Onohana

The setting is a world where people drive sentient vehicles that are hybrids between guinea pigs and cars – "Molcars"! Molcars have round eyes, big soft butts, and short arms and legs as they trot along. They run around with a silly look on their face, and even when you're stuck in traffic, you can be put at ease just by gazing at the guinea pig butt in front of you! Even if they cause a bit of trouble, it's easy to forgive them because they're so cute and fluffy! This is an animation focusing on various situations unique to cars, full of satisfaction, friendship, adventure, crazy action, and tons of guinea pigs!

A touching saga of a cabbage and pea’s friendship across bullying and interdimensional travel.

The two of them, all alone at home. All alone with her father's corpse. Memories, ideals, and reality all sink beneath the muck. Everyone is alone. Everyone is in solitude.

I want to leave home,” a pet fish told a boy one day. The boy reluctantly takes the fish out to the sea to ‘keep his promise,’ as it says. Their recollections on the way became slightly discrepant.

A short film spelling Tokyo in hiragana.

Featuring stirring imagery cycling through abstraction and quivering permanence, Onohana’s (Ouch, Chou Chou and such a good place to die, JC 2016) characteristically stunning animation was produced in collaboration with visitors to her past exhibitions in Shinjuku, Tokyo and Morioka, Tohoku, tracing her original illustrations. -JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film

A grand collision of Mizue’s signature visual music forms and Onohana’s mesmerizing impressionistic illustrations, featuring music by Twoth.

In the midst of the frenzy night a man finds himself lost in the crevasse of time. It was not the grotesque beings nor the monsters, but it was he who “was here, but wasn't here”. He was the phantom. Buried under memories full of inhibition and promises that never kept – words washed up on the shore – time keeps him at a distance from the “place”. And he hears poems coming on the waves from the other side rhyming and lapping against the shore. A 360° scope video Installation commissioned by Nagano Art Museum.

An animation of landscapes fluidly changing shapes.

Forms shift like a landscape of memory in this enchanting work featuring music by Tatsuki Tsushima. -JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film