Happiness from little things
Sep. 20th, 2005 07:03 amTen years ago or so when I was still living in Japan, I wandered past a television and caught a short (five minute or so) animation wedged between two mid-day shows. It was about a small caterpillar attempting to eat larger and larger things... no text description could do it justice. It was inventive, enthralling and adorable in an especially Japanese way. It was also uncredited... the NHK TV listings merely labelled it 'cartoon'.
I'd caught what I thought was the name at the time, but no one I asked seemed to know what the Hell I was talking about. Eventually, the name leaked out of my head but every few years I'd remember the little animation again and make a go of looking for it. After all, anime was becoming a bigger and bigger market in the 'States, and the Web was becoming closer and closer to all-knowing every year. None of the anime stores knew it. No one had ever even heard of anything similar.
At about 6:30 am (unable to sleep as usual), it occurred to me I hadn't looked for it recently. After half an hour of Googling for combinations of 'Japanese/caterpillar/animation/clay' etc, like I have each time in the past (It used to be Altavista, and was... heck, don't remember what it was before that), I found something... similar... I went looking for more screenshots, and there it was:
I remember that frame!
The show is named ニャッキ! (the author Romaizes it as 'Knyacki!'). Now that I had the name, I was able to find a list of plots. I had seen the fourth five-minute episode! ニャッキ! has apparently won fistfuls of mostly obscure international animation awards since then, one of which I finally stumbled across with Google.
This little cartoon had been stuck in my mind for the past ten years as a particularly unfortunate loss; something simple and wonderful I'd have shared with those around me (well, those who appreciate such things) but was one of the few things I'd seen that was lost to everyone but me, slowly fading from even my own memory.
Even small things can make a day deleriously happy. Maybe I can sleep now.
I'd caught what I thought was the name at the time, but no one I asked seemed to know what the Hell I was talking about. Eventually, the name leaked out of my head but every few years I'd remember the little animation again and make a go of looking for it. After all, anime was becoming a bigger and bigger market in the 'States, and the Web was becoming closer and closer to all-knowing every year. None of the anime stores knew it. No one had ever even heard of anything similar.
At about 6:30 am (unable to sleep as usual), it occurred to me I hadn't looked for it recently. After half an hour of Googling for combinations of 'Japanese/caterpillar/animation/clay' etc, like I have each time in the past (It used to be Altavista, and was... heck, don't remember what it was before that), I found something... similar... I went looking for more screenshots, and there it was:
I remember that frame!
The show is named ニャッキ! (the author Romaizes it as 'Knyacki!'). Now that I had the name, I was able to find a list of plots. I had seen the fourth five-minute episode! ニャッキ! has apparently won fistfuls of mostly obscure international animation awards since then, one of which I finally stumbled across with Google.
This little cartoon had been stuck in my mind for the past ten years as a particularly unfortunate loss; something simple and wonderful I'd have shared with those around me (well, those who appreciate such things) but was one of the few things I'd seen that was lost to everyone but me, slowly fading from even my own memory.
Even small things can make a day deleriously happy. Maybe I can sleep now.
