Yuukai Anna

Independent animator Kaichi Sato & Studio Deen’s CG short film Yuukai Anna will inevitably polarize viewers depending partially on viewers’ familiarity with cinema nostalgia. The movie contains several references to the 1967 classic film The Graduate but moreover is inspired by the French New Wave. The movie seeks to condense and elevate a chic, aloof, existential coolness that directors including Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol propagated. The entire point of the short film is cinema for the sake of cinema. Shots are deliberately composed with an emphasis on visual appearance and costume design, on color theme, and editing. The narrative is abstract, revolving around the uncertainty ... of the nature and longevity of love and loneliness. Like the films of the French New Wave, the movie is meant to be taken as an atmospheric and aesthetic experience more than as a literal, realistic narrative. The use of CG further elevates the film into the realm of stylistic abstraction in which order and sameness, represented by the ex-girlfriends, the police, and the blind, is contrasted with rebellion and revolution in the form of Anna. And the two forces are manipulated by the Professor who visually appears uniform with the former group but psychologically sides with the later forces.