Animation First Festival ‘25: Momoko Seto on the Slow Beauty of Rot

While studying in her graduate film program, Momoko Seto gained an interest in the observation of things that occur on time scales too slow for us to immediately perceive: the development of a crystal, the stages of fungus growing, the way ice spreads. Observation is the central pillar of science and any narratives present when observing a thing as it exists are emergent rather than inherent. With this framing, she approached her early experimental work, filming time lapses of crystals and flora to imply a variety of narratives. 

Seeing the salience of emotion in giving meaning to otherwise neutral and naturally occurring phenomena made her want to expand into narrative work. We sat down with her after her talk at Animation First Festival ‘25, in which her unique approach to filmmaking created considerable conversation both during and after the event. She was also putting the finishing touches on her feature debut, Dandelion’s Odyssey.

How did you begin exploring the intersection between science and film?

In France I did six years of art school, along with an additional program. We have a very specific thing in France, a school which is between master’s and a PhD. It’s there that I started to interest myself in new technology, because the school wanted us to use a new technology to create something. I was interested in filming a crystal, how it grows. So I think it's at this moment that I became interested in natural phenomena and using technology to capture them.

It sounds like you approach film with a spirit of inquiry. Like in the formation of a crystal, there’s something that captures you, and you decide to film it and see how it progresses and evolves over time.

Yeah, there’s a childish desire of wanting to watch something that you’re incapable of watching with your own eyes. You need technology to watch those phenomena because they’re too slow. It's not very scientific.

I hear what you’re saying. I also think that spirit of inquiry is one of the animators of science—seeing something happen and being in wonder as to how.

My first intuition is always aesthetic, because I'm coming from the art field. So I don't know what kind of carbon structure it has because it's not my vocabulary. But aesthetically, the salt crystal, sodium chloride, it has this very perfect square structure. Even if you mix it with water it has this very perfect formation. It's accessible to me. We don't need a laboratory to see that.

Film, for you, is a way to make scientific concepts and scientific aesthetics a little more accessible. 

Yeah. I think there is this desire to know more, but it's not primary for me. It's a consequence.

You’d created these different experimental projects earlier, Planet A (2009), Planet Z (2011), and a couple of others, where you play around with these time lapses of crystals, fungi, vegetation. Can you talk a little bit about this aesthetic style that you were experimenting with?

Right, there’s also the process of rot. How something rots. It's not just aesthetic. Because if you just say “aesthetic,” you say, for instance, “a rose flower is beautiful,” but it's commonly beautiful. Everything is beautiful, but a rotten orange, maybe not too many people think it's beautiful, right? But it's the way that you shape it, the way you light it, the way you crop it in the image, it suddenly becomes super beautiful. I also like the excitement of being able to put this thing in a light that nobody really saw before. It’s part of the desire of discovery, to say, “Oh yeah, it's beautiful. I didn't see that before.”

Unconventional aesthetics.

Yeah, I'm interested in finding the aesthetics of something unconventional and turning it into something extraordinary.

That reminds me of Zigeunerweisen by Seijun Suzuki (1980) in which the Dionysian character has this line, “A thing is not beautiful until it’s begun to rot.” 

Ah, yes. Hearing you mention Suzuki, I think there's a lot of filmmakers, even if they're filming fiction, that are interested in the dark side of humanity, the perverse side of it. And it’s something that we try to hide that still echoes up to us, right? This dark side can maybe point to something beautiful in you, though, in its contradictions.

Is that also behind your desire to find the beauty of unconventional things? 

Of course.

Your background was in documentary work, correct?

I made a lot of documentaries. But my background is in both documentaries and experimental arts. I was doing a lot of experimental movies and performances, and on top of that my daily job was to make documentary films.

What lessons did you learn from documentary filmmaking that you brought into your narrative work? How did your background in documentary-making influence your current narrative approach?

With documentary, you let it do its thing. And with fiction, you make the thing do what you want it to do. So I like the approach of letting things do what they want to do, where I’m just capturing it. 

Also, when you make a documentary, you believe in what you're watching, you think it's interesting. You believe in this interesting thing that is natural. Which is contradictory with fiction, where you ask people to do things based on what you imagine. It’s a projection of your fantasy, where a documentary is like, you're taking external things and mixing them with your fantasy. So my approach of filming nature is like, I’m sure that nature will show me its incredible faces, faces that I couldn’t even imagine, faces that are beyond my imagination. It cannot be fiction, because fiction’s limited to your brain. But when you turn to nature the possibilities are infinite.

Trusting in the beauty of nature.

Of course. I also documented and took notes on the phenomena beforehand to better understand how to shoot it. So I know more or less what will happen, but you have to go farther than what we have already seen.

Your ongoing project is called Dandelion’s Odyssey. It’s your first full-length narrative feature. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for the film? What was the initial vision that seeded the project?

You’ll laugh, but the initial vision came from a ball of dandelion seeds, you know, the ball that you blow on. I was in a park in Paris and I was ready to blow on it and began to watch it very closely. There are about 100 seeds in one ball and its structure is super futuristic. There are these perfect lines and angles. It’s like a fractal. And you see something very mathematical inside this ball. It's not random, it's not organic, in the sense of having random patterns. It’s perfectly structured. 

And I thought, it looks like a UFO, then thought about a scenario where it’s going out to another planet, and it's gonna explore, and all the little seeds will drop out like little parachutes, and explore the world. And what if this ball, this UFO itself was composed of astronauts? Imagine 100 astronauts being the actual UFO, and it breaks and they all disperse. And so this image came in that moment. Everything started from here. I tried to write a story with the seeds exploring different topographies and the story came out of that moment of inspiration.

You began with the symmetrical perfection of a bundle of dandelion seeds and your curiosity about the journey of any individual seed became the premise of your film.

Very much. I'm very interested in this mathematical form in nature. It’s impossible to imagine it on your own. How is that possible, you know? These fractals, these crystals, even in the structure of water as it crystallizes into the shapes of different snowflakes, right? It depends on the temperature of the snowflake but the snowflake has perfect symmetry. It's super bizarre.

Compared with your previous experimental work, how did having a more formal narrative structure impact your approach to filmmaking in Dandelion’s Odyssey?

It's very different, because when you're doing experimental art films, you're totally free. You can start from the beginning, you can start from the end, or start from the middle. I think the audience has to do a lot of work when watching experimental films, because they have to create their own story. In experimental film you can have one drop of water and that already tells a lot of stories. The audience has to read the image. It requires a lot of intelligence on their part, so when you create it, you're more free. You're more free to concentrate on expression or a new definition, something more avant garde. 

With feature films, there are sponsors involved, people who put money into the film. You cannot just be free. So you have to convey the form of a narrative that everybody can understand. Even if they didn't go to art school or if they don’t watch experimental films or if they are kids they have to be able to understand. You have to be accessible. So the writing is totally different. 

In this project, you connected with screenwriter Alain Layrac to help you co-write the story. What was that collaboration like?

Alain is coming from a TV background. He was writing very accessible TV series. In TV and film you also have to write suspense. Sometimes it’s better to make the audience wait in suspense, or wait for the result of the suspense. This kind of thing pushes the project into feature length. It's not only beautiful images because those can bore you. If you watch one hour of beautiful images and beautiful sounds you’ll be bored only seven minutes in. So those beautiful images won’t have any meaning to you, because your experience of the film will be too flat. Suspense helps the audience become more involved in the images, more involved in what's happening. 

What was super new and super important to me was to give the audience an emotion to feel with the images, to feel the rotten fungus. How can you feel it? How can you be involved with it? Maybe you're sad for them or you're laughing with them. Something like this can suddenly become very close to you. It has to become close to you otherwise it won’t work; you won't be attached. And the idea is to be attached to those little seeds or even to the rotting orange. And when you find yourself becoming attached to those things that you thought were rubbish or nonsense, it suddenly becomes super important to you. So the emotional richness that you can gain from having more accessible writing is incredible.

So you start with your basic aesthetic inspiration, which involves observing the inherent beauty of nature. And then the narrative elements serve the purpose of making that beauty emotionally engaging, in service of accessibility. Because you’re interested in unconventional beauty, you need to make your images emotionally engaging.

Yes. For instance, in neuroscience you have access to images of the brain, with all their axons, and you learn about the role of DNA. We understand now what we are using those images, but we’re not emotionally engaged. Now imagine a film where you're inside the brain and trying to fix a broken axon, maybe the ship that you're inside breaks when fixing it too. Now you're more engaged with the science of what’s happening. It's the same thing for ecological images. We have a bunch of ecological images that surround us, but nobody cares about ecology because it doesn't touch us. I mean, like you see a polar bear diving in water because the icebergs are melting, those images are powerful. But people still won’t hesitate to take a plane or whatever because it doesn't concern them. Actually it concerns them but they are not emotionally attached. As soon as your child has a problem involving global warming then you're concerned. You are emotionally attached.

How did the emotional content of Dandelion’s Odyssey become clear to you, and how did you decide what you wanted the movie to make people feel?

We designed four different characters with four different behaviors and four different emotions that they represent. I designed that with Alain. And then the film is an adventure film, where the dandelions are looking for the soil they want to be their home. But they're scared by the new, big animals, or by the ecology changing, so they're faced with a lot of fears. Their journey is about finding happiness. It's more based on human emotion.

How much of this film reflects something about yourself?

There is maybe one thing that's close to me, which is the story of a dandelion searching for soil, searching for home. I'm from Japan. I live in France. I used to live in the United States for a semester exchange program, and also in other countries. Why suddenly do you decide to settle down in one place? This subject matters to me. Why suddenly do you leave your home, you leave your comfort zone, to go somewhere else, to work there, to struggle for a living? Not the same language, not the same people, not the same habits. You have to find work and suddenly you decide to stay. Some people decide to stay because they find a girlfriend, boyfriend, make a family or just make friends. There are a lot of other reasons too. Why does one particular place become an oasis to you? And so with this migration, this movement of people, what is home? This is a theme that I was very interested in from my life.

When can we expect to see Dandelion’s Odyssey? And what's next?

We’re trying to do festivals in 2025, we don't know which ones. We’ll see what's happening with premieres and release dates but it's not official. My distributor wants it to be released in January 2026 but myself and my producer want it to be within 2025, so let's say the end of ‘25 or beginning of ‘26. 

And the next project is also about plants, but I want to focus more on the sexuality of plants—different types and manners of attraction, seducing the other male, female or pollinators, and how we can understand their sexuality as humans with complex relationships. There are a lot of broken families, a lot of people with boyfriends and girlfriends, and non-sexual people too. All these relationships are changing, shaping us in different ways. We don't have any restrictions today. And so how can we try to understand their sexuality? This will be my next project.

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