Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a book of his that I find myself continually coming back to. The novel starts as an surreal mystery—a missing cat, a missing wife—then careens into territory few writers are able to explore as adeptly as Murakami. Isolation, war, love, and memory all entwine in a narrative that swings into wild, unknowable places.

I’m too afraid to look back and check when I first started working on this animation. It started more as a proof-of-concept for me to test out different software and techniques I had never tried before, then kept getting bigger and bigger as these things tend to go. Honestly I don’t consider this finished and I wish I had more time and resources to devote to it, but I also know it will only eat away at me if I don’t just post it and officially move on. I’ve got other projects on the docket I’m already behind on!

So maybe I’ll come back to this, who knows. But also, maybe the frustrating, unpolished nature of it plays into the general theme of the novel. You’re left hanging. Things could be better, things could be worse.