Talk: Yuasa Masaaki | IFFR 2023

When Yuasa Masaaki was a child, his family let him draw on the walls of their home. That’s how the story of one of the most revolutionary directors in Japanese animation began, an artist who today candidly states: “Ultimately, I just want kids to feel that the world is an interesting place.” But there is one surprising detail: Yuasa has never been convinced that he has the right stories to tell. As a child, he believed he was incapable of coming up with manga storylines, yet he has become a director who can translate reality, vision, and even blindness into images that no one else could imagine. The idea that turns everything upside down is this: we think that animation is just a different way of telling stories, but for Yuasa, it is a form of perception, a way of seeing and showing things that traditional cinema cannot even begin to touch. For him, animation is not the faithful transposition of something real, but an opportunity to distort, to exaggerate, to reveal the essence rather than the surface. Yuasa recounts that as a boy, he would record animated films on videotape and watch them scene by scene, slowing down the sequences to understand how the deformation of bodies and movements generated emotions that were impossible in live-action cinema. He cites a scene from Fox and the Hound, where a dog is crushed by a bear: viewed in slow motion, the transformation of the bodies almost seems like a surreal dance, something that exists only in the mind of the animator. Throughout his career, he has taken this obsession with movement and transformation to extreme levels: in Mind Game, bodies stretch, explode, and bend in ways that no real viewer could ever see. For Yuasa, the limits of reality are just a starting point: “I want to show things that a normal camera can't.” The turning point comes when he describes how he approached the making of Inu-Oh, a film in which the main character is blind. The challenge was to show the world not as it appears, but as it is perceived by the senses of those who cannot see. Yuasa researches how blind people build mental maps through sound, and in one scene, he depicts space not through sight, but through hearing. It is an example of how animation can translate the invisible, making visible what cannot be filmed. But Yuasa doesn't stop there. When adapting manga or novels, he refuses to “spoil” the reader’s imagination. In Tatami Galaxy, for example, the most beautiful character is drawn in such a way that her face cannot be seen, so that each viewer can project their own idea of beauty onto her. And when it comes to names, he prefers to hide them, to fade the lettering, and never to provide a definitive answer. Instead of imposing a vision, Yuasa leaves room for the viewer’s imagination. His sources of inspiration are surprising: he loves Brian De Palma for his ability to convey everything without words, using only the tension of the images. And when he studies films, Yuasa doesn't just watch: he dissects the scenes, reconstructs them, takes a scene from Carrie and rewatches it as if it were an animation, pursuing the details that others overlook. But here’s the twist: Yuasa never thinks about the age of the audience first. “It's secondary,” he says. Above all, he wants his films to have multiple layers: something a child can follow, but that an adult can see differently each time. And if he has to choose between simplicity and complexity, he always prefers to challenge the viewer rather than make things easy. When asked where he finds his motivation, he replies that the challenges of animation can only be overcome by remaining flexible, improvising, and allowing the story to change course. And when a character, as in Inu-Oh, undergoes a physical or mental transformation, they don't do it to return to “normal,” but to find a purer way to express themselves, to dance better, to be happy even if they are different. The sentence that sums it all up comes at the end: “I want to make films that give children the feeling that the world is interesting.” If this idea has helped you see animation from a new perspective, on Lara Notes you can use I'm In to indicate that this vision is now part of you—you can also choose whether it's a curiosity, a lived experience, or a belief you feel is your own. If you happen to tell someone about how Yuasa transforms blindness into a soundscape, on Lara Notes you can tag the person who was with you using Shared Offline—because some conversations deserve to be captured, not just shared. This Note comes from a conversation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam—and it saved you over an hour of listening time.