JINSEI

TRAILER

Life

Ryuya Suzuki, for his debut animated feature, has performed nearly all the tasks himself, writing, editing, hand-drawn animation, and score, and all in the course of eighteen months. Other tasks, such as voicing of characters, he left to others. "Jinsei," the meaningfully named protagonist (it means "life"), variously nicknamed but not named, is voiced by rapper Ace Cool, with additional voice work from Taketo Tanaka and Shohei Uno and others. Rather than a long even flow of images three are often more staccato montage effects, telling rapid stories with sequences of images. It's original. Skimpy on the dialogue, it's not always easy to take in.

There is the advantage of unified vision with a one-man production like this - and it's sometimes a rather dark one, also in its way rather comprehensive. Its protagonist whose life spans seemingly a century goes through worlds, or at least many identities and monikers and ten chapters (his given name we don't learn). There are dark eras and bright eras, fame (he is drawn into a boy band early on) and a life underground in a post-apocalyptic world. There is tragedy in his early life. The boy loses his father and is raised by his stepfather, and finds a friend in a new boy at school, a boy-band fan called Kin (Taketo Tanaka) and they wind up in a boy band themselves organized by a strangely predatory corporate producer, Shiratori (Kanji Tsuda).

The bland gray black-and-white imagery is only workmanlike, unmarked by complexity of image or visual effect and confined to curve-edged academy ratio pictures, which change shape and positon with a big margin around them to define them that rather distances the screen from us. Eventually having begun in 1994 and reached the present, the film moves far into the future when an elite is hiding from danger of war and hostile technology. There will be children who imagine the wild man in an abandoned factory as "god"; also a journalist named Sakura (voice of Miho Ohashi) who will soon only know the mysterious man as her "love." And much more. Toward the end Suzuki delights in running through all the names and faces his protagonist has worn and borne. His later phases are very abrupt. The chapters are uneven in quality.

I frankly find this film hard going. But if the venerable James Hadfield of The Japan Times takes it seriously and considers it along with Kenji Iwaisawa's 2019 noise band film Our Sound and Takahhide Hori's strange and audacious 2017 stop-motion animation Junk Head as another surreal original piece of Japanese "outsider animation," I must acknowledge Suzuki as having something individual to contribute too.

Jinsei, ("Life") 93 mins., premiered theatrically in May 2025 in Japan with a festival premiere at Annecy, showing also at Vienna, Tokyo, and Taipei. It was included in the NYAFF in July of last year. It has been bought by Greenwich Entertainment for release in the US June 12, 2026.


JINSEI

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.