HKAIIFF 2026 · Official film record
The Bureau of Small Storms
小さな嵐の役所
[ Film / Synopsis ]
A junior clerk must assign every household inconvenience to the correct tiny storm before the city’s complaint season begins.
Beneath a seaside city hall sits the Bureau of Small Storms, where clerks process clouds responsible for minor domestic calamities: laundry dampened at noon, receipts blown under cabinets, soup cooled too quickly, or one balcony rained on while its neighbours remain dry. New clerk Fumi is precise but painfully literal. When hundreds of complaints arrive before the annual festival, she discovers that the bureau’s procedural map has been assigning the same wandering drizzle to contradictory addresses. Correcting the error means crossing departments devoted to thresholds, gutters, umbrellas, and unclaimed gusts, each with its own visual rules and eccentric staff. Hand-drawn character keys guide a paper-textured generative pipeline that maintains geography, object history, and background routines across the city. The result is a warm workplace comedy about systems designed to classify life and the small acts of discretion that keep them humane.
“For constructing a comic animated world whose rules, civic details, and recurring characters remain coherent while every bureaucratic weather event feels freshly invented.”International Jury citation
- Director
- Riku Aonuma
- Production entity
- Paper Weather Animation House
- Entity type
- AI-native animation studio
- Country / region
- Japan
- Runtime
- 78 min
- Language
- Japanese
- Format
- 4K animation · 1.85:1 · 7.1 mix
- Genre
- Animated bureaucratic fantasy
- Completed
- 3 June 2026
- Production window
- 15 months
- Festival master / version
- Festival master v2.2 · checksum locked
[ Named authorship / Principal credits ]
Creative team
[ Production entity / Profile ]
Paper Weather Animation House
Paper Weather Animation House creates authored animated worlds from hand-drawn character sheets, spatial rulebooks, and persistent object histories. Its production system expands approved visual grammar while department leads control performance, composition, and final continuity.
[ 51% Standard / Assessed creative participation ]
80%
AI participation is assessed across the full chain of authorship, supported by journals, model logs, version histories, stems and finishing records.
[ Capability record / 2026 signal ]
Where this film points
- Long-horizon consistency
- Procedural world simulation
- Controllable cinematography
The film demonstrates animated world models that preserve geography, objects, and background life across feature scale. It anticipates small studios maintaining reusable story worlds without flattening them into generic style.
Writers, artists, and actors alone determined the comic ethics of the bureau and when a consistent rule needed a humane exception.
[ Counter Seven, Indoor Drizzle ]
Fumi interviews a thumb-sized rain cloud beneath a desk lamp while filing cabinets continue their own background routines. Paper fibres remain visible throughout the animated shot.
[ Production method / Documented workflow ]
How the film was made
The record distinguishes authored decisions, bounded machine operations and final human approvals across the production chain.
Writers built departmental rules, case histories, and character obligations; procedural tools generated only incidents consistent with that civic logic.
Voice actors and animation directors established comic timing through full scene readings, gesture boards, and selected facial keys.
Hand-drawn keys, paper scans, city maps, and object histories constrain generated in-betweens, layouts, crowds, and recurring environmental actions.
Human editors control joke density, causal clarity, and emotional pauses while continuity tools track cases across departments.
Foley built from paper, drawers, cups, and water gives each department a distinct acoustic identity beneath the ensemble dialogue.
The studio archived rulebooks, character keys, voice permissions, generation settings, continuity reports, source art, and final scene approvals.
“For constructing a comic animated world whose rules, civic details, and recurring characters remain coherent while every bureaucratic weather event feels freshly invented.”
[ Records / Rights / Provenance ]
Reviewer-ready evidence
The record maps cases, world rules, character beats, source drawings, continuity choices, and final scene approvals.
Voice, performance, artwork, and texture permissions state transformation scope, release period, territories, and withdrawal procedures.
Animation lineage, style adapters, licensed source sets, seeds, spatial constraints, and prohibited motifs are versioned.
The delivery includes the 4K animation master, mix, subtitles, access files, world bible, cue sheet, and checksum record.