There are few young animators I look forward to seeing work from more than Onohana. Perhaps there are none. Part of the joy of watching indie animation is finding people whose styles jump out and capture some deep joy, experimentalists whose experiments really do push you to broaden your view of what you enjoy watching and what you excitedly look forward to seeing in the future. It's not a unique feeling to be sure, and for a creator like Onohana, having gone through the prestigious Tokyo Geidai program and even winning the Oofuji prize with her graduate work Crazy Little Thing, there's probably no shortage of people with infinitely more anime experience and technical appreciation than me who found themselves captured by her work in the same way I did. But no matter how many people continue to find her over the years—indeed I hope she reaches far and wide as she continues to hone her craft—to me the experience of finding it was a personal joy, nothing less than a validation of my habits of poking around online for new things to find. I have nothing but thanks to give.
Being in her very early 30s, Onohana's oeuvre clocks in at a bit over a half hour total, between her six short pieces and one music video where she did key animation. And despite my hefty claims in the opening, I can only admit to seeing half that work, since her Age of Obscure and Ouch, Chou Chou are on the film festival circuit and firmly out of reach for me. That said my introduction to Onohana was through the trailer for Age of Obscure, which I saw during the week where I went through the filmography of the established indie director and Onohana's collaborator for Age of Obscure Mizue Mirai. His work is very cellular, about dozens of small creatures moving in sync and filling the screen with motion. In the trailer though his trademark critters only take up the small center portion of the screen, with the rest being abstract forms with bold colors shifting and reforming into one another, similar to Onohana's contemporary the up-and-coming Hiraoka Masanobu, who this year did the endings to Little Witch Academia's TV show. Back then I marveled at how much Onohana's background work augmented my enjoyment of Mizue's constant movement, but in retrospect it was probably the other way around.
The well-known Geidai projects do seem to fall into a couple distinct veins; there are the ones where every frame is distinct and intentionally a bit choppy (think Eunyoung Choi's hand-drawn ending for Ping Pong the Animation), there are atmospheric yet distinctly story or character-driven pieces like Ishida Hiroyasu's rain town, and there are the ones that are nigh impossible to pin down in ordinary sorts of discussions, idiosynchratic works meant both as a showcase of the director's style and a showcase of why it's the style they've adopted. That latter part is important. Onohana's formless post-Geidai works are both visually fluid and engaging like Hiraoka's and seem to engage us subconsciously with the themes she enjoys tackling, which her website lists as “people who deviate from the public consciousness due to mental pathologies, the fear of disaster, etc.” Even in thirty seconds, Origami of Landscape reforms the world multiple times over and strays outside its narrow frame, which is beautiful but brings an unnerving edge with seeing a well-formed world fading into black and white before collapsing and melting away.
Likewise with her other abstract work, such a good place to die, which starts with a dissolving cliff-face which we also see in Origami of Landscape, but in a slower contemplative pace, and accentuated by Tsushima Tatsuki's orchestral score that makes the process feel wondrous. The landscape continues to reform and the bold colorwork of Age of Obscure is central, and then after a while it all fades into a point on a pitch-black horizon, before we suddenly surface in a lake and have a single quiet moment before seeing the title. It's hard to pin down a thematic influence, but it's the sort of work that makes you go back immediately after to make sure there wasn't an obvious clue there the whole time. I also went back a third, but that was just for the enjoyment of it.
Usually when I profile these directors I go forwards in chronological order, but here I've been going backwards. It's mostly just a convenience, and partially because her abstract style is more like a well-done example of a type of animation that's comfortable and familiar. Jumping back to her Geidai days we see something much more hard to recognize, and much more gripped with an inspired madness, first with Do as the Fish Tells You and the next year with her graduation project Crazy Little Thing. In the former a boy taking his fish to see the wider world outside his comically small home aquarium walks across a series of memories of younger days with the fish, a sort of classic storytelling technique but without any surprise from the boy. But as he reaches town, the stories he shares with the fish become desynced with reality, as blank-eyed boys run away and fish appear in the now aqueous sky, and a Christmas tree's lights trap the boy into a pen with an aggressive dog in a split-second cut. The sketchbook style intensifies as the lines break down and we start to see what would later become her post-Geidai abstract forms. The music also becomes more phrenic, muddling and slurring his comments and reminiscences, as he melts through backgrounds and walks through time. Yet everything he says is vaguely tied to these horrific images of Christmas lights, autumn leaves, and the like, as if his words were belying trauma, before the last two scenes would come back to reality and frame the whole tale.
Reaching the credits of Do as the Fish Tells You it wasn't too strange to see Geidai professor and one of the fathers of modern indie animation Yamamura Kouji listed as a producer. While the childish character design and colored pencil coloring are more typical of a certain vein of Geidai projects than Yamamura's darker sketched style, the story takes a sharp turn towards dark surrealism in the middle. Her use of silences in the music is similar to Yamamura's older works like A Country Doctor, but while she chooses to express the same sort of layered surrealism on top of troubled reality as Yamamura, she does so with a more tangible reality underneath. Absurdity is her style and her tool, but there's a story that comes through loud and clear, which is different from a lot of the individualistic style-based Geidai projects coming from more well-known people animators like Kubo Yuutarou and Wada Atsushi, and it's a style I prefer. From what I can gleam of Ouch, Chou Chou from the trailer she chooses a similar style of telling that story, with a cabbage-headed young man in a world that could tangibly be our own. There's an unhinged quality to his psyche as a leaf rests on the cusp of falling off, but the memories he talks about are more for humans than cabbages, so presumably that's a stylistic choice more than a children's tale gone wrong.
Which brings us to Crazy Little Thing. Crazy Little Thing is one of the most terrifyingly potent works I've seen in years, right from the unbroken minute-long introduction of watching a girl hang a sleeping man from a pair of wooden beams, using herself as the counterweight that kills him in a mere few seconds, all framed from behind a collection of empty wine bottles in the corner of the house. Everything about the proportions and the shot speaks to the situation, and not a trace of Onohana's abstraction can be seen in this gritty greyscale shot devoid of any music to distract us from her labored grunts and his last few struggles. My greatest fear in life, and the only thing to give me a more visceral reaction than spiders, is hanging; usually a scene like this is enough to put me on the edge of vomiting. The nausea came, but it didn't come until the shot was broken by the title card and the loud clanging piece that came with it; at that moment the tension and spellbinding shot wore off and I was suddenly aware of what had happened, and for that I have to give her credit. Little consolation when I had to pause and lie down for an hour before moving on, but I can honestly say it was worth it for the experience, especially since it let me then move to the rest of the work.
The same shot immediately comes back, this time in a greyscale tinged with a bluish hue. The man is still there, the girl is walking around picking up the bottles like nothing happened. The shots move around a bit and we see the house from above, a floor plan view covered in all the empty bottles the man presumably left in the girl's care. From there we follow her as she goes about sending a letter and cleaning up as if he weren't even there, even with each shot framing him hanging from the rafters, feet tied together and all. Then the phone rings, and the man is on the couch telling her to pick it up. The same man hanging in the previous shot, the man who appears on the couch from behind the girl's figure as she walks by. And her facial expression, combined with a sudden air bubble that comes from her mouth, tells us this isn't a memory, it's a present madness. He yells at the girl to answer the phone before finally getting up to get it himself, and the girl runs to stop him. In a brilliant rapid sidelong shot, the man walks toward the camera's destination while the girl runs sideways alongside it, and as the music peaks suddenly we pass to the girl's other side and the man returns to the rafters, the answering machine continuing the same message as we get another shot of the man's outstretched tongue, as if to reassure her, or us, of how dead he is.
I can continue on but it's worth seeing her full experience for yourself. The camerawork and floor plan shots aren't something we see her have the opportunity to work with in later projects, but in my opinion as techniques they would be enough to warrant the Oofuji prize by themselves. How they combine with the colorwork, the pacing, the music, and ultimately her descent into insanity, elevates it to a level of unbelievable artistry. It's a one-room epic with virtually no spoken lines, no color, and no hope. I'd be amazed if Onohana had the heart to make this sort of story twice, but god I hope she does.
In general I'm not sure where she'll go as an animator from here, currently developing her studio Gin Nan ni Ame, writing manga essays on her website, and wrapping up from a one-man gallery exhibition in Shinjuku. She has a number of different modes, from the playful ephemerality of her melting worlds to the horrifying realities of her human stories, and moreover like many of the great film and animation directors she knows how to blend them together. Will she develop a partiality to one, especially as she continues to work with more established artists like Mizue and Yamamura before inevitably (at least in my estimation) becoming an established powerhouse of the animation world herself? Like many of the recent graduates she has other creative outlets with illustration and exhibition that may guide her work, even if her interests stay focused on the people whose minds stray from the light. Regardless I can't wait. I can't can't wait. What a great feeling Onohana has brought.