Aaaaargh

I know I’m being spoiled, but lately making work has been so hard it brings me to tears.

I entered grad school wanting to properly build my skills, but I’m losing sight of my goal day by day.

In college I often wondered why people who had no motivation and half-heartedly got through even their graduation film had bothered to enroll… but now I understand how they felt all too well. These days I’m not even throwing myself into my work fueled by negative energy. It’s just a sense of duty.

My inferiority complex toward my honest, ambitious classmates is huge, and I wonder how everyone can absorb things so innocently and keep working so hard.

Coming across news about independent animation has been a little painful lately. (But I’m looking forward to the Hiroshima Animation Festival.)

I’m making this film with such low motivation, but I have to finish it, so I’ll at least make the effort to sit at my desk every day.

Part of why I think I might not make it as an artist is that I can’t keep believing in the value of what I make, and I get caught up in grand worries like “what is the fundamental meaning of making things?”

A great master among my teachers said something like “It’s about steady, patient work,” and I thought that was absolutely right.

When I express what I think, it all feels wrong and I immediately want to take it back, so I can’t talk properly with people, and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m saying. But I think a work that raises no questions and is only about looks or story is just fashion, so even if I don’t really understand it, I feel I have to assert something of my own…

The other day, when I went back to my parents’ home to vote in the Tokyo governor election, I ate Hanamaru Udon at the food court of the local Ito-Yokado. The down-to-earth feeling was irresistible and I didn’t want to go back… (I am down-to-earth, though.)

The children’s swimsuit section with its slightly unfashionable designs, the clear balls (with condensed bubbles inside) on the tips of the levers of the game corner machines… they stirred up my nostalgia for supermarkets.