“Singular” isn’t a word that gets thrown at a movie very often (or at least, it shouldn’t be), but Jinsei earns it in more ways than one. Unlike most animated films, which typically take a village, this one was hand-drawn entirely by one person: Ryuya Suzuki. After teaching himself animation during the pandemic and garnering some acclaim for his shorts, he makes his anime feature debut with as (deep breath) director, writer, editor, animator, DP, art director, character designer, color designer, and composer of Jinsei. As much as we talk about auteur filmmakers, the opportunity to experience the perspective of one artist in this way is rare in movies.
And Suzuki’s perspective is… singular. Jinsei is remarkably difficult to explain, both as a narrative and as an experience. It feels authored; there is an oddness to the story and how it’s told that, once I learned the circumstances of this film’s production, I later recognized as idiosyncracy. In the space of a cut, it can go from engrossing and meaningful to frustratingly distant. I have been more engaged trying to sift through my feelings about this movie after the fact than I was actually watching it.
Sometimes, when it comes to art, that’s just how it is, and I don’t think I could convincingly say Jinsei is unsuccessful. But I don’t think it’s successful enough. Though it creates striking moments and leaves a lasting impact of some kind, Suzuki aims for a scope of storytelling that his film just doesn’t achieve anywhere but on paper. As impressive as his achievement is, the collaborative nature of cinema is one of its strengths, and I can’t help but wonder what he may have accomplished with other hands to help shape his vision.
Moments Of Brilliance Aren’t Enough To Hold Jinsei Together
“Jinsei” means life in Japanese, and Jinsei accordingly captures the full span of an especially eventful one. We follow our protagonist (voiced by rapper ACE COOL) for a century as the story unfolds in chapters, each titled after what he is called at that stage of his life. A person has many names over the course of their life – something he realizes as a child, watching his mother die in a freak accident and use her last breath to call him by a name he’ll never hear again.
That’s far from the last tragic thing to happen to our hero, but it may remain the most defining. An old man losing control of his car and crashing into a convenience store costs him both of his birth parents, as his father, a former J-Pop idol, is left comatose. He’s raised by his step-father, Hiroshi (Shohei Uno), who can’t quite escape the profound sadness of losing his wife. He speaks only rarely and is often at a distance from other people. He spends most of the film a passive observer of his own life, except when moved to a burst of sudden violence.
Episodic by design, Jinsei has stretches that work better than others, and the difference comes down to whether the elements Suzuki has placed together manage to create a spark. The film is flattened in multiple ways: Visually, the animation style is very planar, creating the feeling of stacked, two-dimensional layers. It creates many opportunities for careful compositions, and the strongest images arrive almost like a physical blow. It also makes the movie feel very inert at times.
…Jinsei excels when it lapses into montage.
Likewise, the characters are very dialled down, the protagonist especially. The emotions being grappled with are often very intense, and the film is not entirely without bursts of energy from the voice performances, but they are very much not the norm. Jinsei proceeds calmly through its many trials, and the effect is often alienating. Our hero, by virtue of his personality, is at the greatest remove. That doesn’t exactly make him the most comfortable character to spend the majority of our time with.
This overall flatness is why Jinsei excels when it lapses into montage. Suzuki will occasionally condense the passage of time into a series of images, cutting quickly from one into the next. The film opens this way to tell us the story of the protagonists’ parents, a sequence that plays into all of Suzuki’s strengths as a storyteller. The rhythm of the cut brings dynamism, the compositions highlight repetition and change, and traversing all that time in such a brief duration achieves the sense of epic scope the movie is after.
The montages do show Suzuki’s limitations as well – not every image captures the eye quickly enough to communicate what it signifies before the film has already moved past it. A more experienced animator, or even a team of animators, could have ensured each tableau communicated its purpose more efficiently. But that opacity, a characteristic found throughout Jinsei, is least irksome in the montages, where a missing piece here or there won’t disrupt our understanding of the whole.
I lean negative on the film as a whole because, ultimately, the missing pieces do disrupt my sense of the bigger picture. Jinsei is part of a tradition of telling an epic story through the lens of one remarkable person, and at their best, the effect these narratives create is one of accumulation. They end up greater than the sum of their parts, even if those parts are great by themselves. This movie is far too inconsistent to bring it all together, and the attempt at a transcendent ending feels disappointingly earthbound.
Jinsei released in New York City theaters on June 5 and expands nationwide on June 12.
- Release Date
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June 12, 2026
- Runtime
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93 minutes
- Director
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Ryuya Suzuki
- Writers
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Ryuya Suzuki
- Producers
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Kenji Iwaisawa
Cast
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ACE COOL
Protagonist (voice)
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Taketo Tanaka
Kin (voice)