Hide-and-Seek
Dir: Keiko Shiraishi
Japan/2012/ Japanese with English subtitles/B&W/8min/animation
“They live in a residential town surrounded by the ocean and mountains. Since that day, this town has been in complete darkness. Hidden in the darkness now are the streetlights, roads home, a mother, and a baby in her womb. This animation attempts to depict the truth hiding behind the facts.”
Director Keiko Shiraishi’s deeply thought-out thesis project for Tokyo University of the Arts MFA program dealing with the Tohoku Earthquake. Animation artwork was hand-drawn based on the photographs she took of the affected areas and the interviews with her close friend who was to give birth in the Tohoku region
Vancouver International Film Festival, Image Forum Young Perspective Award, Ibaraki Digital content Software Award First prize, Tokyo International Animation Fair 2013 Tokyo Anime Award, among others.
Director’s Statement:
The Earthquake came when I was planning for my thesis film. The “real” images I saw on television and on the internet were all so unexpected and unimaginable–the unknown reality. I thought that reality had gone beyond fiction. In that kind of reality, what can I create with animation, and what can animation, as an art form, offer?
First, I went to the affected areas in northern Japan and took photographs. I visited a friend whom I have known for 20 years and her husband, who works at the Hitachi Metal Works in Hitachi City in Ibaraki prefecture. I listened to their stories. And without digitally processing the photographic images that I took, I drew by using tools such as the rotoscope, adding and subtracting based on those images of “reality.”
Take the image of shadow and darkness as an example. Shadows can symbolize worries of the mother as well as the materialization of her unborn child. Darkness is the image of being covered by clouds, taken by tsunamis, or radiation spreading.
Moving image is the medium of our sight and hearing, but even things that cannot be captured by our cameras, microphones, eyes or ears do exist in our “reality”. Especially since the Tohoku Earthquake, I think people in Japan have started to realize that even things we cannot feel with our five senses do exist. Then I noticed that “real” photographs and films can reflect the “reality,” but animation can depict a “sense of reality” that reality-based media often cannot.
Credits:
Directed/animated/edited by: Keiko Shiraishi
Soundtrack: Natsuko Yokoyama & Andres Duarte Loza
Screenings and Awards:
“Vancouver International Film Festival 2012” Official Selection
“16th Ibaraki Digital content Software Award 2012” First prize
“11th JCF Student Film Festival” Second prize
“55th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film” Prize
“Tokyo International Anime Fair 2013, Tokyo Anime Award” Prize
“Imageforum Young Perspective ” Prize
“18th Campus Genius Award” Nominate
“Yokohama France Animation Festival 2012” Official Selection