Oozing charm from its every frame, Berlin based animator Dante Zaballa’s absolutely delightful short My Trip to Japan (Viaje a Japón), immortalizes the Argentinian filmmaker’s recent jaunt to the land of the rising sun and is based on a real conversation he surreptitiously recorded with travel mate and illustrator Juan Molinet, who also provided artwork for the short. Watch it below, after which Dante tell us how this grin inducing film came about.
I’ve been doing analog animation for a long time, with acrylics pencils and crayons on paper. But it takes literally a lot of time, so I started looking for a faster way to do animation and I started experimenting with this 2D digital style in Flash.
This was like a dream come true and I wanted to create some kind of memory for this trip.
I am from Argentina, which is located on the exact opposite side of the world from Japan. This was like a dream come true and I wanted to create some kind of memory for this trip. My friend Juan is a true character, so I started recording him secretly with my cell phone. That’s how it started. I also recorded a bunch of stuff from people we met along the trip. The Japanese language sounds beautiful (I used to study Japanese when I was 15).
