
Focus: Yuasa Masaaki
Programma IFFR 2023
When, at IFFR 2018, Yuasa Masaaki's Night Is Short, Walk On Girl screened, audiences and critics alike went wild with delight and wonder. Now, apropos his latest work, INU-OH, IFFR is proud to present the internationally first extensive retrospective of a modern master who, since his first efforts in the 90s as a storyboard artist and episode director, developed into one of world cinema's most inventive and constantly surprising animation auteurs. Recurring topics of transformation, self-expression, and love are exemplary of Yuasa's oeuvre – complemented with an animation style that characteristically favours movement and emotions that feel both authentic and real. In series like The Tatami Galaxy (2010) or Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020), as well as films like Lu Over the Wall (2017) or Ride Your Wave (2019), Yuasa's filmmaking combines the surreal with the cute, the socially conscious with flights of fancy, the visually staggeringly experimental with the narratively classical. IFFR is proud to celebrate a creative mind that, like few others, knows how to fuse the popular with the avant-garde.
Overview of films
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The Tatami Galaxy
Twisted college romance meets absurd campus mythology in a delirious, time-travelling varsity comedy.
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Ride Your Wave
A breezy seaside romance turns into a delicate study of grief in a bittersweet anime feature.
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Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
An outrageous, alcohol-fuelled campus rom-com with oddball characters navigating a series of extraordinary situations.
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Mind Game
A cult classic that takes you on an animated voyage of surreal and psychedelic self-discovery.
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Lu Over the Wall
Mermaids, music and magic collide in this astonishing animation by a master of the craft.
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Kick-Heart
A fast and furious love story between a masochistic male wrestler and a deceptively demure nun.
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Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
Ragtag animation club grows into a media sensation in an exuberant, spectacularly mounted meta-anime.
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Japan Sinks: 2020 Theatrical Edition
A teenage athlete grapples with guilt and loss in this intimate, tonally complex disaster epic.
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INU-OH
Set in medieval Japan, dissident musicians take on tradition in a counterculture manifesto with a contemporary feel.
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Happy Machine
Reality is not all it seems in this journey into an alternative existence filled with bizarre creatures.