A music video created for an in-game song from Bandai Namco Entertainment’s social game The Idolmaster Gakuen. The character Hanami Saki was a top athlete in track and field before aspiring to become an idol, and she has a past in which, due to being a late bloomer, she confronted the limits of her abilities at a young age and suffered setbacks. The song’s theme portrays her “setbacks and challenges,” making for an absurd tale in which she moves back and forth between the reality of the setbacks she experienced in the past and the uncertain glory of the future. In the end, she attempts to break through her own limits. To make this pulp-fiction-like story convincing, we aimed for a meditative music video in which the past and future are suspended, combining the image of sequential photographs that draw the viewer’s consciousness back into the past with animation that propels her into the future to the sound of drum and bass. The spirit of craving victory that she cultivated in her years as an athlete, caught between ideals and reality, shakes off notions of records and victory created by others through the act of “running.” By adopting abstract smear frames and a rough, painterly style, we sought to convey, in a sensory way, her spiritual rebirth as an idol (a performer).

Ending animation for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, which aired from October to December 2022. This work is the first school-themed story in the Gundam series. The two characters appearing in the film are Suletta, a girl who transferred in from Mercury, and Miorine, the daughter of the president of a mobile suit development corporation group. Their relationship is portrayed through enclosed, garden-like spaces such as cockpits and the academy, as well as the curses they each bear, with mirrors and barriers evoked from the motif of “witch,” and those images are rendered more symbolically through reflected and refracted spaces using minerals as a metaphor.

Ending animation for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2, broadcast from April to July 2023. To weave the story of Season 2 together through symbolic visuals, the main keywords were “synesthesia” and “dreamlike theater,” and the animation was created to move between the hearts of the protagonist Suletta (the red-haired girl) and Miorine (the white-haired girl). In the story, the two protagonists’ hearts continue to miss each other, and this was symbolically expressed by showing Suletta standing on a theater stage and Miorine projected from a film projector, physically passing by one another, representing their relationship. Within the main story, there are references reminiscent of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and the ED animation also begins with an opening shot inspired by stage drama. It was created with the image of characters who operate behind the scenes, as if making the two protagonists dance on the stage set called the school. On the other hand, by giving it a strong film-grain look, the animation symbolically expresses how the protagonists struggle against the story burned into film as “the curse of Gundam.”