Stop-motion animation depicts Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing using tiny paper models

When the lights change at Shibuya’s scramble intersection, 10 lanes of traffic draw to a halt and thousands of people surge into the street to cross in multiple directions. It’s one of Japan’s iconic urban sites, and often features on the big screen as a symbol of Tokyo. Of course, Shibuya’s scramble is crowded – it may be the busiest crossing in the world – but underneath the chaos there is a kind of fluid order, as people weave in and out of the oncoming crowd.

Architect and artist Naoki Terada has constructed Shibuya at 1/100th its real size, with the crossing’s cars, people, motorbikes (and even dogs!) made out of hand-cut paper. This beautiful stop-motion animation is the result.

Terada was inspired to begin the project by his experience making architectural models. In order to give scale to his models, he includes small human figures, which gave him the idea of making a stop motion animation of Shibuya using these paper models.

At the end of the video, we even get a look at the making of the 30-second animation, which took a team of staff eight full days to animate.

Watching this video is almost as fun as being in Tokyo yourself, watching the busy crossing from the Shibuya Starbucks. Almost.

Sources: Shibuya Bunka, Terada Mokei

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