Co-founder of Studio 4°C, Koji Morimoto is a key figure in Japanese experimental animation. His work, marked by urban surrealism and esotericism, fuses traditional techniques with a psychedelic aesthetic. Far from commercial canons, Morimoto creates pure visual poetry, influencing filmmakers worldwide with pieces like Magnetic Rose and Beyond.
Analog and digital techniques in creating psychedelic worlds 🎨
Morimoto combines traditional pencil animation with experimental digital effects to build his dreamlike atmospheres. In Magnetic Rose, the use of light contrasts and detailed backgrounds generates a sense of spatial claustrophobia. For Beyond, in The Animatrix, he applied rotoscoping and layer distortion techniques to represent a fragmented reality. His process avoids excessive polishing, prioritizing rough textures that reinforce the feeling of an unstable and poetic world.
When your boss asks for cute animation and you deliver an LSD trip 🚀
Imagine arriving at a meeting at Studio 4°C and Morimoto says: Today we'll make a short film about a space rose that eats your mind. While other studios produced adorable mascots, he drew ships rusting in the void. Luckily, the producers of The Animatrix were already prepared for the weird. Otherwise, he would have ended up making detergent commercials with three-headed monsters.