Using strange humor, the animation Monotreme depicts the evolution of a mysterious life form that has both the features of a machine and a living being. The title Monotreme refers to the name of a primitive mammel belonging to the cloaca, which have a single opening for the intestinal, urinary and genital tracts, and which lives in Australia. The animation interprets the word as the birth of a capsular egg from the excrement of the main figure. The representation of excrement in the form of snack coiling into a spiral is not unusual in Japanese comics.

In this story parts come out of the capsule and conjoin with the spiral into a new life. The spiral form also humorously refers to the form of the gene and the will to evolve.

In forming the visual image, we sought to imbue a world view with originality and impact. For the design we tried to maintain a balance between friendliness and grotesqueness. The color is reduced to black and white, because we wanted to imitate the charm of a copperplate print work on the screen.

In Monotreme the computer is used for nearly all the production processes, from the image as the starting material to the processing and editing of the image. Nevertheless, the work “feels” almost analog. Stylistically we wanted to achieve the kind of warmth of Czech and Russian cut-out animation from the 1960s to the 1980s. The sense of spatial depth is achieved by arranging the picture so that each part is divided on the computer into multiple layers.

To maintain the overall impression of the work, only one model figure was used for all the developments,from the title logo to the end credits. The title logo is already intended to convey the fundamental characteristics of the work, the organic shapes, the mechanical interal structure, as a kind of skeleton.

The story itself is a loop, in which the beginning and the end merge. Because the main character evolves each time the loop is repeated, the story develops in a spiral form that is in turn a reference to the formal theme of the work.

Overall Director: Koji Yamada, Director, Graphic Design: Daisuke Watanabe, Graphic Design: Masanori Esaki, Design Assistant: Hideki Fukushima, CG Assistant: Tomomi Kiryu, Music: Yasuhiro Misawa