It's easy to reduce Jinsei, 30-year-old Ryūya Suzuki's feature directorial debut, to this year's ON-GAKU: Our Sound. It's not like the two films have nothing in common, either. Both share a sheer sense of independent filmmaking, with Suzuki writing, directing, animating, editing, and even doing the soundtrack for Jinsei all by himself in 18 months. The result is not just impressive as a solo effort, but outright one of the best anime movies of the year. There is an eclectic collection of influences at play in Jinsei, from acclaimed Norwegian comedy-drama The Worst Person in the World to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which gives the film a unique look and feel for how it handles human drama and eventually a departure into the futuristic.

That's because Jinsei tells a story over a century. We start in the 2000s when a young boy sees his mother run down by an elderly driver in an accident that also leaves his father in a coma. Left in the care of his stepdad Hiroshi, our protagonist leads a mostly anonymous life as he is never called by his real name in the film, and the audience never learns it. Still, the protagonist goes by several nicknames, like God of Death, Se-chan, Kuro, Zen, and God.

Suzuki takes a rather free-flowing approach to the narrative, telling it in chapters without much connecting tissue. We just catch up on different chapters of this guy's life and have to catch up quickly as to how he's changed (or not), similar to the start of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, catching us up to George Bailey's life story.

Our nameless protagonist strikes a friendship in his youth, a classmate with dreams of making it big in the idol industry, and the two set out to become stars. In its middle section, Jinsei becomes a poignant exploration of the cost of fame, the kind of predatory personalities that take advantage of young hopefuls, and the pitfalls of Japanese entertainment. Suzuki handles his themes with care and nuance, as the story of our nameless protagonist becomes an avenue from which to really explore larger themes such as loneliness, total war, fame, friendship, and more. The protagonist spends most of the film either silent or speaking in very short, succinct sentences with a rather monotone voice. Rapper Ace Cool gives the protagonist a vulnerability and sense of intrigue in the way he delivers the lines with his taciturn voice, creating an alluring mystery around this guy who, out of nowhere, becomes a star, giving very little as to his inner thoughts.

Suzuki's minimalist visuals and muted color palette, which focus more on character expressions and framing than lush backgrounds or details, made the movie manageable enough to make on his own, but it adds something to the film. Our protagonist moves through life not caring about anything, missing the beautiful things life offers, even in disaster and war. And yet, by the third act, Suzuki completely changes gears and both the visuals and the story go abstract, bursting in color and surrealism as we explore the distant future. The story, due to its free-flowing nature, does run out of steam at several points in he film, particularly the ending, which abandons its grounded approach for something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, leaving Earth behind for the unknown. It is commendable as a narrative experiment, but it lacks the richness of the simplicity in the earlier chapters and decades of this man's life.

Jinsei enters grandiose territory as it speculates about the future of Japan. Still, when it deals with just a simple and grounded story of a man and how names shape his life, it makes for a fascinating, compelling debut that shows how exciting the future of Japanese independent animation is.