02/07/2025 - Shunshaku Hayashi’s first animated feature is an experimental, impressionistic film that resembles the experience of a drug trip on a distant planet, except the drug was inside us all along

Screened most recently in Animafest Zagreb's Grand Competition - Feature Film, Invisions is a peculiar specimen. The first animated feature by Japanese painter and filmmaker Shunshaku Hayashi is a highly experimental, abstract film that constantly shifts its form, aggressively distorting the images it projects inside our minds without giving much context as to what we are viewing. But despite its abstract nature, the experience it takes the viewer through remains guided enough to never feel particularly inaccessible or jarring, finding a delicate balance between the abstract and the specific, between the absurd and the intelligible.

The film’s title aptly describes its content. Invisions is an impressionistic film, structured as a 74-minute chain of interlocking visions through the subject’s static point of view. At once ephemeral and strangely persistent, these visions often start as gazes into a concrete reality – a human figure, a treeline, a blinding light on the horizon – only to then be slowly stripped down to their bare components, distorted and painted into another image, another gaze. Often it feels as if we are watching either momentary flashbacks from a fragmented life or catching glimpses of several different subjects in different places and mental states – flashbacks that imprint onto our consciousness like a photographic afterimage, distorting both itself and what comes after.

To construct a story out of this would be a fool’s errand, since Invisions is a film of affect, not of plot. There is no dialogue, no characters, no sense of progression, just a constantly reimagined process of an ominous kind of contemplation of the abstract. There are recurring motifs of outstretched hands and feet, figures of workers, sinister landscapes, imposing windows and hints of a catastrophe, all of which create a recurring feeling of an undefined longing and long-lasting shock that ebbs and flows throughout the film. Likewise, the visions immerse us into a certain sense of loneliness or solipsism – that of a person detached from others, unable to reach out to outside entities. All of this comes into somewhat clearer focus if we consider that the film was supposedly inspired by the author’s experiences after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.

In contrast with more future-oriented but similarly visually experimental films that encompass what we could call a digital, cyber aesthetic, the images in Invisions have a specifically organic feel to them. Part of this can be ascribed to the fact that they are in large part not digital but hand-painted, with rough lines and edges. Another reason, however, lies in how these images are used in conjunction with digital tools. They flow through each other, blend and mutate in slow, smooth motions, combining and distorting harsh, saturated colours that feel otherworldly. This results in a psychedelic, hallucinatory quality that makes us feel as if we have just taken a drug on a distant, lonely planet. All the while, the subtle, droning background music slowly soaks every moment of the visuals in an unexplainable discomfort. At the end of the 74 minutes, we feel as if we have been through a sometimes painful, sometimes calming meltdown of our senses that came not from the outside – from the film projected on the screen – but rather from within a closed off, now unlocked part of ourselves, perhaps a forgotten past life.

Invisions is a Japanese production by the filmmaker himself.