The Films of Masaaki Yuasa – Arts daily news

[The following text was written for the catalogue of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023, where the filmmaker was in focus.]

The oeuvre of master animator Yuasa Masaaki is so thoroughly heterogenous that it is hard to discern what makes it an oeuvre in the first place. With works that cut across formats, lengths, genres, animation techniques and target demographics, with avowed international influences that range from Disney and Dali to Tex Avery and Jackie Chan, not to mention Carl Lewis and MC Hammer, Yuasa is nothing if not artistically promiscuous.

From the nervous contours of Mind Game (2004) and Ping Pong: The Animation (2014), to the flat colour fields of The Tatami Galaxy (2010) and Night Is Short, Walk on Girl (2017), to the more sophisticated modelling of Ride Your Wave (2019) and Inu-oh (2021), Yuasa has constantly modified his style to match his source material, whether adaptations or original scripts. Throughout his career, the filmmaker has donned multiple hats, variously serving as scriptwriter, storyboard artist, key animator, director and showrunner on his productions and those of others.

Starting out as an animator on the popular television series Chibi Maruko-chan (1990–1992) and Crayon Shin-chan (1992–present), Yuasa made his wildly original feature debut with Mind Game, an unbridled phantasmagorical trip that already contained the seeds of what was to follow. An existential parable about a maladjusted, over-anxious young man coming out of his shell to discover free will and complete freedom, the film begins with a sojourn in the afterlife and ends in a dash out of a dying whale’s belly. This smorgasbord of incredible events and animation styles proved too potent for the box-office, prompting Yuasa to return to television production for the next thirteen years.

After over two decades of freelancing with various studios, including a detour into crowd-funding with Kick-Heart (2013), Yuasa established his own company Science SARU with co-founder Eunyoung Choi in 2013. The venture gave the filmmaker a creative flexibility and control that inaugurated a new, prolific phase in his career, yielding five feature films and four television series under his direction within a span of five years. This included commercial hits such as Netflix’s Devilman: Crybaby (2018) and the critically-acclaimed Lu Over the Wall (2017), which won the Cristal Award at the Annecy Film Festival.

Yuasa, who strives to create a more sustainable working environment at Science SARU, away from Japan’s culture of overwork, is attracted to stories where it’s all play and no work; rather, where play becomes work. His films are fascinated with athletic prowess, productivity and professional competitiveness, but these qualities are employed to caution against selfishness, against the mindset of winning by any means. They don’t valorise losers as much as losing itself, insofar as it can teach the value of other people’s happiness. Littered with clubs and fraternities, Yuasa’s work is a veritable anthology of characters from rival clans who come together to solve collective problems, appealing to compassion and consideration for others.

It isn’t a question of submitting individual will to common morality. Coursing through Yuasa’s films is a tension between the need to be oneself and the wish to find acceptance in the community. The filmmaker has spoken in interviews about his experience as a lonely, ungregarious youth in high school, trying to fit in but being rejected by his peers. Despite the idiosyncrasy of his work, Yuasa has also expressed a desire to find a more mainstream audience. Creativity is important, he learnt with the founding of Science SARU, but so are the clients and the market—a lesson made transparent in the indispensable business expertise of Kanamori in Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020).

More often than not, the tension is resolved in favour of individualism, against conformism. Coexistence between different communities becomes possible only through the agency of “in-between” creatures who belong to neither. Sometimes these liminal identities address our real world, through characters that are multi-ethnic hafu, non-binary or gender-neutral, but frequently they are glorious concoctions of different species, corporeal collages that expand the possibilities of being. Yuasa’s universe is one in which identities are in constant flux, undergoing perpetual transformation.

This philosophical transgression goes hand in hand with a concerted formal transgression. With its psychedelic explosion of primary colours, its radical simplification of solid forms to a swirl of abstract patterns, its violent contortions of physical features, its aggressive mixture of reality and fantasy, its enmeshing of different timelines, its unabashed subjectivity, Yuasa’s style is of a hallucinatory maximalism that always threatens—and sometimes manages—to overwhelm a given work. In its blithe disregard for realism, the canons of anime beauty and the mandates of Kawaii or cuteness, the aesthetics of Yuasa’s work may be seen as constituting a challenge to an extremely codified culture where everything has its designated place.

Yuasa’s films derive their manic energy partly from filmmaker’s obsession with capturing the particularities of movement. Either the objects within the frame are in motion, with the ‘camera’ typically hovering over them, or the frame itself is, this combined restlessness throwing the rare moments of stillness into stark relief. From the freeform swing of Lu Over the Wall and the casual waltz of Ride Your Wave to the indescribable physical rituals of Mind Game and Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, dance sequences feature prominently in Yuasa’s films, allowing the characters break free from their modest frames and develop wobbly limbs or supernatural bodies.

Infectious though these emphatic flourishes are, it is in his more delicate touches that Yuasa proves to be a consummate filmmaker. In the insertion of seemingly unrelated images (such as a bug washed away in beer in The Tatami Galaxy or a butterfly in the middle of an intense match in Ping Pong the Animation), in the numerous close-ups of precise actions (preparations of food or characters sensing textures), in the gentle reframing that shifts focus to hands and feet during a conversation, Yuasa allows the audience to imbibe a precise mood without literal explanation.

Yuasa’s work is at its most rewarding when he channels his feverish imagination into material grounded in real world experience. Projects like Ride Your Wave and Japan Sinks: 2020 (2020) may sacrifice a little of the unbridled expressivity of their predecessors, but they gain in emotional resonance and thematic depth. The filmmaker’s expressionistic approach to landscape is subtler in these films, which preserve the integrity of represented space despite expansive flights of fantasy. Yet neither of these two works devolves into sentimentality, the charming absurdities of Ride Your Wave and the ingenious tonal complexity of Japan Sinks: 2020 complicating our relation to the story. Considered alongside the brash, convention-smashing Inu-oh, they reveal a protean filmmaker at the peak of his powers.

[Other catalogue entries]

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