This schoolgirl doesn’t meet the boy you’d think she would, and she’s not who you expect either.
Two years ago, we looked at an amazing short anime that was the work of a single creator, who goes by loudraw. The artist handled all of the design and animation work for the achingly beautiful video, which was remeinscent of the work of Your Name director Makoto Shinkai, and also loudraw’s graduation project.
The video made it obvious that loudraw had the talent to go pro, and he’s now produced his first professional anime short, titled Mirai Sozo-ki (“Chronicle of an Imagined Future”).
While loudraw once again handles direction, story, and character design duties, this time he wasn’t alone in drawing the visuals. At the start of the year, he founded his own studio, called Flat Studio, and so for Mirai Sozo-ki he had a team of animators to work with, though he himself still contributed a number of animation frames.
As the video opens, we see a schoolgirl getting dressed, before rushing out the door as her father tosses her a roll to eat on the way to class. She dashes across a sakura-lined river, and for a second it looks like she’s about to crash into a boy as she rounds a corner, in yet another reenactment of anime’s favorite meet-cute scenario.
This is the anime’s first fake-out, though, as the girl’s pet cat, who was missing from her house that morning, jumps out and surprises her, preventing the collision with the handsome yet haughty young man who smirks at her as he walks by.
As the narration intensely informs us that there’s no such thing as pre-destined love, and people dream of hopes that haven’t materialized, we see the girl and her classmates leaving school at the end of the day, where she happens by a listless boy from another school who’s staring up at the sunset clouds.
A car passes by, splashing water from puddle at the girl, and as she tries to jump out of the way, she bumps into the boy. The pair fall to the ground, dropping their smartphones in such a way that they react to each other, sharing their contacts for the Line messaging app, and we see that it’s this boy who’s set to become someone special in her life, not the guy from earlier that morning.
The video then cuts to the credits, but the story’s not over yet. Instead, next we see a new girl, sitting in her room and typing away at her computer. Zooming in on her monitor, the words she’s typing are the same ones the video’s narrators had been saying, and once she’s done, she moves her hand to the mouse and clicks a button labeled “post.”
It’s only then that we find out that the schoolgirl and the boy she meets are characters in a story within a story, one that’s being written by the girl at her computer, using Line’s Line Novel platform for aspiring writers to post their works online.
Considering how loudraw made a name for himself with his previous solo animation project, it’s a fitting combination that his newest anime is promoting a service to let other creative individuals craft stories and share them with the world. On the downside, this means that the short anime isn’t a preview of a longer TV series or theatrical feature to come…at least for now, but we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that loudraw decides to animate what happens next, either for the smartphone-connected couple or the aspiring author who’s writing about them.
Source: YouTube/loudraw via Hachima Kiko
Images: YouTube/loudraw
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