Aiming for the kind of thrill that makes your mouth corners rise involuntarily, as if you’ve seen something you were never supposed to see, I expressed Insekai Joucho’s sacred atmosphere with regular, inorganic shapes, and contrasted it with visceral motion and grotesque, unsettling elements rendered in a poppy 2D look. For the lyrics, since I was thinking about the image of movement before the form itself, I created the lyric motion in Cinema 4D, where I could make the movements just as I envisioned them.

Inspired by the title “The Last Man in Europe,” one of the other proposed titles for George Orwell’s science fiction novel 1984, I created a story about a protagonist being swallowed up by internet society. For the world-building, I drew influence not only from 1984 but also from PSYCHO-PASS and Discipline and Punish. I tried to portray contemporary society as a sacred yet eerie world permeated by gods, likening the internet itself, or the “sense of common decency” fostered there, to God as an omnipresent watcher, and smartphones, as internet devices, to angels as God’s messengers. The protagonist, an existence before being exposed to God’s surveillance—that is, before internalizing the watcher—is modeled on the devil, the symbol of chaos and the antithesis of angels. I personally like the atmosphere in which mischief and a sense of tragedy coexist, so the overall design ended up having a cute quality. Since the comic panel layout was a familiar structure for depicting the story, I organized the sequence of information toward the climax and carefully examined the role and function of each cut.