Back in 2000 give or take a year, I found out about Anime. I had known about it for some time but never had any major interest in it until I had gotten a whiff of Sailor Moon. I know, that’s the silliest one of all but if you read the books and really get into the story beyond the animated storyline, it’s not half bad. Well getting into Anime, I became obsessed with looking up Japanese things of a generally fun nature online like flash games and such. One of the sites (now defunct) that I loved was Shockwave Japan. They had some very fun games and interactive cartoons. The one I remember best in the cartoon section was something called Tabibito. The company that worked on it was Robot.
I got an inkling they were a kind of multimedia company that did everything from animation to interactive sites. I didn’t get too into their company’s background seeing the info was all in Japanese but I kept up with the whole Tabibito animation and was sad I couldn’t buy their video of it with extras. It was only for Japan and no english subs.
Coming to the present, I was cleaning out my tons of bookmarks I’ve collected for the past 10 years. Had the same file and keep adding to it so I thought there must be a few dead sites or links in the mix. As I cleaned them up I found an old link to the Robot site. It wasn’t working but the main site was and that’s where I found a very cute project they created. Not sure of the reason behind it but it’s called Tunagaru no Uta (Connection Song.) It’s a very cute song (wish I had lyrics to learn it) and there is an English translation of the song on their site but what’s very cool about this project is the video part. All I can think to relate it to is a family trip to Epcot when I was 15 and we saw the China exhibit. They had a very cool IMAX type interactive movie where you were in a circular room and as you looked ahead at the front screen you had a first person view of a man riding on a bike through a Chinese city. If you turned around, the back screen has the view you just left from the front view. It was amazing to me at the time and I was fascinated by the concept.
Robot had done something very similar on their site with Tunagaru no Uta. I won’t spoil it but please go see the site for yourself, turn up the volume, click play and watch the screen. It’s very cool and fun what happens. I am not a coder (beyond basic HTML) but this just made me smile and feel all giddy but I like things like this that are unexpected.
Let me know what you think. I found it one of the more impressive projects I’ve seen on sites online and have been trying to share it with as many people as I can.
Bluegirl Graphics 