Shunsaku Hayashi is one of the most unique and original filmmakers among the already peculiar and distinctive creators in the field of auteur animated and experimental films. Primarily a painter, Shunsaku-san gradually specialised in bringing his painting masterpieces to life. All we see in his films is created in an analogue way, by him drawing on a canvass or paper. And that is precisely his authorial charm. In the digital world surrounding us, Shunsaku persists in hand-painting and/or hand-drawing each individual frame, which he then photographs with a digital camera, scans and edits in After Effects. He thereby manages to preserve the texture of hand-drawn characters in a digital format. 

When I was at Animafest in Zagreb I watched his debut feature Invisions (Monument) (2025), which he based on his memories of the time and space of his volunteer work after the destructive earthquake and the subsequent tsunami in Fukushima (the Great East Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011). I was amazed by how excellently the sound, colours and abstract narrative work together. In his feature, he combined drawing, photos and videos to show fragments of the post-earthquake environment. 

Even though all Shinsaku’s stop-motion animated films are improvised (they are made without a script, storyboard and animatic), they are characterised by a special feel for rhythm and time. Focusing on the different temporalities between painting and the moving image, he creates paintings in which time has a linear progression and creates animation with those materials. The movement of time in the moving image is substituted in the painting by the physical movement of the viewer’s body, and at the same time, all the time within the moving image is stored within a single space in the painting.

In one of the rare interviews, Shunasaku explains that his obsession with animation is a consequence of his encounter with the films by the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. Even though, as a young man at the time, he did not understand Švankmajer’s films, they aroused in him an overwhelming desire to animate the inanimate. Through studying painting, he came to the conclusion that his path in life is to seek a new artistic direction at the intersection of painting, experimental film and animation. Since then, he has taken immense pleasure in creating an intertwinement of various art forms within every drawn frame for his films.

Igor Prassel