Ending animation for the TV anime Bocchi the Rock! The 12 episodes are structured around four songs: “Distortion!!” for episodes 1–3, “Karakara” for episodes 4–7, “What’s Wrong?” for episodes 8–11, and “Rockn’ Roll, Morning Light Falls on You” for episode 12. We produced the three animations for “Distortion!!,” “Karakara,” and “What’s Wrong?” This film’s “What’s Wrong?” is the third animation, following “Distortion!!” and “Karakara.” The third one features the members of Kessoku Band dancing happily while the music plays. As the last of the three ending animations, and with the main story also entering its latter half, we wanted to create an animation that conveys the joy of the music so well that viewers can’t help but sway their shoulders along with it.

Ending animation for the TV anime Bocchi the Rock!. Out of the 12 episodes, episodes 1–3 used “Distortion!!,” episodes 4–7 used “Karakara,” episodes 8–11 used “Nani ga Warui,” and episode 12 used “Korogaru Iwa, Kimi ni Asa ga Furu,” making up a four-song structure. I produced the three animations for “Distortion!!,” “Karakara,” and “Nani ga Warui.” “Distortion!!” is the first of those three animations. The episode where the ED would change was not clearly decided, but it had already been decided that I would be in charge of three EDs, and since I had also been given the songs and scripts, I created a full three-ED structural proposal, character designs, and rough image boards before producing them one by one. For the first one, I wanted to make an ED that would let people who were seeing the work for the first time after the broadcast began, or who happened to turn on the TV and only saw the ending, understand what kind of series it was, so I directed it to become a symbolic visual piece through the use of color, performance scenes, and so on. Also, since the character designs would be simpler and have shorter proportions than in the main story, I worked with the intention of preserving each character’s distinctive traits while making the designs easy to animate.

A commercial produced to coincide with the book publication of “Chikomaru,” a four-panel comic about a cute but slightly pitiful hamster that I created. Using existing illustrations and video assets, I worked to make the video clearly convey what kind of work Chikomaru is. It was also the first video work in which someone other than myself handled the compositing; until then, whenever I directed and produced animation, I had taken care of the compositing myself.