Video games are visual art. Well, at least some of them are. All games have artistic elements – music, graphic art, and narrative that make up the whole. Yet, not all games manage to integrate all of those elements into a cohesive work of art.
For over a decade, Japanese visual artist Komitsu has created interactive art emphasizing play and exploration. In her 2021 web browser game, you understand kawaii [sic], you walk around a park and stop to call each dog kawaii (cute). The dogs beam with excitement for being noticed. Komitsu, as an artist, utilizes kawaii as a tool in her artist kit. Her latest work, Five Years Old Memories, is disarming like her previous work with its cuteness. She describes Five Years Old Memories as an “interactive omnibus animation” created as part of her residency at the renowned NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo in 2023. The game is visually pleasing and conveys a certain faux naïveté whose simplicity packs a surprising degree of expressiveness.
Naïve art is often considered childlike due to its sincerity and because its presentation lacks pretensions. Pablo Picasso allegedly stated that it took him his entire life to be able to draw like a child. The visual aesthetic of Five Years Old Memories is a skilled reimagining of children’s watercolor drawings made by a seasoned artist. A child could not draw nor animate the scenarios displayed. There is too much subtlety at work here for that to be the case.
We hear Komitsu’s voice as she interviews seven subjects in the game, each of whom retells a specific childhood memory as part of a chapter. Komitsu draws each object and person in each chapter with a roundness associated with the firm brush press of a child. This child’s perspective, told through still-life paintings of inanimate subject matter, embeds Five Years Old Memories with a sense that these memories are not only about childhood but are being seen through the eyes of a child.
Komitsu’s research into 1990s-era CD-ROM educational software heavily influences Five Years Old Memories. This is evident by how its interface mirrors many classic point-and-click computer educational games software like Le Livre de Lulu (1996), and Alphabet (1999) based on the work of children’s writer and illustrator Květa Pacovská. Komitsu has demoed both of these on her YouTube channel. That said, Five Years Old Memories is not edutainment. It’s an interactive narrative documentary centered on remembering childhood through the looking glass of time.
Five Years Old Memories is more than just colorful kinetic drawings and memories. The music composed by Natsumi Nagawa is playful and contemplative. The minimalist score begets recollection. When I listen to the music, I recall sitting on a green bench underneath one of the countless Gingko trees outside my house. The sun has begun to set. A swell of people emerge from every direction, smiles on their faces, glad to be outside. Children ride their bicycles, and couples walk side by side holding hands. An elderly woman smiles as she walks out of her home to greet her neighbors. The setting sun is bid farewell by birds (a flock of toucans, maybe) as it descends from the sky into the horizon.
A feeling of being verklempt is a natural byproduct of playing Five Years Old Memoires. “My memories start with a dream,” recalls Takuto at the beginning of his interview. I experienced a newfound appreciation of my memories of childhood—even the traumatic ones—from my time with Five Years Old Memoires. Though I grow increasingly melancholic about the world, thankfully, Five Years Old Memoires as a work of art does not share my bleak and jaded view. These childhood memories drawn in a minimalist art style make one smile.
In one of the recreated memories, a child naïvely attempts to get her father to play with her by filling his brown leather work shoes with water from a red flowering canister. You control the mouse and drag the canister to the shoes to initiate this prank. This endearing story reveals much about a child’s sense perspective; an act that to adults is seen as a nuisance is, for a child, a playful attempt to get the attention of a loved one.
What makes media like video games and “interactive omnibus animation” like Five Years Old Memories visually distinct from cinema is that a film, at its most self-assured, preserves beauty by committing it to the screen; a video game relies on input from the player to experience not only beauty but also preserve shared memories. The kid inside me interacts with what’s on the screen and remembers how life still brims with possibilities. These possibilities are vivid with color. Playing Five Years Old Memories is a powerful experience and a resolute work of anti-cynicism. Through its simplicity and weightlessness, it soars towards beauty.