The words “animation” and “animism” both derive from the Latin word “anima”, which means “life principle” or “soul”. This work is a visual piece that exists within the triangular realm formed by these three words. Animism here represents Japan’s ancient religion, and the title KASHIKOKIMONO in this case stands for “the innumerable gods and deities of Japan”. With this work I have tried to create images that express this profusion of gods representing all of creation.

I felt that organic movement as well as reproductive development and composition would be required to express the concept described above. So, with the goal of creating a new type of organic visual expression, I used a combination of hand-drawn animation and software-based generative animation. Specifically, I took a single drawing as one unit and made several drawings into a visual work on the computer, working with the alignment, form, and composition along planar, solid, and time-based axes. Everything is hand-drawn, and even the compositing work was done by hand using Adobe After Effects.

I worked with a tablet input device on a computer. The colors are all the same and I kept the backgrounds transparent. It is a metamorphizing animation that uses no frame outs. The reasoning behind this was that it enabled me to do compositing at any size. In the end I drew six types of source animations. This was to create the final colors seen in the work. I used Painter and a pen tablet.

Using Adobe After Effects, I arranged everything that I drew in step 1-1 above. I played around with all sorts of values such as timing, size, position, and angle to make the composite. The handdrawn animations were all in one color, so I piled one form on another to create silhouettes. Then I generated organic, reproductive animations. With these you can’t predict what kind of shapes or movement will come out.

I then composed the colors for the silhouette animations created in the step above. I used the color source that I created in step 1-2. After that it was just a question of repeating steps 2-1 and 2-2. Everything is just a combination of six types of animation.