Shojiro Nishimi

Six interlocking stories reveal Bruce Wayne's earliest adventures as Batman and the steps he took to become the grim avenger of Gotham City.

Ran’s secret past revealed! Ten years ago, something happened between her mom and dad. Now, plagued by nightmares, Ran is starting to remember… Meanwhile, a murderous card dealer breaks out of jail to seek revenge. His target: Ran’s father. Can Conan stop him in time and save his girlfriend’s family?

Momoko, a strange and seemingly emotionless girl obsessed with 18th century France, befriends a Yanki biker and the two experience the ups and downs of their unusual lives in a rural Japanese town.

Two penniless orphans, Black and White, struggle to survive on the mean streets of Treasure Town. When a megacorporation threatens to tear down the town to build an amusement park, Black and White engage in the fight of their life.

The Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister) go on a quest to find a fallen wishing star to help Dot with her illness. Unfortunately the rest of the town, including an evil king, also hear about the star and want to get to it first to have their own wishes come true. It's a race against time and it's up to the three zany siblings to get there first.

Shin-chan and his friends travel to India for a dance festival, but Bo-chan accidentally becomes possessed by an evil force from a mysterious backpack and turns into a powerful tyrant. Now, the Kasukabe Guard must work together to save Bo-chan and stop his rampage.

A simple diamond heist leads Lupin into the machinations of a bizarre cult based around the prophecies of Nostradamus. They kidnap Julia, the daughter of Douglas, a wealthy American who is seeking the presidency, along with Lupin's diamond. At stake is the lost book of prophecy Douglas holds in the vault at the top of his skyscraper.

Angelino is just one of thousands of deadbeats living in Dark Meat City. But an otherwise unremarkable scooter accident caused by a beautiful, mysterious stranger is about to transform his life... into a waking nightmare! He starts seeing monstrous forms prowling around all over the city... Is Angelino losing his mind, or could an alien invasion really be happening this quietly...?

Nishi is a loser who has a crush on his childhood girlfriend. After an encounter with the Japanese mafia, he journeys to heaven and back, and ends up trapped in an even more unlikely place.

Term-time ends at Acme Looniversity and the Tiny Toon characters look forward to a summer filled with fun. Buster and Babs Bunny turn a water fight into a white-water rafting trip through the dangerous Deep South; Plucky Duck and Hamton Pig share the most impossibly awful car journey imaginable on the way to HappyWorldLand; Fifi's blind date becomes a "skunknophobic" nightmare; and a safari park is turned upside-down by Elmyra's search for "cute little kitties to hug and squeeze".

15 one-minute shorts created by various people from Japan's animation industry. The title of the collection, Ani*Kuri15, is abbreviated from the words "anime" and "creators".

The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.

How hard is it to kill an idiot? Just ask Kudo Kankuro! The acclaimed screenwriter brings his 2004 Kunio Kishida-winning stage play Donju (a.k.a. Dumb Animal) to the big screen in all its wacky tragicomedic glory. The one and only Asano Tadanobu sports a seriously nerdy bowl haircut to play the leading role of simple-minded novelist Dekogawa who has mysteriously disappeared. Dekogawa wrote an autobiography about his youth that reveals not only his past, but also some of his childhood friends’ best-forgotten secrets. In order to keep the skeletons in the closet, these buddies of yesteryear try to silence him permanently. But no matter how hard they try to kill Dekogawa, he just keeps coming back – because he’s simply too thickheaded to die!

From time immemorial to the age of space colonization, there is one legend that has stayed unchanged in every history book—the tale of the immortal bird Phoenix. A being whose blood is said to grant eternal life or wisdom, the radiant figure ensures the continuation of sentient life in the universe as it oversees human civilizations and their development. Yet, mankind remains a slave to its habits; from happiness and sorrow, to wrath and love, a myriad of emotions continue to play an integral part of human life. Simultaneously, time and time again, certain beliefs and agendas persist over the centuries to disturb the fragile equilibrium of the world's preordained nature and principles. It appears that fate and its dynamic variables can manifest itself in many ways—and oftentimes exhibits a bizarre sense of humor…

Akira Yuki has spent years honing his skills under the guidance of his grandfather. Meanwhile, a nefarious robotics scientist, Eva Durix, desires to create the perfect soldier. Eva kidnaps Sarah Bryant, a close acquaintance of Akira and now he must now fight his way to Sarah to save her.

In the age of space exploration, Romi and George flee a devastated Earth in search of a new world.

Ani-Kuri 15 is a series of fifteen 1-minute shorts that aired on the Japanese TV station, NHK between May 2007 and 2008. Intended as companion pieces to the AniKuri program and as filler between regularly scheduled programs, the shorts were broadcast in three seasons of 5 episodes. Each short was directed by a different director and the episodes were collected and uploaded to the official AniKuri15 website in 2008.