I make original animated stories inspired by the Japanese OVAs, series and films I grew up with. One person, spare hours, and generative tools that are still very far from predictable. There will be imperfect shots, continuity mistakes and odd frames.

That is the technical explanation.
The real one starts much earlier.

The television was already on

I am Italian, born in the 1980s. Long before anyone discovered the urgent necessity of informing me that what I had been watching was called anime, Japanese animation had already occupied a large part of my childhood.

I did not find it in a specialist shop.
I did not join a fandom.
I turned on the television.

I was about four when Junior TV was showing the original Dragon Ball.

Little Goku. Bulma. The yellow cloud.
And the opening I remember was still in Japanese.

I had no idea what those words meant, so naturally I learned the song.

Goku flying away on that cloud meant freedom, mystery, adventure.
There was a whole world beyond my street.
That was translation enough.

Then came the avalanche. Goldrake, Jeeg, Candy Candy, I Cavalieri dello Zodiaco, Ken il Guerriero, Lamù, Ranma ½, City Hunter, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, Cowboy Bebop — 690 Japanese animated series and television specials broadcast in Italy between 1976 and 2006, according to one scholarly count. At that point “foreign influence” starts sounding a little inadequate.

We did not call them anime.
We called them cartoni.
Japanese images, Italian voices.
Japanese stories, Italian songs.
Tokyo streets passing through a television set in a small town outside Naples.

Things I knew before I knew their names

Tatami. Sliding doors. Shrines. School uniforms. Summer festivals. Railway crossings. Utility poles.

A six-year-old does not think: interesting example of Japanese domestic architecture.

He thinks: that's a house. That's what a school looks like.

For years I watched characters eat those triangular rice things wrapped in dark seaweed, and I only remember wondering why nobody around me ever cooked the damn things. Years later I finally held an onigiri.

My reaction was not “how exotic.”

It was: oh. There you are.

I am not Japanese. I have never lived in Japan, and watching Japanese animation obviously does not grant anybody an understanding of Japanese society. But neither is this visual language something alien I discovered yesterday.

These are not memories of Japan. They are memories with Japan inside them.

Thank you

To the Japanese artists, animators, directors, writers, musicians and technicians who created all of it, most of them without ever knowing we existed.

And to the Italians who brought it here: the broadcasters, the translators, the dubbing studios, the voice actors, the singers, and even the people who were simply looking for animation they could afford to put on air and discovered Japan happened to have an extraordinary amount of it. They thought they were solving a scheduling problem. Instead they helped create a thirty-year cultural phenomenon.

Nobody designed that Italian-Japanese childhood from above.
It happened.

Where NipponNana comes from

I use generative models because they finally allow one person working independently to attempt animation that once required resources completely beyond my reach. They are not magic, and they do not decide what matters to me.

I write the stories.
I create the characters.
I edit the scenes.
I choose the pacing, the dialogue, the music, the imagery, the atmosphere.

And I use these very new machines to chase something deliberately old.

Painted skies.
Summer haze.
Neon.
Railway crossings.
School corridors.
Impossible machines.
Melancholy.
Adventure.

Then, under one of my videos, a Japanese viewer wrote:

That is the strange loop behind NipponNana.
The signal travelled from Japan to Italy.
It stayed with me for most of my life.
Now I am sending a little of it back.

It is my small thank-you to the people who made that childhood possible.

My way of turning the old television on again.
Adjusting the antenna.
Waiting through the static.
And trying to find that strange little place somewhere between Japan and Italy that probably never existed on any map.

I don't live there anymore.
Maybe nobody ever really did.
But to me, at least,

it feels a little bit like home.