I'm not even sure what to call this show, since I wouldn't call it an anime or OVA. I don't recall seeing any animation; it's mostly just a long series of paintings shown one after another, each one being slowly panned over by the camera. And when I say that, I mean SLOWLY. Painfully slowly. You could probably watch this at 5x speed and not miss out on much. Some may argue that this pace allows every viewer ample time to scrutinise every fine detail of the paintings. Instead, it ensures that for each painting, every viewer is absolutely certain that they've seen enough.
The show repeatedly alternates between this snail's-pace slideshow and live-action shots of a man lazing around aimlessly. Many of these shots are set in an endless white void. It's hard to tell if it's meant to be a mediocre imitation of The Matrix or a pretentious, abstract visual metaphor for something (perhaps the show's amount of creativity and meaning).
Throughout all of this, there's some voiceover dialogue to accompany the visuals. But it just sounds like the rambling of an art student who's trying to sound profound but has nothing meaningful to say. Sometimes there will be ambient noise, which either *is* music or takes the place of music, depending on who you ask.
The only thing saving this show from being completely empty are a small number of close-up shots of an ant nearly drowning, only to be saved by the man. This is followed by an awkward shot of him holding it up to his face; I'm fairly certain they were trying to portray him as closely examining the ant while pondering the fragility of life, but to me, it just looked like he was gonna eat it. Combined with the dialogue, this sequence about the ant came off to me as an awkward attempt to make philosophical commentary on the nature life and death, while simultaneously trying to avoid the ire of whatever the Japanese equivalent of PETA is.
Overall, this show ends up feeling extremely pretentions, made only worse by how dreadfully slow it moves. There's virtually no story or characters to speak of, and whatever message they're attempting to communicate is vague and hollow. The sound is bland, the live-action scenes are either awkward or boring, and there's no animation to speak of. The art itself (i.e. the paintings) are not necessarily bad, but they're not great either. The live-action cinematography has a gloomy colour palette of black and white and grey, cloaked in a slight but noticeable tinge of mouldy yellow. Stylistically, the paintings and cinematography create an overarching sense of emptiness. Not the kind that's aesthetically or philosophically interesting, but the kind that bores you to sleep.
