ROTH BART BARON “Howling at the Moon” MV Digital animation

We planned and produced the main visual and film for UNIQLO’s 2023 global holiday campaign. Set in a fictional cityscape centered around UNIQLO stores, we created a wimmelbook-style visual—an illustration packed with countless people and objects—that depicts people experiencing a variety of everyday “small joys.” Through the festive excitement of the holidays, it conveys UNIQLO’s “LifeWear” philosophy of delivering the ultimate everyday clothing to people around the world. We also produced a special film in which approximately 1,400 characters move around in animation, and it was rolled out across about 3,000 stores in 27 countries worldwide.

Official trailer for a film festival held at an airport. When making animations, I always go through trial and error and experiment every time, but I am constantly troubled by how hard it is to actually improve. If I boldly discard the things I have built up, I sometimes discover something new, or when I break through a certain stage, my vision suddenly opens up and I start to feel delighted. I feel as though I create while repeating this process of coming closer and moving away, becoming blurred and then clear again. The sound design includes the sounds of stationery and art materials used in the actual trailer production, as well as voices and singing from meetings. I hope viewers can feel the excitement of finally completing the work and setting off for the film festival.

A letter offered to a form of life called a virus, in hopes of coexistence. From a new perspective, it poetically expresses the relationship between humans and viruses. Created from the desire to merge analog methods with VR technology and to showcase the appeal of animation in a more自由な spatial environment.

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.

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.

We planned and produced a TV commercial for “Snow Sand,” a winter-only baked confection created by the sweets brand “SNOWS,” which launched in 2021. https://snows-winter.com/ As SNOWS’s first-ever commercial, we focused on how to bring the brand’s world to life on screen, and arrived at the idea of animating the works of printmaker Kazuyoshi Otani, whose art is also featured on the packaging, as faithfully as possible. By combining only the individual elements from Otani’s various print works, we depict the memory of a winter walk, with footprints as the protagonist. Designed to feel deliberately open and unhurried, the commercial offers viewers a slightly mysterious, relaxed moment when it airs among other information-heavy ads.

Animation created during the first year of graduate school. A woman is told by her doctor that she is pregnant. Shocked by the unexpected news, she drifts between delusion and hallucination. ASIAGRAPH 2011 Student Category, Selected for the Preliminary Round; Sendai/Miyagi Animation Grand Prix 2012, Student Category, Excellence Award.

Comedy animation created as a graduate thesis project. A story about a brother and younger brother who have turned into tomatoes. Screened at the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Film and New Media, Department of Animation, graduation exhibition “talk.” (March 8–11, 2012, Bashamichi Campus) Won the Grand Prize in the 17th Animation Kobe Digital Creators Contest.

日テレ系連続ドラマ「フランケンシュタインの恋」のPR用に制作された 物語の前章アニメーション フランケンシュタインのかいぶつがの誕生と孤独を表現。