Hiroshima. On the morning of 6th August 1945, a bright light invaded the edge of the floating world. A man remembers ...

The shock, a violent blast. Bodies that stretched out in pain, dreams of the past in the present, visions of the future in the past.

The child that he was, before ...

Before the flash struck, Before the world was disturbed ...

Production Notes
Le conte du monde flottant is an animation film composed of real characters shot in Japan and a mixture of new and traditional techniques (film, video, photo, illustration and artificial images, etc...). A free evocation and surrealist image of Japan and of the atomic bomb in the form of an imaginary story, cruel and childlike. The dark visions, light, calmness even, agitated by the strange fantasy of a mutated world.

Technical Notes
The director and creative artist wanted to keep a very sensitive feel in all the images from the film: something between classical cinema and traditional film animation. “In computer graphics I like to give a sense of handcraftsmanship.”

It took two years of work on the computer graphics (Inferno, Flame and Combustion) to compose all the images and their strong and specific design. The film uses different kinds of computer graphic elements: 2D objects like video (beta & DV), film images or drawings shot with a video camera, and a few 3D images like the little 3D horsemen.

The shooting in Tokyo was very short: five days on blue screen with all the actors.
1) For the samurai sequence
2) For the dancers
3) For the women from the past
4) For the ten-year-old boy
5) For the figurants

The director wanted to direct the film on computer graphics, so he made two hours of rendered images to be used as rushes for editing a final cut. For this reason, all the actors were shot with a multi-camera system: some in movement (the samurai sequence), others fixed on the ground; some were shot with a large view of the scenes, some with close-ups. A lot of camera movements are completely digital.