City Glow

In 2005, the Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima collaborated with the New Zealand-based animator Bruce Ferguson to create City Glow, her first animation. Aoshima is a member of Takashi Murakami's Superflat movement, and her meticulously rendered imagery derives from the linear style prevalent in manga (comics) and anime (video animation) and, more distantly, in traditional Japanese painting and woodblock prints. In City Glow, Aoshima visualizes a cyclical narrative in which twenty-four hours elapse within the film's seven-minute time frame. Anthropomorphic skyscrapers sway in the background while plants grow and blossom luxuriantly in the foreground. Aquatic bubbles and fairies further hint that this is no ordinary place. Aoshima transcends the cult of cute in Japanese popular culture by juxtaposing her paradisiacal futurist garden against an ominous night. Amid eerily glowing trees, she pictures a graveyard occupied by the spirits of baleful beauties. This netherworld is dominated by a terrible three-eyed goddess from whose mouth escapes a swarm of fluttering moths. Just when this dire vision threatens to overwhelm, Aoshima offers a Disney-like reprieve wherein winged nymphsa butterfly pulls back the curtain on a fantasy-affirming rainbow.