My trip to Japan / Viaje a Japón
2018 · 4m · Argentina
Directed by Dante Zaballa
Genres: animation, comedy, documentary
Tones: contemplative, humorous, whimsical
Two friends — Argentinian animator Dante Zaballa and illustrator Juan Molinet — recall a recent trip across Japan in a meandering, surreptitiously-recorded conversation, set to fluid Flash animation that morphs from bullet trains to karaoke bars to Hiroshima as their fuzzy memories collide.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A secretly recorded conversation between friends should be awkward or cloying, but Zaballa transmutes it into something genuinely strange—the animation doesn't illustrate the dialogue, it *responds* to it, shape-shifting through Japan like memory itself is the real subject, not the trip.
There's a lineage here worth noting: the essay film's conversational intimacy meets animation's formal plasticity, a tradition stretching from Kawamoto toĐu Bảo, though Zaballa's yellow-blob aesthetic and continuous metamorphosis feel more playful than his forebears' precision.
The masterstroke is the decision to let the animation *move* with each tangent in the conversation rather than follow it—those environments don't change on beat, they drift and meld mid-sentence, and that single formal choice makes a three-minute chat between friends feel like watching someone's brain work in real time.
Reviews
Oozing charm from its every frame, Berlin-based animator Dante Zaballa's absolutely delightful short My Trip to Japan...
Dante Zaballa's animation of Japan morphs through bullet trains and karaoke bars — packed full of detail despite humans being reduced to mere yellow blobs.
Festivals
- Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019
- Animafest Zagreb 2019
- Fantoche 2019
- Melbourne International Animation Festival 2019
- Animaze Montreal 2019
- Lille International Short Film Festival 2019
- Bit Bang Fest 2018, Special Mention
- Anima Córdoba 2019, Best Argentinean Animation
- Avant Edge Film Festival Chicago 2019, Best of Fest
- Vimeo Staff Picks 2018