Family duty sends a lawman to London to look for his mob-assassin brother as a Yakuza war threatens to engulf Tokyo.
Trust is even tougher to find in this stunning drama, created & produced by Sister Pictures for BBC2 and Netflix. GIRI / HAJI (Duty / Shame) was directed by Julian Farino and Ben Chessell, and AKA was brought in to design and create a 60-second animated insert for Episode one—and an additional sequence for Episode five. Episode one’s insert tells the pivotal back story of a ghostly Yakuza, one of the series protagonists, whilst the sequence in Episode five illustrates the moment when … Wait! No Spoilers!
To bring the production team’s ideas to the screen, AKA director Kristian Andrews designed a grim underworld in which washes of Japanese ink soaked into seedy depictions of London life. The look is deliberately set somewhere in-between the graphic stylings of both east and western hemispheres; to reflect the dramatic contrasts playing out on screen. With characters animated in TV paint and composited with live-action textures, the sequences have an ethereal and woozy quality to match Hisateru’s hazy recollection of the ghostly Yakuza.
