Epilogue video for guiding visitors through the hands-on exhibition at Panasonic GREEN IMPACT PARK inside Panasonic Center Tokyo, where children learn about global warming and ways to address it.

We aimed to create a visual style that blends mechanical animation, making full use of patterns, with traditional hand-drawn animation. Even without facial expressions, a person’s fashion can convey emotion and energy. Clothes chosen by a person of their own free will are not mere decorations; they become part of the body, and there is a sense in which the boundary between fashion and the person becomes increasingly blurred. Fashion, including clothing, accessories, cosmetic surgery, and makeup, seems to lose its boundary with the wearer’s body and mind the more they enjoy wearing it, until it feels like they become that person themselves. We tried to express these ideas through animation.

As a second-year junior high school student, 14 years old, I suddenly awakened to “maternal instinct” one morning on my way to school. Ten years later, after being consumed by this maternal instinct that had awakened as if I had been struck by lightning, a friend told me it was similar to the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception, and I began to question my own maternal instinct once again. From there, I conducted interviews about pregnancy and childbirth, and unraveled my own memories from the past ten years, pursuing the awakening of my maternal instinct… Virgin birth, genes, trying to conceive… I explore motherhood by journeying through memories from ten years ago to the present. Starting from my personal feeling of wanting a baby, which I had held from adolescence to the present, I expanded the idea to consider whose motherhood it is. Although the word “motherhood” contains “mother,” I wondered whether it is not necessarily an emotion only women have, and whether it is different from paternal instinct as well. So I ultimately sought to express a world in which, regardless of whether one is female, male, or transgender, one can encounter one’s own “baby.” From my personal feelings, I hope this becomes an opportunity for others to think about encountering and cherishing a baby in whatever form that may take. To reach that conclusion, the work incorporates memories related to motherhood that occurred during my own ten years, as well as interviews about motherhood. I then translated these into the work through different modes of expression. Although the work brings together ten years of events into a single piece, it is not depicted in a correct chronological order, and not everything comes solely from within myself. Because I created it by collaging fragments together, both the modes of expression and the chronology are all mixed up.