Watch this: 2,000 plastic shapes filmed in stop motion for Shugo Tokumaru’s amazing ‘Katachi’

Stop motion is a painstaking animation technique by anyone’s standard, but individually drawing thousands of subjects and cutting them from plastic sounds like a surefire way to increase the workload beyond all reasonable limit. That’s exactly what animation pair Kijek / Adamski have done in the new video for “Katachi” by Japanese singer-songwriter Shugo Tokumaru, however.

“Katachi” means “shape” in Japanese, and the video has over two thousand of them dancing in step to the music and lyrics; the animators describe the result as “an everlasting chain of convulsive memories.” The song is taken from Tokumaru’s excellent In Focus? album, which came out late last year in Japan and got a US release this month through Polyvinyl.