Fifteen minutes in and your ears feel like they've been through something. Koji Morimoto and Studio 4"C build Cahmpon as a city where sound itself is contraband, and Noiseman doesn't silence music so much as harvest it, snapping songs into crystal like bugs in amber. The animation moves the way noise does, rubbery, warping, hand-drawn linework smashed against 1997-vintage CGI that nobody else was brave enough to try yet, and Yoko Kanno's score is the whole argument for why the biker kids fight back. Yes, it's short, and yes, the plot is barely a sketch. That's the trade. You take a thesis on who owns the airwaves and you get it delivered as pure kinetic assault instead of dialogue. Watch it before Mind Game or Tekkonkinkreet and you'll see exactly where that studio's whole nervous system came from.

Cahmpon is a city of the distant future. There, a scientist brings to life an artificial being called Noiseman, which strips music from the airwaves and transforms it into crystals. Against this oppressive silencing, a band of young street bikers decides to fight back. The result is a single-episode 1997 film that mixes action, fantasy and science fiction.