Reflective Encounters

“With a title that suggests something more akin to a picture book adaptation, Yoko Yuki’s In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket is rather a densely concentrated parade of unrelentingly colourful, faux naïf visuals sometimes reminiscent of the work of Peter Millard, at other times the hypnopompic hallucinations that torment us in moments of sleep paralysis between dreaming and waking. Paired with brutal sound design and narration that borders on the obnoxious, the film requires a moment or two for the viewer to acclimate before accepting the playful insanity for what it is.

While the synopsis suggests it is a piece thematically about contradictions, in its execution it comes across primarily as an experimental film about the very joy of experimentation. Certainly it feels very much stream-of-consciousness in the flow of its visual concepts, as characters and scenarios morph and evolve from one another between occasional lines of either poetry or pointedly disjointed prose. This isn’t a film that purports to have a lofty societal point to make or message to convey, other than perhaps the value of living in the moment, and the further value that can come from stringing those moments together.”

— Ben Mitchell