I’m not sure what it says about the current state of Japanese cinema that one of the most striking movies of the year so far was created in isolation — not just from the film industry, but from people in general. Thirty-year-old Ryuya Suzuki wrote, directed, animated, edited and soundtracked his debut feature, “Jinsei” (“Life”), all by himself. The only reason the end credits go on for as long as they do is because he drew individual portraits of each of the project’s several hundred crowdfunding supporters.
The film’s publicity hails it as a successor to Kenji Imaisawa’s “On-Gaku: Our Sound” (2020) and Takahide Hori’s “Junk Head” (2021), two recent landmarks in outsider animation. Yet while those solo endeavors each took seven years to make, Suzuki got the job done in a more modest 18 months. This isn’t to downplay the effort involved, merely to say that it’s easier to imagine other people being inspired to have a go themselves.
We never learn the name of the film’s protagonist (voiced by rapper Ace Cool), although he’s addressed by many different monikers over the course of the story: Se-chan, Kuro, Zen, God.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.