Jorogumo
2025 · 1m · Denmark
Directed by Angeliki Ioekeimidou
Genres: animation, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, mythic, theatrical
A Japanese yokai myth with a samurai duel. A love letter to Japanese art culture and cinema, inspired by Bunraku theater — the protagonist a puppet animated like stop motion — fused with the influence of Japanese horror cinema.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Stop-motion yokai mythos filtered through Bunraku theater and J-horror—it's the kind of premise that sounds like three interesting ideas colliding, but Ioekeimidou actually *lands* it, which is annoying because I wanted to hate this more.
A 1-minute meditation on form: puppet-as-protagonist positions animation within the literalist vocabulary of Bunraku, while the duel structure and horror tonality situate this squarely in the lineage of Kurosawa and contemporary Japanese horror cinema—formally conversant and utterly composed.
The decision to animate the samurai as a puppet grounds the entire piece in tactile, physical space rather than digital smoothness; that single formal choice transforms what could've been pastiche into something genuinely unsettling and reverent at once.