The streets of Harajuku in Japan are overflowing with Kawaii, a chaotic yet pure and unfiltered youthfulness. I walked through Harajuku several times while making this music video, and I wondered what “love” in this city would look like visually. After listening to City Cyndrome’s music, I wanted to create an animation that captures the intersection of the perspectives of a tough woman and a Harajuku boy, their near-misses, and an almost arrogantly personal point of view. As for the technique, I started by drawing with air spray and watercolor.

When listening to “Hada no Yume” as a song, I felt my chest tighten with a deep ache, as if something within the hearts of the living were drifting to the surface, in a film where death and life quietly coexist and seep into one another. Through the MV, which I was invited to make after Director Horigimoto saw my work Honekami, I wanted to depict the nature of Shikoku and Kochi with tactile detail, and create an image that was not a line-by-line visual translation of the poem. What is “Hada no Yume”? The innocent, soft sense of reassurance in which one can remain unaware even of being “naked” is just like the feeling of those left behind, warmed by thoughts of the person they love. I wanted, in my own way as an MV, to weave into it the director’s feelings for the film, as well as the gentleness of the light that binds the false image and the real one, through the life and death close to me, and through flowers and the seasons. Lost lives do not return, and the living can only continue to remember. I created this piece while thinking of the mother in the film Hada no Yume, and of Yume. https://honamiyano.com/works/

When I was entrusted with the ending for the new anime adaptation of Yasuhiro Nightow’s TRIGUN, by the hugely popular manga artist behind series such as Blood Blockade Battlefront, I looked through a great deal of reference material and felt the poignancy and pain born from the love and sacrifice between two brothers who keep missing each other, as well as the strength to keep asking those questions despite everything. In addition, the quiet celebration and joy evoked by the star in the ending theme “Hoshi no Kuzu α” (Salyu × haruka) seemed to coexist with a certain sorrow—the ache of being unable to reach the stars. From these impressions, I chose to center the work on Knives’ perspective and the theme of stars, and rather than depicting stars as random lights or movements, I wanted to treat them as something with form and meaning, incorporating the myth of Gemini as one of the zodiac signs into the visual background. I also felt that the image of stars disappearing by morning and reappearing at night was closely tied to the relationship between the protagonists, Vash and Knives.