Characters for Senior Thesis

Because this is the first post concerning my Thesis project, I'll go over the summary. This is based off a true story about my Grandmother through the evacuation to the Japanese internment camps during World War II. She was twenty years old when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred and my project will be a montage on all the events that my Grandmother experienced.

There will be six main characters, and about ten additional characters. This will be the first four, the other two still need to be worked on.



This is Yuri Yano, the main character of my story and my Grandmother as a young girl. She used to tell me how much of a rebel she was back then. To put things in prospective on how aggressive she was, she was sent to a girl's etiquette school over in Japan, but after a few weeks, she got herself kicked out. She was very caring, but rebelled when she felt an injustice. It's very sad that she was accepted into the University of California for Nursing when Executive Order 9066 was issued. She and the rest of my family lost so much.



This is her dog, Scotty. In reality, my Grandma had to give him away, because the camps didn't allow animals. In my animation, I slightly changed the story to have the father take the dog away. It stays consistent with the theme of having our lives/possessions being taken away during this time. Scotty is supposed to represent "the observer" in my story. Children, for example, are observers as well. They can't comprehend what this evacuation is about, however it still effects them as a scary occurrence.



This is Yuri's father, Juro. Despite being the father, he ends up being the antagonist of this story. It's very ironic how in reality, he was the one who lost everything during the Japanese evacuation. There's a time in the story where my Grandmother packed her suitcase full of not clothes, not jewelery or food; but full of photo albums and photographs. The father scolded her, telling her that we can only bring "one" suitcase and one suitcase only per person. Only necessities should be packed. I want to show the Father vs. Daughter conflict to reflect society vs. authority. The viewer isn't going to grasp the concept of what the evacuation feels like. So instead of soldiers policing the town and taking things away, I'm portraying the father as the one taking things away from Yuri. Almost all people has experienced a conflict with a parent or someone else that stands as an authority figure. I also wanted to show how this evacuation destroyed not only what we owned, but destroyed the families themselves. There will be a few instances where the father and daughter fight and argue, where their relationship used to be so good and happy.



Just as a cameo, I added in my Grandmother. She's the one who survived the Japanese internment camps during World War II. To the audience, she's just an old lady shopping at the market. But to my family and me, it's our Grandma. She went through so much, I needed her to be there.