Departures - Movie Posters

In the movie Departures, the main character, Daigo, loses his job as a cellist for a symphony in Tokyo and is forced to move his family back to his hometown in the countryside of Japan. There he finds work as a Buddhist mortician. Culturally, any work dealing with dead bodies is seen as degrading and dirty, and Daigo tries to keep this job a secret from his family and friends. While he feels disgusted at first, he eventually discovers the beauty in the burial ceremony and begins to embrace it as an honorable and respectable way to send off the souls into their next life.

The movie poster is created with complex visual metaphors while not using any of the actors/actresses in the film. The feelings of solitude, the transitional stages of life, and a return to nature are big themes represented in the movie and here they are metaphorically represented in the imagery in a combination of sumi-e brush techniques and photography.
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- Movie Poster

CalArts BFA-3 assignment
Class: Graphic Design III
Instructor: Michael Worthington.