Crayon Angel

A wordless short homage to the maestro of pittura metafisica.

In Madonna, Tanaami employs his signature collage-style animation, combining pop art influences, retro aesthetics, and surrealistic motifs. The film explores themes of desire, fantasy, and memory, often referencing elements of post-war Japanese culture and American pop culture.

A short experimental animation by Keiichi Tanaami.

A joyfully psychedelic animation inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

An animation mixing hand-drawn and cut-out techniques depicting the daily rituals of weekday morning that is occasionally interrupted by flights of fantasy delivered in stroboscopic flashes. Showing scenes of brushing teeth and face washing, Tanaami describes the film to be like a self-portrait on his favorite day of the week.

A trippy pop-art collage of phallic objects, naked women and American icons, most notably Elvis Presley.

An erotic pop animation seemingly symbolizing his youth when his soul was taken by the Hollywood actress.

A short film by Keiichi Tanaami.

A collaborative film between Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara with a new interpretation of the traditional Japanese folk tale.

By the maker of Yellow Night. Also an exercise in the storyless and meaningless description of a drawn journey through the subconscious. Hallucination as a cheerful firework display. Made with style and skill, because nonchalance obviously has to be conquered. (IFFR)

Blending psychedelic animation with haunting music. Centred around a black cat, it explores themes of misfortune and the uncanny through dreamlike visuals and Maki Asakawa’s melancholic song, "Fushiawase to Iu Na no Neko".

An experiment concerning the attempts at creating a ‘moving image’ long before the invention of cinema. A re-experiencing of the history of ‘magic with light’ unfolds through the use of various devices and techniques, including flip-book animation and Muybridge’s photographs in motion zoopraxiscope. (IFFR)

Screened at the 1st Sogetsu Animation Festival in 1965, the film was made in 35mm using the animation equipment owned by animator Yoji Kuri. (Source: Collaborative Cataloging Japan)

'There is a fusuma (paper sliding door) work based on the Hannya Shingyo (Prajna-paramita Hrdaya Sutram) by woodblock print artist Shikou Munakata. He wrote the sutra in one go without any rough drafts or scketches and the result is a very powerful and compelling work. Ever since I first saw this fusuma I have had a special interest in the Hannya Shingyo... ' (extract of the commentary by Keiichi Tanaami)

Psychedelic –and at times sinister– music by Shinpei Kikuchi accompanies a disorienting display of reproduced imagery taken from magazines and posters of sunny beaches and bikini models. Tanaami made positive and negative reprographic prints of these images onto transparent cel sheets, placed them on top of one another, and twisted them in different directions to create a moiré effect. Speaking on the work, Tanaami explained his paradise only exists in the world of reproduction.