A music video created for an in-game song from Bandai Namco Entertainment’s social game The Idolmaster Gakuen. The character Hanami Saki was a top athlete in track and field before aspiring to become an idol, and she has a past in which, due to being a late bloomer, she confronted the limits of her abilities at a young age and suffered setbacks. The song’s theme portrays her “setbacks and challenges,” making for an absurd tale in which she moves back and forth between the reality of the setbacks she experienced in the past and the uncertain glory of the future. In the end, she attempts to break through her own limits. To make this pulp-fiction-like story convincing, we aimed for a meditative music video in which the past and future are suspended, combining the image of sequential photographs that draw the viewer’s consciousness back into the past with animation that propels her into the future to the sound of drum and bass. The spirit of craving victory that she cultivated in her years as an athlete, caught between ideals and reality, shakes off notions of records and victory created by others through the act of “running.” By adopting abstract smear frames and a rough, painterly style, we sought to convey, in a sensory way, her spiritual rebirth as an idol (a performer).

The words of Tahi Saihate, who has created many poems about constellations and the universe, leap off the page and light up the planetarium. Even the mythological explanations that connect one poem to another are entirely in the poet’s own words. Please enjoy this new kind of planetarium, where you can savor poems that shimmer in the night sky.

Ending animation for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, which aired from October to December 2022. This work is the first school-themed story in the Gundam series. The two characters appearing in the film are Suletta, a girl who transferred in from Mercury, and Miorine, the daughter of the president of a mobile suit development corporation group. Their relationship is portrayed through enclosed, garden-like spaces such as cockpits and the academy, as well as the curses they each bear, with mirrors and barriers evoked from the motif of “witch,” and those images are rendered more symbolically through reflected and refracted spaces using minerals as a metaphor.

Ending animation for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2, broadcast from April to July 2023. To weave the story of Season 2 together through symbolic visuals, the main keywords were “synesthesia” and “dreamlike theater,” and the animation was created to move between the hearts of the protagonist Suletta (the red-haired girl) and Miorine (the white-haired girl). In the story, the two protagonists’ hearts continue to miss each other, and this was symbolically expressed by showing Suletta standing on a theater stage and Miorine projected from a film projector, physically passing by one another, representing their relationship. Within the main story, there are references reminiscent of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the ED animation also begins with an opening shot inspired by stage drama. It was created with the image of characters who operate behind the scenes, as if making the two protagonists dance on the stage set called the school. On the other hand, by giving it a strong film-grain look, the animation symbolically expresses how the protagonists struggle against the story burned into film as “the curse of Gundam.”

This is the sixth ending theme for the TV anime “Ahare! Meisaku-kun,” based on an original work by Takato Shinkai and featuring character designs by JUN OSON. The concept imitates the “before-and-after” effect often seen on Instagram and TikTok, where the camera lens is covered by a hand to create a transition. It proposes a scenario in which Meisaku, who is seriously cleaning, transforms into a classmate who messes around while cleaning. Illustrator docco joined as the character designer, resulting in a “reverse deformed” design with more realistic proportions.

Music video for “Mondaina Tripper!” sung by virtual YouTuber Sana Natori. Usually living in a virtual sanatorium, Sana Natori enjoys traveling the world with her friends. However, she comes to realize that the experience is not taking place in the real world but is instead virtual, and she gradually loses the ability to distinguish reality from fiction. Co-director Wataru Uekusa, an animation artist, handled character design and key animation. Ohashi was responsible for compositing and motion graphics overall.

Produced a teaser movie for “100 Video Creators,” an annual publication by BNN that selects unique video creators each year. To express the image of an annual volume encompassing a wide variety of video creators, we conceived a personification of the color bars. The colored panels of the bars split apart, and each dances as if freely expressing itself in its own way. Then, peering into the creators’ minds, geometric graphics, brushstrokes, and abstract effects swirl wildly, suggesting the diversified range of visual techniques.

“Chimera Project,” an original concept, story, and character design by voice actress Aoi Yuki. It tells the story of Chimerios, or chimeras, born from the words spoken by humans through virtual communication such as social media. The seven Chimerios are characters personifying the days of the week: for example, Monday is gloomy because it comes right after the weekend, while Friday has a carefree, party-loving personality because it comes just before the break. While expressing the Chimerios’ terrifying yet adorable world, the music video depicts their desire to eat the words spoken by humans.

ONE DAY, 2050 / Sci-Fi Prototyping is a project in which SONY’s young designers and a leading science-fiction writer use “Sci-Fi Prototyping” to create a 10,000-character short story set in Tokyo in 2050, themed around diverse forms of romance, along with future products that appear in the story, which are mocked up and exhibited as design fiction at SONY Park in Ginza, Tokyo. Ohashi collaborated with illustrator Kazuya Kikkawa and animation artist Kazuki Sekiguchi to create an animated work like a film teaser that draws interest in the original novel’s story by incorporating the design fiction exhibited at the venue into the short story “Kimi ka Kimi ka.” Using halftones and dithering, the work portrays the hopeful vision of future products and the distance that emerges between the protagonists, Ichiu and Yori, after a certain incident, in a clean, dry visual style.

Music video included on the first-press bonus edition of rapper-singer DAOKO’s second album. Since the song title is “Boku,” we developed the idea of “selfies and Instagram,” and because it was also meant to be an animated MV, we planned to use photographs for the backgrounds in order to reduce production time while improving quality. Based on that, we proposed a plot in which “while playing with an AR selfie app, you get sucked into an AR world and drift through cyberspace.” In keeping with lyrics that suggest DAOKO, after her major-label debut, gained new fans while also losing old ones, the MV depicts high school–aged daoko confronting the post-major-debut DAOKO, with the unsettling story gradually unfolding as her personality is peeled away, like a broken link on a website.

This music video is for “Tomadoi Telepathy,” a tie-in song for NTT Docomo’s next-generation communications standard, 5G, sung by the virtual singer KAFU. To interpret next-generation communications standard “5G” as a metaphor for high-speed internet, we proposed the concept of “KAFU taking part in a VR racing game.” With future-forward art direction reminiscent of WipeOut and RedOut, and the extreme racing action unique to anti-gravity racing games, the video expresses an image of the internet space of the future. Two perspectives were deliberately depicted in this MV. One is KAFU’s first-person perspective as she immerses herself in a racing game as a metaphor for the future internet space; the other is a third-person perspective, composed like manga panel layouts using graphics modeled after desktop browser windows. An MV can sometimes feel awkward when a manga-like panel structure does not align with the music’s tone, but by styling the panels after browser windows, the direction more strongly reinforces the internet-space theme that is the subject of the MV. The racing scenes using VR goggles serve as a metaphor for the next-generation internet space, while also representing a first-person perspective immersed in that space. The visuals of the racing scenes draw inspiration from WipeOut, whose art direction was handled by Designers Republic, but turning the parody of a specific title into the concept itself could never rival an MV made in MAD style. So while retaining the futuristic feel, we used a vividly primary-color palette reminiscent of web 1.0, and forcibly arranged backgrounds made from 2D graphics and photo collages into a 3D space to create the image of the internet as a circuit course. The racing craft were also designed in an avatar-like style by making the racer visible on a Mario Kart-like vehicle, and by unifying the characters’ base forms into silhouettes that resemble the figure eight. The avatar designs drew on icons symbolizing net culture—such as Mona from 2channel ASCII art, vaporwave-style plaster busts, and emoji motifs—to depict lively racing scenes. In the racing scenes, motion blur was applied to the backgrounds to express an overwhelming sense of speed. If standard After Effects motion blur is used, it tends to suggest the subject itself is blurred due to the lens shutter speed. To evoke a digital space made of accumulated bitmaps, the render settings were set to “Draft” so that the output would not use anti-aliasing. For the blur effect, we used a Displacement Map effect, which is often employed to simulate datamosh. By assigning a striped graphic as the map layer, the motif silhouettes are distorted as if with speed lines, and together with the camera work, a pseudo-motion blur can be created.

Under the mission of “conveying the appeal of music,” this Space Shower TV station ID depicts the introspective world of audiences immersed in music at live houses and clubs. By surrendering themselves to the rhythms and beats of the music, their bodies take on abstract forms reminiscent of Paul Klee’s paintings, and the listeners melt into the music as part of it, while vibrant colors as if bathed in colored light metaphorically express an unreal, vivid musical experience through animation.

Music video for “cat step,” from daisuke tanabe’s latest EP “cat steps,” released in 2018. As the title suggests, it is an animated work in which a cat dances to the music. The entire piece is set in a world designed with rectangles, and the visuals begin to move in response to the track, as if a piano roll in a DAW had been brought to life.

The music video for “Geki Yaba ∞ Boocan!!,” the first anime tie-in song by the DearStage-affiliated idol group Dempagumi.inc, which began at a maid café in Akihabara. Inspired by the lyrics evoking destruction and by Dempagumi’s emotional state, the concept of a “super special move” was launched. I&S BBDO’s Go Nagasaki handled the concept (along with the finer fighting-game references), while Toshitaka Shinoda directed the visuals (live-action segments and emotional tone) and Ohashi (CG, animation, and fighting-game references) was in charge of the rest. To convey the image of them carrying the culture as an idol group rooted in Akiba, the fighting-game aesthetic was expressed not as traditional pixel art, but through modern-looking 3DCG, crisp graphics, and CG-rendered images of destruction, highlighting their distinctive presence as more than just cute.

This music video is for the lead track from BURNOUT SYNDROMES’ final indie-era album. Built around poetry readings quoting classic works of literature and lyrics by vocalist Kumagai, who spent his school days in a state of frustration and melancholy, the song combines a band arrangement that nonetheless feels uplifting with a wealth of inventive touches that can’t be summed up simply as “downer.” At the suggestion of art director Kawamoto, we were asked to create a lyric video using “letters and a girl motif as the core elements.” So we decided to visualize Kumagai’s gloomy student days, as described in the lyrics, in a straightforward way. Even with typography as the main motif, we wanted it to have a distinctive feel, so we broke down and reconstructed the letter elements to create new characters, and used those elements to depict concrete motifs, putting effort into staging that could captivate viewers through the forms of the typeface alone. The girl’s animation was based on character designs by Kaneko Kaihatsu, then redesigned by Tomoeki Nakauchi, Wataru Uekusa, and koya, with an attempt to change the visual style for each part of the song.

FILMOGRAPHY 2018 “Hyper Montage” edit: takashi ohashi music: tomggg soundcloud.com/tomggg FILMOGRAPHY 2018-2013 DAOKO “Boku (Re-Arranged by STUTS)” Mousou Calibration “Gekiyaba∞Bokkaan!!” Ayana Taketatsu “OH MY Sugar Feeling!!” BURNOUT SYNDROMES “Bungakushoujo” Gogoshichisan'niijuu “Shimaji Ittai” NHK Educational TV “Ahare! Meisaku-kun” Season 3 ED NHK Saturday Drama “Shigou Keibi OP Title Back” Mousou Calibration “Chichin Pui Pui” Arts Council Tokyo “Zoning Tokyo” Sayonara Ponytail “Matenrou to Rinkaiten” Megu to Patron “Pari Pari Paarii” MTV IDENT [BRDG022] nakaniwa Koukou | koukou

Fumi Oohashi’s showreel. A CG animation work in which words, text, graphic scores, characters, and more unfold rhythmically and with a pop sensibility. Set to a lively BGM reminiscent of chiptune, it weaves together a lighthearted and charming visual world.

A commemorative video work for the collaboration between the gaming fashion brand “Vaultroom” and “chroNoiR,” the unit formed by two of Japan’s top VTubers, Kuzuha and Kanae. The base animation was produced by a TV anime production company, and then finished by Director of Photography Fumi Ohashi into a pixelated look never seen in a TV anime. The aim was to create a new work that blends the strengths of TV anime and individual creators.

Music video for the original song “Mondai Night Tripper!” by virtual YouTuber Sana Natori. This work is themed around “the internet x travel.” While aiming to faithfully recreate the world of the song by sasakure.UK, this piece was created with the hope of positively embracing the ever-expanding world in which the boundaries between the internet and reality are steadily fading away.