“I draw butts because I like their shapes and because I am fascinated by the things that happen around that area.” With those words, Sawako Kabuki, a Japanese artist currently based in New York, concluded her masterclass on 27 June at Fest Anča International Animation Festival in Žilina. Now in its 18th year, the festival embraced a coming-of-age theme: the body and all perceptions of corporeality. With her shocking, controversial, yet mesmerizing animation that perfectly aligned with that motif, Kabuki was invited as a special guest and served on the jury for the Best Slovak Animated Short Competition.

We are sitting in the New Synagogue, which at night transforms into the festival club. Butt-people are dancing on the screen in front of us, and Sawako Kabuki begins her talk by apologizing for replaying the same animations shown just an hour ago. We reassured her that that’s exactly why we had come: to hear what was inside her mind as she drew those psychedelic, colorful butts, dicks, and tentacles, and to eagerly experience it all once again.

“When I was little, my preschool teacher complimented my drawing. I got super cocky and ever since that, all I have done was draw,” she says. Confident in her drawing skill, Kabuki decided to attend one of Tokyo’s top art universities. There, she created her first animation, ‘Circle’ (2010), which was already fluid and trippy – the style she would later be known for, though less colorful and more subdued than her future work. Still, she found animation exhausting and, at first, somewhat unengaging. Despite attending animation classes again the following year (the alternative was “boring advertising classes”, she jokes) and completing two animated films as her graduation project, she didn’t plan to pursue animation as a career.

Therefore, after graduating, she took a job as an assistant director at a film production company, yet even that wasn’t exactly her dream job. Luckily, around the same time, her graduation film ‘Anal Juke -anal juice-’ (2013), which reflected her inner sadness after a breakup and the national chaos following the 11 March 2011 earthquake in Japan, began receiving international film festival invitations. Seizing the opportunity, she gradually immersed herself in the animation world, and over time, her name gained
increasing recognition.

Certain now that animation was her true calling, she returned to her alma mater for graduate studies and created her most well-known works. These included ‘Master Blaster’ (2014), a pinkish, eccentric visual fantasy that expresses her desire to crawl inside the butt of someone she loves and be carried away, just like drugs that people smuggle.

Master Blaster

This was followed by ‘Don’t Tell Mom’ (2015), a late-night educational show for kids about the art of masturbation, and culminated in ‘Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight’ (2016), a deeply personal story of vomiting. Through these works, she invites audiences into the surreal and intimate corners of her psyche, offering an unfiltered exploration of the body – both inside and out. For that last one, she earned a Jury Award at the 2017 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which exhilarated her and affirmed that she had chosen the right career path.

“I love drawing a lot of butts. It really calms my mind and makes me happy. I call it ‘butt therapy’”, she tells the audience. Animation may be therapeutic, but Kabuki admits that it’s also difficult and draining, and that sometimes, despite the urge to draw, nothing comes out. Her favorite English word – tenesmus – captures this as a bodily feeling: the urge to free the bowels, but not being able to. She even used it as the title of her book, which was released in February 2025. It’s a collection of sketches and illustrations, with pages full of tiny people pouring in and out of various body parts, as well as documentation of her animation process, which she shares during the masterclass. Showing her book, she puts it awkwardly in the middle of the floor, stating that anyone can look through it, if they want to.

Kabuki’s storyboards, which she draws only for commission, are a playground of tick-lined, simple, and omnipresent butts. One poops toothpaste right onto the toothbrush in a commercial pitch for Marvis, while another ejects a hand that draws a ballot for Adult Swim’s voting campaign. None were accepted, unsurprisingly, due to the presence of butts and bodily fluids, which are still taboo, and which some found more grotesque than hypnotic. As a compromise, Kabuki had to turn to drawing lips or butt-shaped chins, which in some way resemble her beloved shape, but are more socially acceptable.

The delightfully bizarre screening ends with ‘Cockroach Calisthenics’ (2021), a seven-minute short that uses rotoscope animation to transform her friends into singing, contorting cockroaches. In comparison, her masterclass ends on a grounded note with I’m Late (2021), a documentary short about late periods and pregnancy, animated in the same rotoscopic style.

The art of Sawako Kabuki is an astonishing and eye-catching display of artistic audacity. Her work is not only bold in its border-crossing, but also remarkable in its ability to portray the body as something both natural and fascinating – all wrapped in colorful, shameless honesty. While guiding us through the surreal traipse of her animations and hidden desires, she invites us to embrace our curiosities, shed our shame, and celebrate the strange beauty of being ourselves.

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contributed by: Magdalena Nieświec

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