At eight years old, Yong lives with anxiety and questions about parting with her pet cat Kiku, as well as about keeping Kiku confined in a narrow human home. Yong’s mother takes her to a house in the woods to view a new home… A reflection on childhood memories of growing up with cats, and on the lives of creatures that continue to seek a comfortable place to live.

Mimi was fed up with how pathetic she felt she had become. One day, as she was walking along as usual with her head down, a suspicious flyer caught her eye. A graduation film from the Department of Animation at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts.

One day, the protagonist watched a film with friends. The protagonist voiced dissatisfaction at how boring the film was, but for some reason, no one agreed. A first-year production from the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts.

Original short film Hand-drawn animation Pencil, ink, acrylic

Original short film Hand-drawn animation, pencil, ink, acrylic

Since I was born, the moon has orbited the Earth 9,125 times. In that time, we have all grown up, but the moon seems never to age. A story of a granddaughter’s relationship with her grandmother, and witnessing her death.

A fox studying abroad in a foreign city. In the monotony of everyday life, even its connections with others feel flat, and homesickness grows stronger. Then one day, the fox picks up the curiosity it had lost and finds an answer of its own.

It should have shrunk, but it swelled; when it floated, it sank. You thought you were apart, but you’re connected; you think you’re watching, but you’re being watched. An elegant animated poem that weaves together days through observation, recording, and experimentation.

For a long time, every house in this country was inhabited by the yokai known as Yanari, or “house-rattlers.” But as wooden houses gradually fell into decline, they came to be inhabited only by the hard of hearing elderly, and the voices of the house-rattlers could no longer be heard. The house-rattlers sometimes feel lonely about that. The protagonist of this work is a small yokai, only a few inches tall, called “Yanari,” which appears in Japanese folklore. It has long been believed that the strange creaking and other mysterious sounds sometimes heard inside houses are the work of these beings, who try to startle the residents. In Japan, people have long believed that the homes they live in, like the house-rattlers, contain unseen shadowy aspects, and they have feared them, calling them “oni” and treating them as something distant from everyday life. Today, this culture is fading, and the residents who once sensed “oni” have grown old, as if living on the side of the oni as shadows of modern, bright society. This work is a video piece that depicts the figures of elderly people being left behind by contemporary society and creatures from folklore, using effects of shadow and light. This is an animated work shot by physically moving dolls on location in my grandmother’s 80-year-old house in a depopulated port town. That house had long accepted and seen off many residents over its 80-year history, and because it still bore traces of the lives they had lived there, I always felt the presence of something “uncanny” whenever I heard a house-rattler in the house, and as a child I was always afraid. In this work, faint natural light, shadows, and the contrast of light and dark shining through the transom were used to create effective boundaries between bright and dark areas inside a Japanese house. I attempted to recreate the folklore creature moving between light and shadow using actual dolls, making it seem as if it truly existed. By filming the dolls at their actual size as the scale of “Yanari,” I aimed to blend our everyday world with the world of animation, and to visualize the eerie presence lurking within the Japanese house.

This work is an animation based on my past experience of confronting death for the first time, set on the Shimanami Kaido. In some regions across Japan, there is a custom called “honekami,” in which, after cremation, one eats the bones of the dead in an attempt to take them into oneself and overcome grief. Whether I wanted it or not, my family in my hometown had this custom. The first death I experienced was my father’s, but when I was made to try “honekami” as part of the ritual, I could not bring myself to chew the bones. That became a childhood trauma: an experience of being unable to face my father’s death directly, and not knowing how to accept it. Like an imaginary bone stuck in my throat, it could not be put into words, nor could it be forgotten. More than ten years have passed since I left my small, distant hometown at the age of 15. Fireworks storage buildings still remain along the island’s coast. The fact that there were fireworks magazines, rather than air-raid shelters, in my neighborhood made me feel that death and merciless violence existed for me not as something to be endured, but as something to be inflicted. When I think about these things as an adult, I came to link my father’s bones with the fire in the fireworks magazine, and decided to face “honekami” once again. The island’s landscape and sea are full of life, and within their calmness there is an unchanging severity. The shadows of the dead still exist in the same space and time, both now and in the past. Through this project, by blurring the boundary between life and death, I sought to create a confrontation with the bones I could not chew. The visual concept of this project was to merge natural landscapes with childhood memories, and to visually bring memories to life through the accumulation of dots. For this reason, I used colored pens to layer pointillist dots on paper, then filmed the paper under a camera while placing it over transmitted light. In doing so, I hoped to entrust the haziness of memory and the emotions of childhood to the technique as particles of colored light.

Various patterns of life and death glimpsed in the moments before drifting off on an operating table. Did the surgery end safely? Is the patient alive now? This work is a stereoscopic experimental film inspired by the creator’s own experience of, upon waking from a dream, sensing that the left eye and the right eye were seeing different worlds. In addition to creating a sense of depth across layers, the hand-colored metamorphosis animation drawn on paper was transferred into digital form, after which rounded contours were added to match the shapes. We also studied how to achieve a visual balance in expressing the idea that the left eye and the right eye are seeing different worlds, and made careful adjustments repeatedly.

ドローイングで制作されたアニメーション・ショートフィルム。娘の父親殺しというハードなテーマを、緩めのキャラクターデザインで描く。「死」と「無意識」と「自然」が少女の世界に何をもたらすのか、または何を浮かび上がらせるのか。ノンナレーションで没入する孤独の世界を、表象と演技にフォーカスして制作。アニメーションが生む、夢と現実の狭間の物語。