Various characters keep walking across the screen from right to left, sending emails from their cell phones. They proceed at their own pace, regardless of whether they pass pedestrians smoking cigarettes, an accident occurs, or a bomb explodes. This CG animation piece is a black-humored satire of today’s urbanites who can’t live without their media.

Tokyo City was produced as a university project with Tokyo as the theme. I was born and raised in Tokyo, and this work is themed on the everyday lack of awareness regarding other people’s individual existence, as well as the coldness of the city felt by people who come from outside Tokyo.

I thought of using characters from cell phone emails when I was commuting to school on the subway and saw everyone, from businessmen to high school girls taking out their cell phones and writing emails, even in packed subway cars. Various people appear—an office lady, two businessmen, an otaku-style youth, four high school girls, a bully, and a straight-laced middle-aged man—a scaled-down recreation of the many types of people in ultra over-crowded Tokyo.

There are five incidents in the story: massive littering of garbage, tossing out cigarette butts, bike theft, a traffic accident, and terrorism. These happenings range from things experienced every day to a major event that could conceivably happen in Tokyo. The main characters take absolutely no action in response, and express this mechanical quality even more by conveying their feelings via cell phone email.

I used a game-like structure scrolling from right to left because I had only one month to create the piece, but it resulted in a simple structure that enables people to understand the concept more directly.

Yusuke Koyanagi (JP), born 1982. Currently a fourth-year student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Serves as head of the university visual arts club, and is active in the visual production group TACO ROOM along with five students from the same university. http://www.geidai.ac.jp/~de14137/eizo/