Born 1972
Lives Yokohama
Children of Shadows
2006
Still from charcoal drawing animation
Courtesy Corvi-Mora
The childlike characters and forms that populate Naoyuki Tsuji’s animated films emerge from the page as though summoned by a medium from another realm. Exploiting the ‘after-image’ that lingers through the build-up and erasure of images in charcoal, Tsuji’s quixotic films are psychedelic palimpsests that draw on the darker recesses of the imagination. Children of Shadows (2006) narrates a surreal Oedipal drama in which a young boy and his sister make a nail-biting escape from their father, who attempts to devour them, only to be confronted by a giant and a witch. Evoking the danger lurking in every childhood story, Tsuji’s films inhabit a dreamlike space between nightmare and fantasy. (AB)
