Review: You'll really feel the passing of a hundred years in solo-animated Jinsei

Jinsei, the debut feature from solo animator Ryuya Suzuki, covers the hundred-year life of its protagonist. Sadly, it feels like it.

There's so much in Jinsei that I'm drawn to, so much potential that peaks through. I kept wondering if we were about to turn the corner, and the film was going to find its footing to become something great, but sadly, it ended up being a thoroughly frustrating watch for me. I have so much respect for these solo animators who take on an ambitious project like this, and that alone makes it worth a watch, but sometimes the ambition outpaces the execution, which is the case here.

The protagonist of Jinsei is known by many names throughout his life, marking the various chapters. It's hard to know what to call him, because he's a hard person to pin down. His life begins in tragedy, with the loss of his parents at a young age. He's the son of a former idol whose career ended in controversy, and that legacy is a burden he must bear. Throughout the years, he becomes an idol himself, and is also at points a god of death, a host/escort (I think? This chunk of the movie confused me), and an oracle/cult leader. It's a big life with lots of twists and turns, strange developments and characters who disappear and reappear at different intervals. At one point, a kind of sci-fi war has broken out, where the warriors look like they stepped straight out of Halo.

Which brings me to the surprising truth about Jinsei: it's pretty boring.

That's certainly not what I expected going into this movie. The premise, the promise, the trailer, all made me think I was heading into something free-wheeling and strange and exciting. And it's occasionally those things, especially during the futuristic final stretch that recalls 2001: A Space Odyssey, but more often, it's a slog. Even with the constant reinvention of our main character, the film just kind of meanders through its paces, rarely feeling like it has much to say. It feels more like an exercise in a filmmaker feeling his way through making a feature for the first time, deciding each beat and story development as it barrels down the way without a strong sense of narrative shape to hold it all together.

It's a shame, because I love this kind of small-scale, independent production, the way it looks and feels. The animation here is pretty rudimentary, with a lot of static frames, or frames with very little movement. It sometimes feels like a slideshow or a flipbook, with some sequences of rapid-fire editing telling bits of the story via Kuleshovian mood boards. And I dig that style. It doesn't feel like it's a constraint or a weakness of the film, but rather an impetus to be creative and economical in the approach. It makes the whole movie feel punk, thrillingly rough around the edges. Each aspect ratio change and adjustment to the color scheme really pops. For all of its narrative foibles, Jinsei at least has style to burn.

If the film falters in its storytelling, and ends up feeling a bit hollow as a result, there's at least some meaning to skim from the surface level. The ability to reinvent ourselves, either through self-determination or as a result of the stories cast onto us by others, is a deeply human quality. We're storytellers, always wanting to find meaning and rhymes in the chaotic world around us, even when any shape we try to assign to our experiences is flimsy, false. Jinsei is defiant in that way, revealing the multitudes we contain, and thus the futility of trying to sum anyone (or anything) up neatly, cleanly. The best we can do is to wear our various names and titles proudly, to shed the ones that don't fit, and to move as far into the future as we're able to, until our time runs out.