Renowned Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami, who once decorated the palace at Versailles with his signature candy-coloured works, has made his first feature film, and it looks like an utterly amazing visual feast. The movie is called Jellyfish Eyes, and while it has been out for a while already in Japan, there’s now a subtitled version for English-speaking fans to enjoy.
Check out the super trippy trailer below:
“When a young boy moves with his widowed mother to the Japanese countryside, he discovers that their apartment is inhabited by a strange creature—and that very little is what it appears to be in the sleepy town.”
The making of the film was a long process, fraught with creative tension. Reportedly, Murakami produced detailed sketches of his characters, and then clashed with animators, who struggled to get the details just right.
Murakami rejected his animators’ work on multiple occasions, and it did not make for an amicable process. Jellyfish Eyes was meant to be part one of a trilogy, but the artist told the Wall Street Journal that, by the end of the first installment, “the team was so fed up they didn’t want to work on the second film.”
According to its official website, the film is touring art galleries in the U.S. for the next few months, with the artist himself appearing at some screenings for Q&A sessions. Can we please start a campaign to get this thing to Australia?
Right, now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to dig out my copy of Persona 3 and play it for the rest of the afternoon.
via Wall Street Journal
Image via YouTube
