I directed this year’s promotional video for the Japan Anti-Drug Addiction Campaign, “No Way. Absolutely Not.” When someone has come right up to the edge of the boundary, I wanted to portray the choice to turn back by one’s own will, rather than being stopped by someone else, and thought that perhaps the true meaning lies in the place one has returned to. Rather than presenting a bright future, I wanted to depict the moment of pausing at the very edge, and the beginning of a faint sense of recovery. The piece was structured based on the voices of researchers specializing in drug addiction and those with firsthand experience.

An animated work that uses a smartphone’s vertical screen to express a sense of gravity.

back number’s music video for “Aru Mirai yori Ai o Komete” was produced by qootain. The concept was jointly developed by back number’s Iyoru Shimizu and qootain’s Yukika Kawahara. Centered on the theme of “love and kindness” that embraces people’s regrets and suffering, this warm story was created using a variety of animation techniques.

Description: I want to keep a hamster. But someday, they will die. Could I endure that sadness and pain? No, I probably couldn’t. “Then why not just keep something that is already dead?” Thinking this way, the girl breathes life into various lifeless objects around her. So when will those already dead things die again? This work is an animation depicting the moment when “death” dies once more. By combining simplified, fancy characters with vividly shot live-action footage, the work creates a coexistence of cuteness and grotesquery, enhancing the appeal of each.