Loopdeloop - Magic
June 2025 theme
This submission stemmed from the idea of not wanting to lose the magic of animation, AND my love for the magical girl genre. Compositing done by the amazing Nathalie Feodora.
The short opens up with a girl proudly presenting her art at a gallery. However, the audience are gravitating more towards a slightly off illustration of Hayao Miyazaki.
Fed up, she marches towards the image and tries to get to the bottom of this. Once entering the other side, as a magical girl she fights off these dark creatures. Eventually she ends up facing the biggest and strongest of them all. She knows she cannot quite defeat it. So decides to seal it off for now.
Unfortunately, there was not enough time to portray the alluring nature of Ai in a obvious manner. But I wanted to depict the irony from the very beginning with the general audience blindly mesmerized by the Ai generated ‘painting’ of THE Hayao Miyazaki. He has famously expressed strong environmental themes and general distaste for the ethics behind Ai.
Beyond the ‘painting’ are dark, sludge creatures that plague the art work. The smaller ones are no problem to defeat, but as reflected in current reality, it gets better and stronger by consuming more data.
Heavily inspired by my favourite magical girl anime ‘Card Captor Sakura’ (1998), it was a very rewarding challenge to try and capture the old anime’s sense of wave principles and organic shapes when it came to magic 2dfx!