Eternity

First of all, understand that Mirai Mizue is to animation what an abstract artist like Georgia O'Keefe or Wassily Kandinsky is to painting. You won't find a story or a particular subject image here, just like you won't find one in a Jackson Pollack splash canvas - that's the whole point, you look for the beauty in the way the subject-less chaos nevertheless comes together into beautiful order, or from how the animation techniques themselves are explored, and/or perhaps from the evocative feelings the whole combined thing gives you in a more nebulous way. Common themes which Mizue likes to explore in his works are passagesof time and how structures like the human body are made up of smaller elements. Many of Mizue's works are based on looking for new ways to express or connect to those notions in the medium of animation, and both are present here. Much like its name suggests, ETERNITY is about evoking feelings of cyclical, or perhaps even infinite time, through abstract animation and music alone. The first 5 minutes are not unlike a typical Mizue short: a small template of recurring visual assets, edited into large kaleidoscopic moving tableaus, all divided into 4 sub-chapters that each present one main visual motif. But then the short repeats... and again... and again. Each of the four cycles repeats the same sub-chapters with the same repeated visual motifs, like we are trapped in an endless cycle for... well, for ETERNITY. But each repetition adds variation, adds more complexity to the previous iteration of each sub-chapter. The chaos becomes more chaotic, more and more visual assets are put on screen, but from it all comes more colour and, ultimately, a greater sense of order and an even more beautiful display. Admittedly, I was surprised to find that the last cycle was labeled as the "Final" one, as I would have thought that there would be an implication that this cycle could continue on forever, growing grander and grander every time, for all of eternity. Nevertheless, if one does indeed wish to view the fourth cycle as the final one, it serves well as a climax to the piece, especially with the fitting soundtrack. (Scored 9/10 only because MAL requires a score but really no score can accurately reflect a work like this; numerically "scoring" an abstract independent short film made for festival circuits and art displays in the same way as a commercially-made television series or theatrical film is an inherently futile endeavour.)