After School Midnighters


After School Midnighters is a 2012 Japanese computer animated comedy film directed by Hitoshi Takekiyo. It released on 25 August 2012 in Japan and was originally based upon a short film that Takekiyo had made for a musical channel.
The producers of After School Midnighters submitted the film for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but it was not selected for the final round. The film did go on to gain some attention at the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival earned a special mention for the Audience Award for Best Animation Feature, but did not win.
The movie was released in the United States on 2 September 2016, dubbed in English, on the television channel Toku, along with the short series based on the movie.

Plot

Three elementary school girls, Mako, Miko, and Mutsuko, decide to investigate the legends behind their school, St. Claire Elementary. As a lark they decide to vandalize the science room's human anatomy model Kunstrijk, who decides to take his own personal revenge on the three girls. He invites them to return to the school at midnight for a party, intending to scare them. Instead the three girls end up joining Kunstrijk and the skeleton model Goth on a quest to gain a wish. The girls must find three medallions that are spread out over the school's enormous grounds. Kunstrijk directs them to go to three rooms: the Pool Room, the Digital Room, and the Music Room. Each room has their own guardian that fits each area's themes, as the Pool Room is guarded by a merman, the Digital Room's guardians are two all-knowing beings, and the Music Room's guardian is Mozart himself. However the quest is made even more difficult as not everyone wants the girls to succeed and Kunstrijk is hiding his own secret reason for wanting the girls to succeed: the quest is actually to help ensure that he and Goth will remain in their living state forever rather than returning to inanimate objects.

Cast

Japanese cast

The character of Kunstlijk was originally created for a dialogue-less short film intended for a music video channel and Takekiyo had planned to film a further series of shorts around the anatomical model. Producer friends of Takekiyo convinced him to work on a feature-length film instead, which necessitated the creation of a script and the addition of various characters. The film quality also improved from the level seen in the short and Takekiyo stated that he found that "Getting the characters to really perform like actors was both the hardest part and the most important."

Reception

Dread Central gave the film 3 1/2 out of 5 blades, remarking that the "animation seems almost too two-dimensional at times, but it’s so colorful and dynamic that by the halfway point I was too wrapped up in the unfolding storyline to care" and that they saw the movie as a good introduction to the horror genre as a whole.