PRIME
2025 · 4m · Japan
Directed by Hoji Tsuchiya
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
A puppet sheriff investigates a missing-puppets case in this music video constructed entirely from paper cutouts and sculptures.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A paper-puppet jazz noir — three words that have no business going together — and it somehow works as a completely coherent mini-genre film, which is exactly the kind of formal impossibility that gets my attention.
Tsuchiya's paper-sculpture noir music video is the kind of craft-mad object Madame Tutli-Putli scholars will love — fully realized genre cinema in under four minutes. PES-tier tactile invention.
Fully realized noir detective narrative told entirely through paper-sculpture puppetry as a music video — Hoji Tsuchiya pulling off a complete genre frame in four minutes. The craft-to-runtime ratio is huge.