Chalk-iro no People

After Heart Cocktail, Watase Seizou released three more anime OVAs based on his stories:

• 1987: Boku no Oldies wa All-Color (My All-Color Oldies)
  
• 1988: Chalk-iro no People (Chalk-Colored People)
  
• 1992: Two on the Road

Like Heart Cocktail, these OVAs never made it across the Digital Divide and are available only on VHS tape and laserdisc. (Oldies and Two aren't even listed in AniDB.) Unlike Heart Cocktail, they have minimal animation and no dialog. Like a silent movie (or A-Girl), they have constant music, and signs or intertitles provide the dialog. The signs conveying the dialog are set as ordinary subtitles; only actual signs have been typeset.

Chalk-iro no People (Chalk-Colored People) is a bit of a departure from Heart Cocktail. Instead of centering around the theme of romance, it tells stories set in or near a single apartment house, a chalk-colored four-story building near the seashore. The stories also depart from the usual 4-5 minute running time; the longest is 14 minutes, and several of the others around 10 minutes. Most of them are rather downbeat.

The stories are:

The Building that Cries in the Wind. A boy visits his divorced father and his new stepmother, who live in the chalk-colored building.

Older Brother and Younger Sister. A painter, separated from her brother since childhood, is approached by a stranger who wants to buy an "unsellable" painting.

Uchuu notes that the car is probably a Buick Super V8.

The Sidecar Is Reserved for You. A young man returns home in order to propose to his widowed sister-in-law, whom he has loved secretly for a long time.

Sometimes I'm Happy. A man tries to borrow money from the master of bar "Sometimes," using his wife as collateral.

Santa's Quartet. A communications officer, involved in an unnecessary civilian killing at the chalk-colored building during World War II, tries to make amends every Christmas.

In addition to the usual soft-jazz background music, the show features two songs by the great Brazilian jazz singer Astrud Gilberto: "Where Are You Now?" and "Tempos Antigos." The latter is in Portuguese.

As with Boku no Oldies wa All-Color, Darkonius (DarkWispers), MartyMcflies (LonelyChaser), and I (Orphan) collaborated on this project, our ninth join release. Darkonius translated and rough timed. I fine timed, edited, and typeset. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed. Rezo encoded from a Japanese laserdisc ripped on the Domesday Duplicator by an anonymous friend

You can get Chalk-iro no People from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.

P.S. We have a raw for Two on the Road and will get to it Real Soon™.