Neo Sora & Sunny Gho: “Honesty” in Film, Animation, and the Creative Ecosystem
At Jakarta Film Week 2026, Grafis Masa Kini sat down with Neo Sora, director of Happyend (2024), and Sunny Gho, illustrator and founder of JICAF (Jakarta Illustration & Creative Arts Fair). They talked about the experience of watching films, artistic freedom, and how visual work can open up conversations about the world around us.
Amid the bustle of Jakarta Film Week, the screen becomes a place where different experiences and ways of seeing meet. Films from many countries arrive with stories that may feel unfamiliar but also carry concerns close to everyday life. For audiences, a film festival is a chance to discover work they have never come across. For the makers, it is a space to share ideas and see how a story is received by others.
This year, Jakarta Film Week takes Encounters as its theme. It became the starting point of our conversation with Neo Sora and Sunny Gho, who both served as jurors in different categories: Neo Sora for Global Short Films and Sunny Gho for Global Animation.
Sunny Gho admits he had no expectations about the films he would watch at Jakarta Film Week. It was his first time being asked to serve as a juror. He had assumed he could at least judge the films on their visuals, and then sat down to watch nine films from nine countries for the Global Animation category. In Global Short Films, Neo Sora went through something similar, with a little more experience. This was his second time as a juror, and he too chose to go in without any ideas or preconceptions, letting the films work on him. The festival’s theme this year is Encounters, and each of them explained what an encounter means in his own way. Both start from the same habit, which is to work from their own experience and not borrow anyone else’s yardstick.
Neo approached the theme from the audience’s side. A film can be watched again and again, but in his view, “our first encounter with a film is something that happens only once.” A festival gives that encounter a more special quality, he said, because of the audience’s enthusiasm and the chance to meet the artists in person. He also pointed to the many people from different parts of the world gathering in Jakarta as another kind of encounter. Sunny answered through his role as a juror. For him, the encounter happens in the way creators from different backgrounds interpret stories or themes that are already familiar.
The difference showed up again when the two were asked how they judge, even though they begin from a similar place. Neo measures a film with one simple question. For any film, he asks, “Do I have a physical reaction?”, by which he means a reaction of the body and the emotions together. He tries to be honest with that reaction and tends to prefer films that trigger it. The more intellectual assessment comes afterward, such as whether the film is well made, original, or different from anything he has seen. But what matters most to him is still, “Do I feel something?” When we described this as empathy, Neo clarified that this was not what he meant. What he looks for is more basic, and he calls it affect. If a film evokes affect in him, something is working there, and that is his baseline.
Sunny takes a different route. His initial assumption that he would judge on the visuals shifted after he had watched all the films. “What I look for is how well the story is told through the medium of animation,” he said. A film whose story is carried out through techniques only animation can achieve earns a higher score. For Neo it is a bodily reaction and for Sunny it is the fit between story and medium. These are two different yardsticks, but both come first from the experience of watching, rather than from rigid criteria.
Neo found the films in the Global Short Competition to be of very high quality, and he said that has a consequence. When every film is technically well made, the viewing experience can start to feel monotonous. Because the technical standard is nearly uniform, it becomes a secondary consideration. What he looks at first is how bold and how original a film is, since in his words, “almost anyone can make a very polished film.”
For Neo, boldness and originality matter even more when technical skill is no longer the main differentiator. A compelling film has to offer something that is not easy to find in other work. “What matters is what goes beyond that technical standard,” he said.
Neo’s view of artistic vision has also changed over time. There was a period when he felt he had an idea of cinema that he wanted to prove through his films. Now he comes from a more sincere place, wanting “to do the best work I can to tell the story that has been entrusted to me, or the story I want to tell.” In his view, a filmmaker “does not need to deliberately try to be unique or original.” He says he draws a lot of inspiration from canonical films, among them Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living, Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, which he recently rewatched, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, especially The Marriage of Maria Braun, Jacques Tati, especially Playtime, and a few works by Douglas Sirk.
“Some of the films on this list certainly change over time,” he added.
The most fundamental thing in solving the problems of filmmaking, for him, is to use the most honest means he has, so that an artistic perspective emerges on its own, whether he is aware of it or not.
Take Happyend (2024), which follows two young friends whose friendship begins to fracture because one of them undergoes a “political awakening” and starts to see the world beyond himself, while the other stays in his own world. For that reason, the world around them had to be portrayed on equal terms with the characters. He wanted to depict a city without a specific identity, any fictional city in Japan. He often uses wide shots and sets the lens’s depth of field so that everything stays in focus, from the characters to the background. “In this two-dimensional image, I think it matters how we depict the world around them and the characters themselves on equal footing, or in parallel. We gave both the same weight.”
Neo pays close attention to the characters in his films, both visually and in terms of sound. “I wanted to build a narrative, or an emotional arc, that runs through sound and keep it separate from the narrative that runs through the visuals in the film,” he said. The music in the film, both diegetic and non-diegetic, serves different functions. The techno that the characters listen to works as a kind of metaphor for the earthquakes that recur in the film, “because techno has a very strong bass thump that creates resonance.” The score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto, meanwhile, builds tension between the two characters. Its composition is drawn from the perspective of the two characters as they revisit memories and moods from the film’s unfolding timeline.
Honesty is what matters. Neo’s perspective always starts from the experience, imagination, and references he has accumulated. Although the characters in Happyend are fictional and live in the near future, he translated some of what he felt in his youth into the story, so for him the film is more about himself and his image of Japan’s future.
Looking back at the judging process for the Global Short Animation Competition, Sunny Gho found diversity from another direction. He rarely watches animation outside the mainstream, so the richness of the techniques used by the filmmakers in that program surprised him. Besides hand-drawn work, there was stop-motion and many kinds of materials. He mentioned one film, if he remembers correctly titled Carla and Her Legs (2026) by Christoph Büttner, which resembles woodcut techniques, and he was drawn to how many different ways of telling a story were on show.
Sunny then recalled a time when arthouse films were considered unlikely to succeed commercially, while mainstream work was seen as having less artistic value. In his view, that line is now blurring. A highly personal animation can succeed commercially without losing its cultural impact. He concluded that “the boundary between the commercial and the artistic is much more fluid today.” The strength of animation, he said, lies in the fact that it begins with drawing. A story can start with how you draw a line and shape a character. A live-action camera is limited by physical reality, while animation has far wider possibilities. He pointed to School Show (2026) by Ana Horvat, a film in the festival that uses children’s drawing strokes to tell a rather unusual political story.
On what makes a creative ecosystem healthy for local creators, Sunny answered plainly. We have to stop looking at how other countries build their industries, he said. We often fall into the mindset of making something in the Korean style or following the Japanese way, and then using their success as our benchmark. “We have to have our own definition of success,” he said, and we need to write our own playbook. Indonesia, he said, “does not lack talent at all.” The problem is that stakeholders assume success has to look the same as in other countries, even though Indonesia does not have the same industrial history as the comic industry in the United States or manga in Japan. Forcing outside standards will feel heavy and push us toward things that are impossible to compete in. So in film, comics, and illustration alike, the local industry needs to map out its own path to success, with a different yardstick.
