Soshiki Hakase's hyperactive new animation is filled with zombies and fidget spinners

Soshiki Hakase and his animation studio Furifurisoshiki popped onto our radar back in spring when he made a pastel-hued world packed with objects and animals brought to life with human characteristics in a music video for Japanese singer/songwriter YeYe.

This week we stumbled across a new animation from Soshiki, another music video, this time for TogoKiyomaru. Summer Time is a headfirst leap into a deranged video game filled with surfers, zombies, and er, fidget spinners.

“The original idea comes from my actual life!” Soshiki tells It’s Nice That. “Since I’ve been playing a lot of video games recently, the video reflects the view of life and death like games. Collecting hand spinners is one of my recent hobbies, and it often appears in the video. I realised that the way of reflecting my real life to works is my original style for creation.”

The process behind the animation was remarkably unstructured. “To keep things fresh, I didn’t make any illustrated script,” Soshiki says. “Without a prepared narrative, I just created scene to scene, ad-lib. This method often gave me delightful surprises!”

Despite Soshiki’s signature joyful tone, the animator tells us that the emotion didn’t come naturally. “I made desperate efforts to create a happy video. So when the work was chosen as Vimeo’s staff pick, I sobbed remembering my hard days!”