Robu (18:19)
Dust.tv; IMDb; official website; YouTube

This 2019 short film was presented by Dust in 2021.

An American teenager named Rob visits Japan to search for the second issue of a manga his father had left him, apparently before he died. There's a note at the end of the first issue that says the second one's even better, so Rob is desperate to find it. But none of the places he looks have it. Meanwhile, he meets a Japanese guy named Yuuki, who wants to practice his English. (He calls Rob "Robu".) Rob reads the first issue of the manga to him and a group of other people who don't speak English, but they all want to know what happens next, so they become invested in Rob's search for the second issue. (And so did I.) The strange thing is that occasionally Rob notices scenes in the manga that look like various places and things he's seeing in real life, which ultimately leads him to find... something. I don't want to spoil it, but it's definitely cool.

Anyway, I wasn't sure what category to put my review in. Dust calls it "sci-fi fantasy", but neither of those genres seem quite right to me. I could have called it "surreal", but I think "quirky" is maybe the closest fit. I don't know what else to say except that it's definitely an interesting short film with decent characters.