When a Masaaki Yuasa project is announced, a minimum threshold of visual ambition is expected – his upcoming feature “Daisy’s Life” seems even more far-reaching in concept than his last. Co-produced by Yuasa’s new studio ame pippin and France’s Miyu Productions (“Ghost Cat Anzu”), “Daisy’s Life” tells the story of a friendship between two young girls, Daisy and Dahlia, a bond that transcends the rules of time and space.
Based on the book by Banana Yoshimoto (with illustrations by contemporary artist Yoshimoto Nara), producer Fumie Takeuchi describes it as a thematic continuation of Yuasa’s previous film “Inu-Oh,” his final work with the studio Science Saru. That film focused on a friendship between two boys connecting over a shared love of music and theatre, eventually landing on a note about stories continuing beyond the mortality of the human body. “Daisy’s Life” approaches this on a grander scale, as Yuasa says that moments experienced by Daisy with her friends could exist at any time.
The team didn’t have as much material to share as in other work-in-progress sessions shown throughout the week, and focused more on the emotional aspect of the film as well as the ideas driving visual development. There were glimpses of short, unfinished clips throughout the session – a first-person shot of one of the young girls walking through the forest and playing a recorder; another, a layout from Norio Matsumoto (a star animator known for his work on “Naruto,” who also worked on “Inu-Oh”), was a mix of domestic scenery.
“When I was 20, I was an anxious man,” Yuasa said. “I thought, ‘What’s going to happen after my death?’” and began thinking about the time before his life as well, in what he calls an existential crisis. This made him think it would “be great to have your entire life organised in a book, in a library,” alongside the lives of others. The director continued to say that books are ways to relive the lives of others, whether it’s a medieval book or a science fiction book, and that animation can be the same. This is the principle behind “Daisy’s Life,” and while there was no visual example from the film to illustrate this, Yuasa brought some props to the stage to demonstrate.
The first was a two-volume edition of Yoshimoto’s book, which Yuasa says is “meant to be difficult” to get out of its box as it’s dense with experience (he was struggling to remove it at this point). The other part of his thinking around the film was a little more metaphysical. “I often think about the fourth dimension,” he said. He described the idea that time doesn’t unfold in a linear fashion, that everyone’s experiences are happening simultaneously, and that the idea brings him comfort, as even during the sadder moments, the happier ones are happening on some other timeline at that same moment.
“I thought about ‘Interstellar,’” the director said of this approach to time, and he relates to it personally, and to how “Daisy’s Life” is intended.
Yuasa pulled out another prop: a copy of a tunnel book, a 3D piece that unfolds in a line, segmented into layers. Each layer represents a historical event, shown sequentially in time, which he then folded flat. He wanted to find a way to present this concept of a tunnel book for one person’s life in the form of an anime feature. This all, of course, leads to a joke about how the film is both finished and unfinished at the same time (he also says “Daisy’s Life” is due to be finished in 2026).
The collaboration with Miyu Productions is linked through visual development artist Batiste Perron, who had worked on projects with Yuasa before through an internship at Science Saru. He spoke briefly about helping to define the look of “Daisy’s Life,” describing the process of figuring out complex camera direction in concert with the surreal spaces created for the film, like a garden blown up to the size of a forest, with gigantic leaves bigger than the young main characters.
Perhaps the most striking statements of the panel came during the segment on character design. After discussing the technical work of adapting illustrator Nara’s design into animation, character designer Izumi Murakami spoke on a topic she feels passionately about. Working on the designs for the young girls Daisy and Dahlia, she spoke about wanting to make sure the designs wouldn’t be interpreted as sexualised.
“It’s sad to say that in Japan, underage girls are sexualised, and I don’t like it at all,” Murakami said, explaining that this kind of imagery has become part of the landscape in Japan, something she rightly feels very uncomfortable about. “So I talked about this issue with Yuasa, and he understood right away.” The artist acknowledged that she can’t control what an audience chooses to see in the characters. “I know I’m not going to change the world, but I can use my role to change something,” she said.
Murakami noted how Nara’s designs exclude necks, eyebrows and ears – the first two of those elements being rather key in animated movement and expression. “I hesitated about whether or not I should add the eyebrows,” Murakami said. But she still found that the characters could express themselves well without them.
Another challenge was the adult characters, who look quite different from the children in terms of the features they do or don’t have (they have eyebrows, for starters). She first tried working from a reference image drawn by Yuasa, but found that this placed her in a “cul-de-sac” where she got stuck on these designs, unable to work them into something that fit with her style. Murakami eventually just worked from scratch.
Perron spoke about finding a way to represent a sort of synesthesia in their presentation of cuisine, referencing Pixar’s “Ratatouille” as a particularly successful example from which they could draw inspiration. It’s an important part of the family’s life in “Daisy’s Life” (footage showed characters working in a noodle shop). But also, as Perron said, “food is loaded with emotion.” And, it seems, so is “Daisy’s Life,” which is on a mission to see if it can use the medium of animation to contain the breadth of human experience, not just from a narrative perspective but a sensory one too.
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