YOASOBI "The Blessing" MV Animation Director Digital Animation

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 work was inspired by the simple question I once had while playing Pokémon: “What happens to the Pokémon that got away?” Created as a juvenile story together with novelist Yusaku Kitano, it depicts the beginnings of research encountered through play in a secret-base-like setting, with the goal of conveying to children the message that curiosity and a spirit of inquiry are what drive us to open up the world.

Planned as part of Suntory’s #ZONe IMMERSIVE SONG PROJECT. A novel served as the basis for the story, which was then expressed as a music video. The specific narrative was abstracted and visualized graphically by combining hand-drawn animation and motion graphics.