and transform them into an animated atlas of sorts. In this simple point-and-click game, released in 1995 and advertised as "an interactive way to enjoy the art and stories of Phantasmagoria", the player can travel to the various locations on the planet, see the small happenings of its environments and inhabitants, and occasionally interact with them to learn more.

####"The Star Fish seem happy", from the Phantasmagoria CD-ROM. ‍ It was from this CD-ROM that the A Piece of Phantasmagoria OVA was assembled. The animations for the CD-ROM were created in Macromedia Director, a precursor to the later ubiquitous Adobe Flash, and primarily consist of small loops that are triggered when the player visits the various locations. Released four years later, in 1999, the OVA utilizes these same animations, as well as Teshikai's soundtrack, but adds the voiceover and narrative structure to create the 15 short stories that make up the OVA. The unusual format and style of the OVA are a result of its construction out of the materials originally produced for the CD-ROM.

Just as the Phantasmagoria art book built on the locations depicted in Tamura's early manga, and the CD-ROM expanded upon the illustrations from the art book, the OVA iterated on the development of Phantasmagoria again by offering a closer look at some of the characters that had appeared previously only fleetingly. Indeed, it was initially promoted as this expansion of Tamura's world, aimed at fans who perhaps had read the book, or played the CD-ROM, and wondered about the stories behind the planet's inhabitants.

####A Star Head visits the Liquor Shop while trying to find the Altair Bar; an example of how the locations from the game were edited together to produce the stories in the OVA. ‍ As I mentioned near the top of this review, I think that A Piece of Phantasmagoria can be enjoyed simply as a singular and mysterious experience; a charming and enigmatic example of anime doing something different from the norm, deeply nostalgic yet enticingly strange. While it is that, it is also a development of ideas that had been present already in the various formats in which Phantasmagoria had appeared. This is a development that began in Tamura's early manga and continued beyond the release of the OVA: a year later, Tamura returned to drawing manga for the twelve adventures of Dr. Hoop and his robot assistant, Lancelot, contained in Phantasmagoria Days.

As far as I'm aware, apart from some scattered illustrations, Phantasmagoria Days was the last time that Tamura emerged from the realm of dreams with tales of his small planet. While there may not have been any recent developments, there remains a wealth of Phantasmagoria material in Tamura’s back catalogue that has yet to be made available at all in English. Here’s hoping that one day it will be.