Scrolls in Motion: A Visit to Koji Yamamura’s Studio Praxinoscope

Koji Yamamura is one of Japan’s most recognized independent animators, known for animated films that adapt literary sources with surreal metamorphosis, dark humour, and distinct character design. Yamamura is an enthusiastic collector of 19th-century optical toys, and his Tokyo studio takes its name from the Praxinoscope. Our visit to Yamamura’s Studio Praxinoscope focused on his most recent two short films, Polar Bear Bears Boredom (2021) and Extremely Short (2024), both animated with ink on paper.

Polar Bear Bears Boredom is an animated adaptation of a 12th-century Japanese emakimono (illustrated ink scroll) known as the Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga. This scroll, which features scenes of anthropomorphic animals playing beside a river, is often considered an antecedent for modern Japanese manga and animation. Following the logic of a scroll, Yamamura composed Polar Bear Bears Boredom in a wide Cinemascope ratio as a single unbroken scene that unfurls over time.

Working with ink brush on paper, Yamamura drew undulating lines and softly bleeding washes that turn a paper canvas into a deep-sea setting populated by marine mammals. He digitally layered animated sequences onto the background to produce the horizontal drift of a scroll unwinding across the screen. The film pairs scenes of underwater life with playful rhyming text in both Japanese and English — “Polar bear bears boredom,” “other otter, poor otter” — a bilingual word game that extends visual puns into language. The film has the wit and precision of classic picture books.

At the studio, Yamamura brought out the actual scroll made for the film, as well as frames from the animated episodic sequences that were layered into the scene. The entire film took five months to complete: one month the animation and four months to compose and record the music, as well as sync the bilingual text. Polar Bear Bears Boredom was included in two special screenings presented by the Animate Materials Workshop, at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2023 and at Kaboom Animation Festival in 2026. The film consistently draws strong positive responses from viewers of all ages.

Our visit also touched on Yamamura’s most recent film, Extremely Short (2024), which had its world premiere at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. Based on a prose poem by Hideo Furukawa, it follows a search for the shortest thing in Tokyo and finds it in the last breath of a dying man. Rendered in black and gold metallic ink, the film continues Yamamura’s interest in animated calligraphy, each stroke carrying weight as both image and written character. Where Polar Bear Bears Boredom unfolds laterally like a scroll, Extremely Short is compressed and vertical, a poem wrung from a single Japanese syllable.