To most viewers, director Nobuhiro Yamashita is known for his feature films as well as his works for Japanese television, but in the animated short “Lucky Owl With Shimako”, co-directed by Yoko Kuno, who previously worked on “Penguin Highway” or “The Case of Hana and Alice”, he delves into the art of animation. In the one-minute-short, he tells a story about the kind of encounters you can have in the city, along with the adventures you can experience.
Lucky Owl With Shimako is screening at Nippon Connection
At Ikebukuro station, four year-old Shimako is separated from her parents and is soon lost within the streets of the city. When she suddenly sees an owl statue, she engages in an adventure in the streets of Tokyo which not only makes her travel back in time, but also shows her the way to the apartment of a cartoonist, who once lived there.
Perhaps the best thing to be said about “Lucky Owl With Shimako” is how the viewer most likely will want to see more of this world and these characters. Combined with Yamashita's predilection of making his characters run into otherworldly or fantastic beings, such as the robot in “Hard-Core”, the animation paves the way for a colorful journey which the viewer experiences together with the child protagonist. It is a narrative that wonderfully combines elements of reality and fantasy, or most likely the imagination of a little girl into a feature which ends all too sudden.
In the end, “Lucky Owl With Shimako” is a wonderfully animated, creative short whose only flaw is that it ends after one minute, leaving the viewer wanting to see more.
