BAF8 - Fantoche presents: Girls on the run

At first I didn't really know what to expect for I didn't really read the booklet before hand, but when Nobuaki Doi (Japanese screenwriter, programmer, researcher and critic on animation) introduced the screening with his informative talk, I was really looking forward to spot the difference and if I was able to tell the differences.

He put this screening together for Switzerland before to show the difference between animations created by male and female animators. Especially to show the difference between drawn women by both genders. A lot of women choose to portray a "real life" girl instead of idolised images of girls in real life. These idolised images of girls set a high bar for fan boys of the communities. The change of image of girls in animation is a big, positive thing, trying to put a bit more education into the animations. The animations are to be divided into two parts, those created by men which mostly portray desire, and those created by women which are more psychological, more in the head you might say.

I think for this post I want to talk about a few that stood out to me.

Transfer Fantasista - Utamaro, Kazuma Ikeda

I'll start of with the first one! It started off like a generic (man designed) anime sequence. A girl wakes up (too late probably), gets dressed, gets her breakfast and runs out of the house in the direction of which is probably school. (Knickers-shot tally is already to be counted on two hands by now). At some point I felt it was going somewhere else than I expected it to go because of an inhumane jump, the girl then falling down but still managing to land "normally" and continue her journey. Turned out the sequence kept on repeating but every time with different backgrounds, environments, settings and art styles. The music was a bit indie techno and I thought it was pretty decent. I must say I kind of liked this one (I think because of the music), except for the over excessive panty-shots. (but I also guess that's kind of the point? Easily spotting the difference this way.)

Yamasuki Yamazaki - Shishi Yamazaki

I really loved this one even though it might seem weird at some moments. I really loved the vibrant pink, blue and red used in this video. The description used by the animator is as follows: "When you're insanely happy, you're so happy to be happy, that you forget what made you happy". I think that really shows through the video, there's a lot of dancing, happily moving around and having fun in the video. I really love all the transitions though morph in the short, it adds that bit of weird to it. The song really adds to the visuals, it makes me feel happy, so I think that's a job well done for Shishi Yamazaki. The video flows with femininity and joy, I think it's really lovely.