Yoko Yuki is one of the graduates of the Tokyo University of the Arts who aggressively breaks with the classical Japanese animation tradition and habitually ruffles some feathers. She describes her film as an experimental montage of diary-like sketches.
“In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket” is screening at Vienna Shorts
The short begins in a cornucopia of colors, sounds, and shapes that look as if they jumped from the pages of the a children's drawing book, with the background being an intense yellow. Surprisingly, and although the style remains the same, the next vignette is quite intricate, while a minimalist break with text on screen provides a welcome but very brief relief. More sketches follow, with their succession being as chaotic as the soundtrack and the narration (?) heard throughout the movie, as much as the text that keeps on appearing on screen.
A man with funky hair who seems to eat anything in his hand, mushrooms coming out of the earth, a flame of sorts and some even more abstract sketches follow, with the animation speed being as dizzy as trying to make sense of what is happening would be to any viewer. The sound of guitar adds some semblance of measure, but again this is quite brief, and the image never actually matches it. Some pictures that look religious and credits on a pink screen with the same type of music conclude the film.
The approach Yoko Yuki implements here is as unusual as it is intriguing initially, with the style of the sketches and the frantic speed of animation resulting in a spectacle that is entertainingly chaotic. At the same time though, and beyond its individual elements, as a whole it makes very little sense as the sense of measured is lost early on, with the whole thing emerging as somewhat tiring and annoying, both to the eye and to the ear, even though its duration is less than 7 minutes.
Perhaps it is a short that fans of noise music will enjoy (listening) but in the end, it emerges as a film that is more fit for some kind of extreme installation or perhaps a paintings exhibition than an actual movie, as watching it on a big screen does not seem like an ideal option.
