The Meaning of Kawaii is an animation based on my interest in Japan’s mascot culture. Created for a school project, the goal was to research a foreign culture and communicate it through video. I chose to research mascots because I was curious about their origin and propagation in all aspects of Japanese culture. I documented a brief history of the mascot for Ginan, a town in central Japan, and connected it to concepts of Shintoism that influence the characters created by the culture large. I animated by hand in Procreate, before assembling everything in After Effects.
