Weave Your Webs with the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival

Crafting one’s own reality is inevitable. The more your mind develops, the more elaborate your reality becomes.

Sure, once you become an adult crushed by largely mundane experiences and the necessity of maintaining a high fibre diet, there are fewer dragons and unicorns prancing around just outside your line of sight. But the webs that form your perception increase in complexity and depth and the vibrating crystalline droplets speckling your mind that are occasionally, spontaneously illuminated are designed to endure long enough to get you through the echoing emptiness of an exhausting, objectively meaningless, mostly depressing existence.

Of course, as an adult, those webs are also filled with spiders far greater in number than light-flinging dew drops, and as a result you can’t sit down to eat your goddamn cereal in the morning without your mother’s voice ringing in your ears about how you’ll never amount to anything if you can’t learn how to wipe your own arse properly, you little waste of f**king space.

Sometimes it’s necessary to introduce some of that childlike magical reality back into your adult brain just to temporarily keep the spiders at bay.

Do so with the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival.

In honour of its 10th anniversary, a special edition of the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival will be held on YouTube. The festival will use its YouTube channel to present a free online screening of shorts from an all-female line-up of directors ranging from university students to the current crop of animators working today. They will be highlighting the works of many animators, starting with Fusako Yusaki, a veteran claymation animator and a pioneering female voice who emerged in the 1960s at a time when men dominated the scene. They have more films from Miho Yata, an animator most famous for her style of using knitted materials in her work. Arisa Wakami produces beautiful works in both hand-drawn and stop motion animation. They also have a set of graduate works from students of Tokyo University of the Arts and Mone Kurita, a graduate of Tokyo Polytechnic University.

So relax, lose yourself in the beauty and magic of animation and remember, being an adult isn’t wiping your own arse perfectly every time, it’s knowing how to wash out the skid marks.

 

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