Inside Hidari's five-minute pilot: wooden puppets, a Volo motion-control crane, and hand-moved smear frames

Animation Obsessive's account of Hidari's 2023 five-minute pilot -- the hand-carved-wood samurai short from director Masashi Kawamura that is now in development as a feature with Keanu Reeves voicing the lead -- names the crew behind its "wood punk" look: TECARAT's Takeshi Yashiro designed the puppets, Kimimasa Inazumi animated the action scenes, and Shigeru Okada (Rilakkuma) led the rest. Even a five-minute short needed two Jingoro puppets, a separate Inumaru puppet and Inumaru robot, five henchmen, an armchair dog, and a sleeping cat built as five separate motion-blur models -- one puppet per in-between pose rather than a single reused figure. Over 60 staff worked across five filming stages for a year and a half, shooting with a Volo motion-control crane, switching lenses within a scene, and varying frame rate; fast motion was faked not with a blur filter but with wire-suspended "smear frame" puppets, detached and repositioned by hand one frame at a time.

Folded into the Wiki's wood-puppet-material page as a sourced production example, alongside a correction: the page previously described Hidari as "the stop-motion feature" outright -- it is a completed 2023 pilot with a feature version still in development, per the works directory's own record.