Nishikata Film Review

Help Kickstart Mirai Mizue’s WONDER 365 Animation Project

2013-04-25T12:43:00.000+02:00

Help Kickstart Mirai Mizue’s WONDER 365 Animation Project

Since his exciting debut on the animation scene in 2003 with his dynamic hand-drawn abstract animation Fantastic Cell, Mirai Mizue’s have become increasingly ambitious in scope. Like his predecessors Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger, Mizue’s work explores the relationship between music and movement.

Mizue began his Wonder 365 Animation Project a year ago, producing 24 drawings a day for a total of 8,760 drawings. He normally works independently, but the scope of this project led to him hiring 160 painters to assist him to complete the work by the end of March of this year. Now Mizue needs help to cover the costs of recording an original soundtrack by the acoustic orchestral group the Pascals led by Rocket Matsu, the editing costs, the costs of cutting a 35mm print and creating a DCP, and other incidental costs.

There are five days left in Mizue’s Kickstarter project, please donate now and spread the word via Facebook and other social media. Check out his videos on Vimeo and YouTube to get an idea of Mirai Mizue’s unique talent as an artist.

Nishikata’s Best Japanese Indie Animation 2012

2012-12-26T17:27:00.000+01:00

The year of the dragon got off to a blazing start with the experimental filmmaker Isamu Hirabayashi winning the Noburo Ofuji Award for innovation in animation in January for his contemplative film 663114 (2011) which was inspired by the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster of March 2011. Then in February, Atsushi Wada’s French-Japanese co-production The Great Rabbit (2012) won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale. Wada’s Mechanism of Spring (2010) also won for best short film at Anifest 2012 . It was a great pleasure for me to have Wada as a guest at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt in the spring. Other notable successes in 2012 (too many to list in full here!) included Mirai Mizue’s Modern No. 2 (2011) winning the Sacem award for original music at Annecy and Yoriko Mizushiri’s Futon (2012) winning the Renzō Kinoshita Prize at Hiroshima.

There were also a number of notable international animation events involving Japanese animators this year. I had the privilege of attending the tribute to Kihachirō Kawamoto and Yuri Norstein at the Forum des Images in Paris in March. A number of top Japanese animators took part in Animafest Zagreb’s celebration of its 40^th anniversary this year which included a retrospective of the career of experimental animation pioneer Yōji Kuri who was honoured with the Animafest Lifetime Achievement Award. Kōji Yamamura designed the poster for the Ottawa International Animation Festival and gave master classes in the UK and France in November (see Zewebanim’s interview with him – FR/JP only).

Things have been quieter than usual on Nishikata Film Review the past few months due to my teaching commitments and some upheavals in my personal life (I don’t recommend moving house a month before Christmas!), but the weird and wonderful world of independent animation in Japan has been stronger than ever. Here is my list of the best independently made animation shorts that I have seen this year:

The Great Rabbit (グレートラビット, Atsushi Wada, 2012)

In addition to the Silver Bear, this film has brought Wada recognition at festivals around the world from Fantoche to Hiroshima. Read review.

Muybridge’s Strings (マイブリッジの糸, Kōji Yamamura, 2011)

Yamamura’s Deleuzian exploration of movement and time hit the festival scene in 2011 and I finally got an opportunity to see it when it came to Nippon Connection. Now available on DVD and bluray in Canada as part of the NFB’s Animation Express 2 and on a bluray of its own in Japan. Read review. Additionally in 2011, Yamamura made a watercolour animation Anthology with Cranes (鶴下絵和歌巻) which aired on NHK BSPremium. Take a look at this beautiful image from it.

#270 / WONDER 365 ANIMATION PROJECT DECEMBER 26 from MIRAI_MIZUE on Vimeo.

Wonder 365 Animation Project (Mirai Mizue, 2012-13)

The ever prolific Mizue has set himself a big challenge this year: a new short animated film every day for 365 days. Check it out on Vimeo. His film Modern No. 2 (Mirai Mizue, 2011) is also one of my favourites seen this year. Read the review. If that weren't enough, he also did a fascinating series called Kubrick in February where he explores geometric animation further. See the playlist.

663114 (Isamu Hirabayashi, 2011)

A profound response to the nuclear disaster of March 2011 from the perspective of a cicada. . . read more.

PiKA PiKA Sunlight Doodling Project (TOCHKA, 2011-present)

In the wake of the March 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster, TOCHKA started to rethink their methods of animation in terms of renewable energy. As a result, they adapted their PiKA PiKA lightening animation (see my review of their DVD) from using battery-powered flashlights to harnessing the power of the sun. See the trailer for their project above.

WWF 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY from AMICA KUBO on Vimeo.

WWF 100% Renewable Energy (Amica Kubo, 2012)

This adorable animation was sponsored by WWF Japan as part of their campaign to move Japan away from nuclear energy and towards the use of renewable energy. Kubo first made a name for herself with her 2006 animated short with Seita Inoue called Bloomed Words.

Kiya Kiya (きやきや, Akino Kondoh, 2010-11)

Another rare animation by New York City-based painter and mangka Akino Kondoh featuring her mysterious alter ego Eiko. Read more.

Two Tea Two (Hiroco Ichinose, 2010)

One half of the husband and wife animation team Decovocal, Ichinose's films are a wonderful blend of surrealism and humour in the tradition of her mentor Taku Furukawa --- read more about this film.

Holiday (ホリディ, Ryō Hirano, 2011)

One of my great discoveries this year was the work of young animator Hirano who has been making films for several years now. Learn about him in my piece The Curious Animated World of Ryo Hirano and my review of Holiday.

Monotonous Purgatory (Saori Shiroki, 2012)

Shiroki brings her melancholic aesthetic to a recently released music video for the band Matsyoshka featuring trak maker Sen and female vocalist Calu. To learn more about Shiroki see my series on her films.

Futon (布団, Yoriko Mizushiri, 2012)

In a minimalistic style, Mizushiri captures the sensuality of a woman's relationship with her futon. Mizushiri is starting to come into her own as an artist - as recognized by the jury at Hiroshima who awarded her the Renzo Kinoshita Prize.

Beluga (ベルーガ, Shin Hashimoto, 2011)

A nightmarish tale of a young woman's suffering and abuse brought to life. A modern interpretation of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Match Girl". A bloody world filled with senseless violence - not for the faint of heart.

Sound of Life (生活の音, Shiho Hirayama, 2010)

Hirayama experiments with three dimensionality and claymation in this colourful short. (A cheerful antidote to a screening of Hashimoto's Beluga.) Read more.

---------------

I am very excited about promising animation that I expect to see released in 2013. Kei Oyama’s After School got crowd-sourced through CampFire in January and I know of a few other exciting projects underway at the moment. In the world of indie anime, I was delighted that Masaaki Yuasa and Production I.P.’s Kick-Heart exceeded its funding goals. Anime director Keiichi Hara, who has also turned to more independent work in recent years (Summer Days with Coo, Colorful), is trying out a new path altogether by directing his first live action feature film for Shochiku. It is a biopic called Hajimari no Michi (はじまりのみち) about the life of filmmaking legend Keisuke Kinoshita (1912-98) with Ryō Kase (Letters from Iwo Jima, Like Someone in Love, Outrage) in the lead role. Kon Ichikawa began as an animator (see: Shinsetsu Kachi Kachi Yama) and turned into one of the greatest feature film directors of the 20^th century, so it will interesting to see what kind of a film Hara produces.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Hatsumi (ハツミ, 2012)

2012-11-28T16:08:00.000+01:00

Hatsumi: One Grandmother’s Journey Through the Japanese Canadian Internment (2012)

ハツミ：日系人強制収容所を経験した祖母の人生の旅路

Tonight sees the launch of the DVD of Chris Hope’s moving documentary Hatsumi: One Grandmother’s Journey Through the Japanese Canadian Internment (2012) at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre (JCCC) in Toronto. Since the official Japanese Canadian Redress in 1988 many Nikkei have come forward to tell their stories of forced relocation. In recent years, at the prompting of their children and grandchildren, many more stories have come to light that add to our understanding of this dark chapter in British Columbia’s history.

Many of the adults who experienced the forced internment have been reluctant to speak of their experiences. In his animated documentary Minoru: Story of Exile; for example, Michael Fukushima speaks of “those silences” which are such “a large part of [his] identity.” In Hatsumi, Chris Hope attributes those silences to the notion of shikata ga nai (仕方がない). This expression literally means “it cannot be helped” and is generally used to describe circumstances that our beyond one’s control. In North America, the idiom has often been used to explain how the Japanese were able to maintain their dignity in the face of the unavoidable circumstances they found themselves in after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Chris Hope describes how he often tried over the years to get his Nisei “Nana”, Nancy Hatsumi Okura, to tell him about her wartime experiences but that she was unwilling to share the whole painful story. On the occasion of her eightieth birthday, after her stroke and recovery, Hope decides that the time has come to try to one last time to preserve Nancy Hatsumi's story for posterity. Okura’s decision to tell her story reveals a wealth of information about herself and her immediate family that had previously remained in photo albums, diaries, and written correspondence.

Told in a straight-forward, first person documentary style, what makes Hope’s film stand out from previous films about the internment experience is his family’s remarkable archive. His late Issei grandfather, Kenji "Ken" Okura, was an avid photographer and documented his family and his community in remarkable photographs and home videos both before and after the war. He even managed to smuggle his camera into internment with him and documented his experiences as a forced labourer in Jasper.

A young, well-to-do Vancouver couple with an infant daughter, both Ken and Nancy Hatsumi kept detailed journals of their experiences from the moment they sold off their dry cleaning business to move to Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island at the beginning of the war. Hope first tries to get his grandmother to tell her story by having her read parts of her journal out loud but she finds it too painful. He changes tack and offers to take her to British Columbia to retrace her wartime journey.

In the 1940s, Telegraph Cove was a quiet fishing village but today is a centre for ecotourism. The wooden home that Ken Okura built still stands in the village and can be rented by tourists (see: Okura House). As Nancy Hatsumi tours the house for the first time in over sixty years, the memories come flooding back as if it was yesterday. An historical plaque dedicated to the Okuras marks the house and she is even able to meet with former neighbours who still live in the cove. The passage of time has done nothing to dampen the feelings of both parties of the injustice done to the Okuras when they were given only three hours notice to throw together the possessions that they could carry before being shipped off to internment camps.

Hope and his grandmother also visit the unwelcoming livestock building that was used to house the women and children after they were separated from their husbands. The building looks remarkably unchanged and brings home the inhumanity of how these Canadian citizens were treated by their own government. Through historical documents such as NFB propaganda films and archival photographs, Hope demonstrates how a terrible combination of fear, ignorance, racism, and greed brought about this shameful injustice.

The most moving moment in the film comes when Chris Hope discovers that his grandmother’s brother, whom she always spoke of in the past tense, is still alive and living in Japan. At the end of the war, the Japanese were still forbidden from returning to the Pacific Coast and were given two options: to move elsewhere in Canada or to return to Japan. Nancy Hatsumi’s parents and siblings chose to return to Japan. Eventually her parents and sisters returned to Canada, but her brother Tadao Hashimoto stayed on in the small city of Gobō in Wakayama Prefecture.

Hashimoto suffered the most out of all of his family. Born with childhood glaucoma, the forced internment meant that the family lost the means to pay for his medical treatment and he ended up going blind. The blind have a special status in Japan – it has the largest Braille library in the world – and since the Tokugawa period blind people have traditionally been trained as anma masseurs. Hashimoto received an education in Japan and had a successful career as a shiatsu masseur.

Like his sister, Hashimoto proves reluctant to dwell on the past. The subtle cultural differences between Canada and Japan raise their head in this sequence with confusion over what to say when entering the house and Hope’s inability to sit Japanese style. Hope speaks only a few words of Japanese and Hashimoto has lost most of his English, so Nancy Hatsumi acts as the interpreter. In another example of shikata ga nai, Hashimoto is ambivalent towards the internment. Although he has every right to be angry and bitter, Hashimoto seems content with how his life turned out. Upon leaving, Nancy Hatsumi displays her “Canadianness” when they leave by embracing and kissing her brother and sister-in-law. This moving reunion between a brother and sister after more than half a century brings home the terrible wrong done to them by the wartime government.

With Hatsumi, Chris Hope has created an invaluable record of his grandmother and her family. She is their last living link to traditional Japanese culture as Japanese Canadians rarely marry other Japanese (see: One Big Hapa Family). At the same time, the film is an important contribution to the education of current and future generations of Canadians. Not only does the film teach us about the past, Hope points out that Nancy Hatsumi’s courage in difficult times demonstrates that “the past should never limit a positive outlook for the future.”

Hatsumi is currently available to order via Amazon Canada.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Minoru: Memory of Exile (ミノル：逃亡のメモリー, 1992)

2012-11-27T12:56:00.001+01:00

“Let our slogan be for British Columbia: No Japs from the Rockies to the sea.”

These were the words famously spoken by Ian Alistair Mackenzie the Liberal Cabinet Minister for Vancouver Centre during the 1944 federal election. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mackenzie had played a key role in the government's decision to intern Japanese-Canadians living on the Pacific coast for the duration of the war. In the 1970s and 1980s literature and film began to surface addressing the injustices suffered by Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia. Pierre Burton addressed the subject on his television show and the materials presented were published by Janice Patton in her book The Exodus of the Japanese: Stories from the Pierre Burton Show (1973) and journalist Ken Adachi wrote The Enemy That Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (1976). Two semi-autobiographical works, Shizuye Takashima’s A Child in Prison Camp (1971) and Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan (1981), have become staples in the Canadian classroom because of the moving way that they tell their stories from the point of view of a child.

Since Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s official apology to the victims of this abuse of human rights in 1988, many Nisei, Sansei, and more recently Yonsei have come forward to share their family stories. Michael Fukushima’s animated documentary Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992) was one of the first of the post-redress films. His proposal to make an animation based upon his father Minoru Fukushima’s story landed on the desk of William Pettigrew at the NFB at about the same time that they were contacted by the Japanese Canadian Redress Secretariat (JCRS) about the possibility of funding educational films about the internment.

Fukushima did not learn of his father’s experiences until the issue of redress raised his head in the late 1980s. According to the film’s first-person narration, in the fall of 1987, at the age of 26, Fukushima asked his father for the first time about his childhood. Fukushima’s guiding voice is interwoven with the voice of his father and accompanied by traditional Japanese music played on the shamisen, koto, and taiko. The animation uses a variety of media including cutouts, paintings, and photographs.

The past and the present are also interwoven through Fukushima’s use of relics of the past in the form of family and archival photographs and archival documents. As Minoru begins to tell of his happy early childhood in Vancouver, the image of Minoru as a child comes to life in a faded family photograph. A colourful cutout of Minoru jumps out of the picture and leads us through archival photographs of Vancouver’s city streets. Minoru looks back fondly on his childhood in Vancouver. He describes how his parents ran their grocery store for almost 20 years from when they arrived in Canada until their internment.

Minoru speaks of how they were sheltered as children from news of the war. Even the internment camp didn’t seem that bad to the kids: it was almost like a summer camp and he recalls learning how to swim there. This is a sentiment shared by renowned environmentalist David Suzuki in his 2007 eponymous autobiography, who wrote that his love of nature was came from the idyllic time he spent in the interior of British Columbia – a time when he was blissfully unaware of the hardships endured by his parents until after the war.

It is not until the end of the war that things take a turn for the worse. The Fukushima family discovers that despite being Canadian citizens, they must make a choice of moving somewhere outside of British Columbia in Canada or be deported back to Japan. It turns out that the internment of Japanese-Canadians ignited “long-standing anti-Japanese sentiments” and local merchants, fishermen, and farmers supported the government in the seizing of all Japanese property and liquidating it. The funds raised from the sale of their property was used to fund the cost of their own internment.

Minoru: Memory of Exile by Michael Fukushima, National Film Board of Canada

Uncertain as to what would be best for the family Minoru’s father decides to take the Japan option although Minoru and his siblings cannot speak any Japanese and are Canadian citizens. They return to their father’s village where they encounter poverty and resentment by the locals who see them as foreigners. By the time Canada reverses its policy on Japanese Canadians in the late 1940s because of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, their family it too poor to be able to afford the journey back to British Columbia. In a case of bitter irony, when the Korean War breaks out in 1950, the Canadian government tries to recruit the same Japanese-Canadians they had banished a few years earlier. Minoru jumps at the chance along with about 40 others and thus begins his journey back to the only country that ever felt like home to him – despite the injustice and racism he experienced there.

Minoru: Memory of Exile is an early example of an animated documentary – a medium that has become more common nowadays with great films like Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004). It demonstrates the unique ability of animation to express things with greater depth and poignancy than mere archival footage or interview footage could ever do. The animation fills the “silences” that Fukushima speaks of as being a large part of his identity as a Sansei Canaidan. Following in his footsteps, Yonsei Canadian animator/documentary filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns also used animation to bring to life his Uncle Suey Koga’s stories about the internment in his feature length documentary One Big Hapa Family (read review).

Michael Fukushima directed at least one other animation at the NFB before beginning his transition into becoming a producer. Over the past decade he has built a reputation over as one of Canada’s top animation producers. Minoru: Memory of Exile shows us his roots as an artist in his own right. It is both informative and moving in how it tells the story of Minoru. A warm tribute from a son in recognition of the sacrifices made by both his father and his grandparents to enable him to grow up Canadian.

Related Reading: Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

direction/design/animation

Michael Fukushima

narration

Minoru Fukushima

Michael Fukushima

animation assistance/colour rendering

Faye Hamilton

producer

William Pettigrew

additional colour rendering

Colette Brière

sound design

Normand Roger

taiko

John Endo Greenaway

koto

Teresa Kobayashi

shakuhachi

Takeo Yamashiro

animation camera

Jacques Avoine

Ray Dumas

Lynda Pelley

re-recording

Jean-Pierre Joutel

apprentice mixer

Terry Mardini

Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art

2012-11-23T11:19:00.002+01:00

As part of its Canadian Spotlight, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival hosted an evening with renowned NFB producer Michael Fukushima on November 7, 2012 entitled Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art. The evening was moderated by Aram Siu Wai Collier and featured both conversations with Fukushima and a selection of films. Fukushima notably worked with Koji Yamamura on Muybridge’s Strings (2011). Other notable animated shorts that he has produced include Christopher Hinton’s Genie-award winning cNote (2005) and Ann Marie Fleming’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010.) The evening’s proceedings were uploaded onto YouTube. I have summarized the proceeding below with some added context and links to related NFB content.

Original Programme:

Minoru: Memory of Exile (Michael Fukushima, 1992)

cNote (Christopher Hinton, 2011)

Flutter (Howie Shia, 2006)

Jaime Lo, small and shy (Lillian Chan, 2006)

Dimanche (Sunday, Patrick Doyon, 2011)

Due to technical difficulties they weren’t able to screen cNote (but you can watch it online here). The evening began with Fukushima’s directorial debut Minoru: Memory of Exile. Fukushima was very modest about his abilities as an animator, but this is a very impressive film which I have been meaning to write a review of for some time. Fukushima’s proposal for this film is what brought him to the NFB in 1990. His invitation was thanks to what he called “a whole series of wonderful serendipitous convergences.” His proposal landed on producer William “Bill” Pettigrew’s desk at around the same time that he was asked to look into funding projects that addressed the internment of Japanese living on the west coast of British Columbia during the Second World War. This followed in the wake of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s historic apology to Japanese Canadians on September 22, 1988 and the compensation offered to victims of the internment. The redress included funds for educational materials.

Minoru: Memory of Exile by Michael Fukushima, National Film Board of Canada

Minoru: Memory of Exile is an animated documentary about Fukushima’s father Minoru and his experiences during and after the internment. It took about two years to make this 18 minute film which was handmade and shot on film. It won a couple of awards including Best Short Documentary at the Toronto Hot Docs festival in Toronto in its inaugural year. At the time, the genre of animated documentary was a new form. Fukushima himself had actually conceived of the film as a completely fictional animation but during the development process, it became clear to Fukushima and Pettigrew that in order to make the story more poignant, it needed to have more of an element of the real.

Pettrigrew had himself started out at the NFB as a documentary filmmaker with films such as Kuralek (1967), Oskee Wee Wee (1968), Epilogue (1971), and The Vinland Mystery (1984) and recognized the potential of bringing animation and documentary together. It had never occurred to Fukushima before that one could “marry documentary and animation” so this was a significant moment in the creative process for him.

The producer David Verrall helped Fukushima edit his film. Verrall produced more than 240 films during his NFB career including Bob’s Birthday (Alison Snowden and David Fine, 1993), When the Day Breaks (Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, 1999), Village Idiots (Rose Newlove, 2000), Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004), The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, 2006). Through his experiences with Verral and Pettigrew, Fukushima “came to realize that being a producer is more than just being a manager” and said that he thought that “it was at that moment that the seed was planted” for his trajectory to becoming a producer.

I was surprised to learn that Fukushima was initially resistant to the idea of making Minoru the film more personal because “It was still raw. I honestly didn’t think I could do it. . . to give justice to the story. . .” He had only just recently discovered the story of his father because of Minoru Fukushima’s receiving of a compensation package from the government. This had prompted his father to tell him the story. Fresh out of college and with no experience with documentary filmmaking, Fukushima was concerned about how to tackle the subject matter. At the time there was a huge debate in the documentary community about “veracity” with people asking “Who gets to tell stories?” and it seems that Fukushima was very sensitive about this. In the end, Pettigrew recognized the potential for how Fukushima as an artist could make the important story his father had to tell much more accessible and poignant for audiences while at the same time being “very subversive.” Fukushima credits Pettigrew with teaching him that “animation has a way of sneaking up on audiences and catching them unawares, and having a greater impact because of that.”

After Minoru, the Reel Asian audience watched Flutter (Howie Shia, 2006) and Jamie Lo, small and shy (Lillian Chan, 2006). Jaime Lo came out of the Talespinners Collection which was an initiative designed to encourage young, relatively inexperienced animators who reflect Canada’s ethnic diversity to make animated films for children. First the NFB took the “safe route” of optioning a number of children’s books by non-white authors to adapt. Fukushima produced one of this first batch of films and while he was pleased with the result felt that they could push it further and suggested putting out a call for proposals from young filmmakers about the minority experience in Canada. It was through this they discovered great talent like Lillian Chan and Jonathon Ng. They produced some terrific films for kids that were not necessarily about “being Asian” or “an ethnic minority” but were rather “coloured by their experience of being Asian.”

Flutter by Howie Shia, National Film Board of Canada

Fukushima was introduced to Howie Shia by the Hothouse emerging filmmakers programme for which Shia had made the great short short animation Ice Ages (2004). Shia came to Fukushima with the idea behind Flutter: a boy that just “runs and runs and runs.” It turned into what Fukushima calls a “beautiful, elegiac poem about search; about love; about how. . . you just have to dive into life and life takes you. . .” The film went on to win the Open Entries Grand Prize at the Tokyo Anime Awards in 2007 – the first animation produced outside of Asia to do so.

Asthma Tech by Jonathan Ng, National Film Board of Canada

After the films were screened Lillian Chan and Jonathan Ng – director of another great Talespinners film called Asthma Tech (2006) – joined Fukushima on the stage to discuss Fukushima as a producer. Ng was concerned that he might end up becoming too “gushing” about Fukushima. He praised him as behind different from other producers because he has a knack for understanding the needs of the director. In Ng’s case, he likes to be left alone during the creative process and he was appreciative of the fact that Fukushima gave him “a lot of leeway,” which is quite remarkable as Ng did not have a lot of experience as an animator at the time.

Collier asks if this hands off approach is something Fukushima tailors to specific animators or if it is his “style” as a producer and Fukushima says that to him “getting engaged on a filmmaker’s personality and their working style is fundamental to being a good producer for me. It’s a relationship. With animation it can be a 2, sometimes 3 year relationship and it’s pretty intimate.” Because of the deep emotional investment that he has as a producer, it’s important to Fukushima that he find animators with whom he can foster a good working relationship. He sees no point in badgering an artist like Ng, who prefers to be left alone, when that won’t bring any results. He also mentioned that he enjoys picking apart films and discussing them, but finds that it isn’t always productive or useful. It sounds like a very delicate process.

Jaime Lo, small and shy by Lillian Chan, National Film Board of Canada

Lillian Chan said that she moved to Montreal to work on Jaime Lo, small and shy and that Fukushima warned her at the outset that production meetings can sometimes involve tempers and people walking out of the room and that that was okay and a normal part of the process. Chan was surprised to realize that it could be “that intense of a process.” She doesn’t recall having any shouting matches with Fukushima herself, but she remembers that initially the story for the film wasn’t fully fleshed out and she was given several months just to work on the story. She really respects Fukushima for giving her the time that she needed to get to the right space with the film on her own. Fukushima would give her a critique of the film that would identify very precisely what the problems were with the film, but would not tell her how to solve the problem. She wanted definitive answers for her problems, but Fukushima instead offered suggestions, encouraging her to problem-solve issues on her own. This forced her, Chan explained, to come to terms with her own creative process.

Chan asks Fukushima how he finds it different working with young filmmakers like her and Ng as opposed to more experienced filmmakers as she imagines that this would be a different experience. Fukushima claims that there is often very little differences working with a veteran as opposed to an emerging filmmaker as long as the framework of the roles of producer and director have been set up clearly from the beginning. He addresses the fact that it is not only a two way relationship but a three way relationship which includes institution of the NFB. The NFB is “a very scary beast for veteran filmmakers and it must be terrifying for younger filmmakers.” The most important thing for Fukushima is establishing his relationship with the filmmaker. He sees his role as not only an advocate and champion of his artists, but also someone who will challenge them artistically. The only difference is that veteran filmmakers tend to have greater self confidence and a greater sense of what will work and won’t work for them artistically.

The final film of the evening was Patrik Doyon’s Oscar nominated film Dimanche (2011). Like Ng, Doyon was not classically trained as an animator, but rather had training in illustration. He also came into contact with Fukushima through the Hothouse project. After Hothouse, Doyon approached the NFB with a proposal about life as a child in rural Quebec . It ended up being a co-production with the French language ONF studio (the French branch of the NFB). Dimanche won Doyon the 2012 Jutra Award for Best Animated Film. Many people at the NFB pushed it as a children’s film, but Fukushima obviously thinks that it is more than that. They pushed the NFB to send it to the Berlinale where it won a prize, which led the NFB to get behind the film even more.

Unfortunately they seem to have run out of time at this point in the evening. I had been looking forward to hearing to listening to Fukushima talk about his transition from director to producer. He seems to have a close relationship with Reel Asian however and there was a suggestion that they would invite him back at some point in the future. I was impressed by Aram Siu Wai Collier as the moderator for the event. He asked very thoughtful and engaging questions. With the online availability of these superb short films plus the video record of the event, it was the next best thing to being there in person.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン, 1983)

2012-10-10T17:15:00.001+02:00

The popular mediums of the comics and animation sometimes get dismissed as mere amusements for children, but they can also be powerful tools for expression and education. For the mangaka Keiji Nakazawa, his manga serial Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン/Hadashi no Gen, 1973-74) was his method of coming to terms with his experiences of the atom bomb and his continuing bitterness as a hibakusha with postwar politics in Japan (Learn more in Asai Motofumi’s interview with Nakazawa in Japan Forum).

Nakazawa’s manga has not only educated generations of post-war Japanese about the bombing of Hiroshima from a child’s perspective, but it has also inspired other artists to follow in his footsteps and harness the power of the comics format to give voice to the unspeakable. Most notably, Art Spiegelman has cited Barefoot Gen as having had a significant impact on him during the making of Maus (1991).

Madhouse’s 1983 adaptation of Barefoot Gen under the direction of Masaki Mori remains true to the message of its source material in its unflinching portrayal of the devastation wrought by the atom bomb on the people of Hiroshima. Like other classics of the anti-war genre – Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita’s Pica-don (ピカドン, 1978) and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓/Hotaru no Haka, 1988) – the story is powerful because it portrays the inhumanity of war from the perspective of its most innocent victims: children.

The iconic Genbaku Dome during the blast

Gen is a grade school boy who lives with his father, heavily pregnant mother, older sister, and bratty younger brother in the summer of 1945. His father is a wheat farmer but despite good crops, they have fallen on hard times because no one can afford to pay them for their produce. This is a great story for teaching students because it smashes a lot of widely held myths about the Japanese blindly following the will of their leaders during the war. As was true of Nakazawa’s own father, Gen’s father holds dangerous left-wing views that could get him into trouble with authorities: he is against the war and Japan’s policies and boldly prophecises to his sons that Japan will lose this war.

Suspense is built in the lead up to the dropping of the bomb through repeated false warning trips to the air raid shelter, and the father’s growing suspicion that the fact that other major cities are being bombed more often than Hiroshima is a bad sign. The anime intersperses the emotional personal drama of Gen, his family, and neighbours with sequences with an impersonal documentary narration that tell us the facts about the war and what the armed forces are doing. Thus, we know that the Enola Gay is coming before the characters do themselves. The bomb is even shown from the perspective of the Enola Gay as it falls silently onto the city.

The “pica” of the flash is depicted in black and white – as was in the Kinoshitas’ depiction of the same moment. The “don” of the explosion is horrific in its detail, drawing on both photographic evidence of the destruction and the colours and style of the grotesque in Japanese traditional and modern art. The immediate devastation and its aftermath are depicted in gruesome detail: people stripped of their skins, dead and dying infants, people driven to insanity by what they have witnessed, maggots and flies feeding on both the living and the dead. Man’s inhumanity to man is laid bare in all its horror and agony.

Hiroshima Castle being destroyed by the blast

Gen and his mother desperately try to save their trapped family from the fire engulfing their home without success. The two are left to struggle on their own with Gen aiding his mother as she gives birth in the ruins of their once beautiful city. Despite suffering from malnutrition themselves, Gen and his mother never lose their own humanity. They try – often in vain – to help others who are suffering and even adopt a young orphaned boy called Ryuta whose cheeky ways reminds them of Gen’s lost litrle brother Shinji.

One of the reasons that the story of Barefoot Gen is such a successful narrative is that it refuses to fall into the easy traps of anti-Americanism or over-sentimentality. As equally as powerful as the anti-nuclear bomb message, the film also raises criticisms of the Japanese themselves which were core messages of the original manga. The inadequate aid that was sent to Hiroshima following the attack, the suppression of survivors stories for years after the war, and the widespread discrimination against the hibakusha (被爆者/atomic bomb survivors).

Gen and Ryuta reflected in Seiji's tear

This last theme is personalized through the story of Seiji, a survivor who comes from a well-to-do family. Gen and Ryuta take to the streets in search of work in order to get enough money for milk for the baby and they are hired by Seiji’s brother to look after him. Seiji is covered in maggots and flies because no one in his family will touch him themselves and the family has been unable to find anyone with the stomach to handle the job of picking the maggots off of his skin. Gen and Ryuta are desperate for money and put up not only with the stench but with the abuse of Shinji who calls them “vultures” and resents his situation. In a remarkable scene, Gen and Ryuta are able to connect with Seiji on a human level and we learn that Seiji’s pain at being shunned by his family like a leper outweighs the physical pain of his bomb injuries. His gratitude at these two young boys for teaching him that he can still feel real human affection is depicted movingly with an image of Gen and Ryuta reflected in a large tear falling from Seiji’s eye.

Gen recalls his father

The original Barefoot Gen manga is quite a long series – the current American English edition at Last Gasp has 10 volumes, so a feature film cannot possibly encapsulate Nakazawa’s exploration of the long term effects of the bombing of Hiroshima on its victims. There is more tragedy before the film ends but it still manages to leave the door open to optimism for the future. In spite of many people claiming that it will take 70 years for grass to grow again in Hiroshima, the boys discover that wheat has begun to sprout again. Gen recalls his father once advising him and Shinji to learn from the example of the wheat (mugi):

Its life begins in the coldest season of the year.

The rain pounds it,

the wind blows it. . .

it’s crushed beneath people’s feet

but still, the wheat spreads its roots and grows.

It survives.

Learn from it boys.

Grow big and strong and let nothing beat you down.

Hadashi no Gen DVD (JP only)

Barefoot Gen won Masaki Mori the coveted Noburo Ofuji Award for innovation in animation in 1983. The success of the film led to a sequel a few years later, Barefoot Gen 2 (Toshio Hirata/Akio Sakai, 1986) which picks up Gen’s story three years after the war and examines the long-term consequences of the bomb. Both films were rereleased on DVD with subs by Geneon in the US but are currently only available second hand. The French box set is also out of print, but it is available here in Germany: Barfuß durch Hiroshima - Film 1 & 2 (OmU) [2 DVDs] [Deluxe Edition]. This edition has German, French, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Danish and Finnish subs. The Japanese release also has no English subs.

Last year a documentary was made about Nakazawa's life called Hiroshima Through the Eyes of Barefoot Gen. Here's an excerpt:

©cmmhotes 2012

Click here to learn more about the Noburo Ofuji Award Winners.

Obāchan’s Garden (おばあちゃんのガーデン, 2001)

2012-10-10T16:34:00.000+02:00

When sansei Canadian filmmaker Linda Ohama set out to make a film that would celebrate her grandmother’s life on the eve of her 100^th birthday, she had no idea just how far her journey would take her. On the surface, there was more than enough material to make a feature-length documentary for her obāchan (grandma) had lived an extraordinary life in Canada. Yet during the filming of Obāchan’s Garden (2001), the Murakami family discovers that the matriarch of the family has been keeping a painful secret about her early life in Japan for over 70 years.

Asayo Murakami (1898-2002) was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima Perfecture in 1898. Her parents had named her Asayo because she was born in early in the morning (asa). For her Canadian family, Asayo’s story began in 1924 when she came to Canada as a “picture bride”. A man named Murakami had selected Asayo’s photograph as a potential future wife and paid for her journey to British Columbia. Unfortunately, upon meeting Mr. Murakami, Asayo immediately rejected the possibility of marrying this short statured man. She worked for three years in a fish cannery and picking strawberries to pay the man back the $250 dollars he had spent on her.

Not long after this a matchmaker introduced her to the fishing boat craftsman Otokichi Murakami (of no relation to the man she had turned down) – a tall widower with two young children. Asayo agreed to this marriage and the couple settled in the village of Steveston, which today belongs to the city of Richmond, British Columbia. They went on to have 8 children of their own and Asayo was known locally for her wide social circle and her beautiful flower garden. While most women filled their gardens with more practical crops of fruit and vegetables, Asayo preferred flowers – a sentimental preference which was connected to her private sorrows.

Like the other Japanese families living in coastal British Columbia, the Murakamis were forced to leave their home during World War II and were relocated to a sugar-beet farm in Manitoba. After the war restrictions were lifted, the couple joined their eldest daughter and her family on their potato farm in Rainier, Alberta. These were difficult times for the family – the grandfather missed making boats and Asayo missed her garden – but they were resilient folk and persevered in the face of hardship.

Linda Ohama pieces together the life of her obāchan like a quilt. Fragments of recollections by obāchan herself, Ohama’s mother and siblings, Ohama’s daughter, and other friends and relatives are woven together with a collection of family photos, archival footage from Japan and Canada, and dramatic reenactments of the past with the filmmaker’s cousin Natsuko Ohama playing obāchan in her younger years. Docudrama elements in documentaries are a common, and sometimes controversial, feature in Canadian documentaries and may not be to everyone’s taste – but as the Murakami family had to leave everything behind when they left Steveston, the reenacted sequences bring colour and life to the home that obāchan loved best outside of Onomichi.

The film keeps coming back to one of obāchan’s prized possessions: a beautiful photograph of two smartly dressed little girls. The secret that obāchan has kept for all these years is that before she came to Canada she was married to a man from a prominent family called Ishibashi. For reasons that are unclear, around the time of the Great Kantō earthquake, Asayo was divorced from her husband and he took their daughters to live on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Asayo has been unable to trace her children, but has always believed that they were safe because they lived near the emperor and his family.

The discovery of obāchan’s secret changes the course from a mere celebration of Asayo’s life to a quest to find out what happened to these two long-lost daughters. At this point, according to the director's online diary, Ohama brought the National Film Board of Canada on board to help with funding and she set off to Japan with her mother and daughter – the first time the three women have been to visit obāchan’s family there. It is a complicated journey, with many unexpected twists and turns, but it certainly makes riveting viewing.

Also interwoven with the story of obāchan is the story of her former home in Steveson. The Murakami home and boat works, where they lived from 1929-1942 were the only buildings belonging to the Japanese to survive into the 1990s. As they prepare for obāchan’s birthday, the family are involved in the restoration of the property which is now a part of the Britannia Heritage Shipyard Site in Richmond. The film also documents the family’s restoration of the garden, which they plant according to obāchan’s instructions in preparation for the opening of the Murakami Visitor Centre in May 1998.

Is Linda Ohama able to track down obāchan’s daughters and is it possible for frail obāchan to travel to British Columbia from her nursing home in Alberta to see her garden in its restored glory? You can enjoy the emotional ending of the film yourself on the NFB website:

Obachan's Garden by Linda Ohama, National Film Board of Canada

Since making this documentary Linda Ohama (リンダ・オオハマ/official profile) has developed strong ties between Canada and Japan. She is currently in Japan on a lecture tour and is active in Tohoku region recovery efforts through her Canada-Tohoku-Japan Cloth Letters project.

To learn more about obāchan read:

Asayo Murakami: The Last Picture Bride and The Story of Ms. Asayo Murakami by family friend Kojiro “John” Iuchi

The Water Seed (水のたね, 1975)

2012-10-08T14:06:00.001+02:00

The Water Seed (水のたね/Mizu no tane, 1975) is a unique animation by Tadanari Okamoto. He designed it for the Okinawa Kaiyouhaku no Kayoubunkan: the Oceanic Culture Museum at Expo ’75 in Okinawa. The theme of the exhibition was: “The sea we would like to see” (海－その望ましい未来/Umi - sono nozomashii mirai).

The film was projected onto the dome of the planetarium in the Ocean Culture Museum. At the original screening, the animation was projected using two 35mm projectors, a 16mm projector, 1 large slide projector and 2 small slide projectors which were computer controlled. The work was later adapted so that it could be projected in a standard 35mm format. This is the version that appears on Volume 2 of the Tadanari Okamoto Box Set (Geneon Universal, 2008). During the transfer process they tried to maintain look of the cinemascope technique using letterboxing. Thus the 4:3 format sections of the film are also letterboxed with black matte so that they appear smaller than the wider cinemascope sequences.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.2

The story is based on the retelling of a traditional Okinawan folk tale by Miyoko Matsutani, a Tokyo native who is famous for her retellings of folk tales from all over Japan. She has written more than 300 stories and founded the Miyoko Matsutani Folklore Research Center. The story is narrated by the renowned actress Kyoko Kishida, who in addition to famous cinematic roles (Woman of the Dunes, An Autumn Afternoon, Manji, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), did the narration for some of the top Japanese puppet animation of the past half century: (Towards the Rainbow, The Book of the Dead, etc.).

In keeping with the Okinawan origins of the story, Okamoto and his animation team made the backgrounds for the film using bingata – the resist dyed cloth method that the Ryūkyū Islands are famous for. The puppets and the background images were painted on kiwata cloth which is similar to what in English would be called muslin.

The story is that of a young rice farmer whose fields are suffering a drought. He prays fervently at his small rural shrine and is blessed with a heavy rain shower that fills his 48 ponds and he rushes to plant his rice seedlings. One day, while on an errand, he encounters a group of children torturing a snake. He offers to buy the snake and they refuse. He then offers more money, throwing it on the ground. While the children scurry for the money, he rescues the snake and releases it into the water.

Night falls, a fog descends upon him, and a mysterious woman appears out of the mist. She tells him that she is a princess by night, but by day she takes the form of a snake. It was she whom he rescued from the children. To reward him for his good deed, she invites him to visit her undersea realm. They travel out to sea on her royal vessel and the screen shifts to widescreen. The princess shows him her wondrous underwater kingdom. They spin on starfish, ride shrimp like they were horses, hunt dolphins (!), play blind man’s bluff, and play ball. Then the farmer is treated to a sumptuous feast on a revolving table. When served a bowl of rice he suddenly remembers that he is neglecting his rice terraces. The farmer insists that he must return to his farm and the princess takes him to her treasure chambers to allow him to choose a souvenir to take with him. He is not enchanted by her jewels or gold, rather his eyes are drawn to some seeds that remind him of home. These are water seeds (mizu no tane), she tells him, and he takes one with him.

They start their journey home on the backs of dragons but then the scene shifts into a dream-like sequence of a starry sky. At the end of this sequence – which must have looked spectacular on the dome of the planetarium at the original screening – the man wakes up in his futon on the floor of his humble home. Did he really meet a princess and go to her magical undersea realm? Has she really given him a gift that will bring him water for his fields? Or was it all just a dream?

The Water Seed also screened at the 4th Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet-Anime Show in October 1975 and it won Okamoto his fourth Noburo Ofuji Award in 1975.

Credits

Director/Screenplay

Tadanari Okamoto

Narration

Kyoko Kishida

Cinematography

Minoru Tamura

Editor

Naoko Aizawa

Art Department (Figures/Puppets)

Sumiko Hosaka

Hiromi Wakasa

Sumie Ishii

Art Department

Takashi Komae

Masami Tokuyama

Eiji Sashida

Chizuko Hosokawa

Yuko Onaka

Animation

Ryo Ozaki

Hiroshi Taisenji

Satoru Yoshida

Hirokazu Minegishi

Music

Akio Omori

Ryohei Hirose (composer)

Assistance

Emiko Okada

Click here to learn more about the Noburo Ofuji Award Winners.

Praise Be to Small Ills (南無一病息災, 1973)

2012-10-08T13:58:00.000+02:00

With Praise Be to Small Ills (南無一病息災/Nanmu Ichibyo Sokusai, 1973), Tadanari Okamoto wanted to retell a traditional tale in a way that brings together traditional and contemporary storytelling styles. Based on the short story by Ryusuke Sato, Okamoto collaborated with the folk singer Kōhei Oikawa to come up with a narration that mixes song and spoken word with a guitar accompaniment. The sequences vary in style. One narrated sequence is chanted with percussion, while a melancholy sequence depicting a funeral is accompanied by a flute.

The central motif of the film is ema (絵馬): votive pictures painted or drawn onto small wooden tablets that are hung in Shinto shrines in prayer. Common prayers today include for success when writing exams, for a safe childbirth, for the recovery of someone who is ill, or for luck in love. “Ema” literally translates as “horse picture” because of the ancient tradition of giving the gift of a horse to a temple when asking for help from the gods. Over time, this tradition evolved into the giving of a picture of a horse. Today, the pictures or writing on the ema vary (see title card at top).

The film begins with a montage of traditionally painted ema. Kōhei Oikawa then begins to sing in the role of a father telling a bedtime story to his daughter Hiroko. Hiroko is curled up in her futon bed looking at a picture book featuring drawings of a skinny blue oni (demon) and a powerful-looking red oni. The father cautions his daughter not to be scared by the tale.

In the story, the blue demon takes up residence in the belly of a humble farmer. His presence in the man is troublesome. It causes the man to cough from time to time and brings him bad luck in both farming and hunting. The man; however learns to live with the oni and in spite of the ill luck the oni brings him, the farmer enjoys a moderate success in life. He marries well and has many children and he teaches his children to be grateful for the small rewards that come from hard work by giving a prayer of thanks every morning.

In contrast, the red oni takes up residence on the property of a big, strong farmer. Initially, the red oni brings the man good luck. His crops are plentiful and he has much success in hunting. Rather than give thanks to the gods, the man overindulges by eating loads of rice and sake. He too marries and has a child but his overindulgence leads to the rather brutal demise of the man and his family.

Praise Be to Small Ills is a morality tale aimed at teaching children the benefits of working hard and being grateful for what they have. In conclusion, the narrator father sings to his daughter Hiroko that that one should put up with small irritations – represented by the blue oni – in order to enjoy a long and fruitful life. Overindulgence in the sudden success a red oni can bring will only lead to tragedy.

Tadanari Okamoto is famous for using different materials in each of his films. For this film, the cutouts are made using the wood of the what the Japanese call sugi (cryptomeria japonica) – a tree native to Japan. The cryptomeria is sometimes called the Japanese cedar in English although it does not belong to the cedar family. Sugi is the national tree of Japan and is commonly seen in temples and shrines. The wood of the cryptomeria was chosen for Praise Be to Small Ills because it is traditionally the wood of choice for making ema. It gives the characters a sort of roughly hewn look unique to this film.

As with all Okamoto animated shorts, the film has been flawlessly put together. I would personally hesitate to show the film to the young children for whom the moral message was intended because of the violent death of overindulgent man. However, it is quite a useful film for teaching older children about Japanese folk tales and religion.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

This film won the Noburo Ofuji Award for 1973: Okamoto’s third of seven wins of this prestigious award. Kōhei Oikawa also features in another of Okamoto’s Ofuji award-winning films: Towards the Rainbow (虹に斑って, 1977). The film appears on Volume 1 of the Okamoto Box Set (JP only).

Director, Producer, Screenplay, Song Lyrics:

Tadanari Okamoto　岡本忠成

Original Story:

Ryusuke Saito 斎藤隆介

Cinematography:

Minoru Tamura　田村実

Ken Yoshioka　吉岡謙

Editing:

Naoko Aizawa　相沢尚子

Masako Sakama　坂間　雅子

Art Department (figures/puppets):

Sumiko Hosaka　保坂純子

Hiromi Wakasa　若佐ひろみ

Masami Sudo 数藤雅三　

Art Department:

Takashi Komae　小前隆

Masami Tokuyama徳山正美

Animators:

Seishiro Fujimori 藤森誠代

Seiichi Araki 荒木靖一

Hiroshi Taisenji　泰泉寺博

Narration, Music (composition, lyrics, performance):

Kōhei Oikawa　及川恒平

Musicians:

Akio Omori　大森昭男

Masazo Nakagawa　中川昌三

Ritsu Murakami　村上律

Osamu Nakajima中島御　

Sound:

Isamu Kattō甲藤勇

Click here to learn more about the Noburo Ofuji Award Winners.

The Restaurant of Many Orders (注文の多い料理店, 1991)

2012-10-03T21:23:00.000+02:00

Very early in his career as an independent animator, Tadanari Okamoto decided to try out new modes of expression and technique for each of his short films. From coloured yarn together with paint on glass in Are wa dare? (1976) to painted cedar cutouts in Praise be to Small Ills (1973), Okamoto went to great lengths to match the aesthetic of the animation to the story that he wanted to tell.

Okamoto’s final film, The Restaurant of Many Orders (注文の多い料理店/Chūmon no Ooi Ryōriten, 1991) looks nothing like the 30+ films that preceded it at Echo Productions. The film is an adaptation of a famous short story by the early Shōwa writer and poet Kenji Miyazawa. Miyazawa’s writing has been a fruitful source of inspiration to animators, as the fantastic and surreal elements of his writing are well suited to the medium of animation.

Two hunters dressed in British-style hunting gear – one man tall and slender, the other short and stout – drive furiously into the forest to go deer hunting. They set off into the woods, dragged along by their hunting dogs. The dogs chase off after some deer but do not immediately return. As the men stop for a break, they hear one of the dogs squeal as if in pain. They run off in search of their dogs and find that they have strangely dropped dead.

A chilly wind blows eerily and foggy weather sets upon the men. Without their dogs and unable to find their vehicle again, the men grow hungry and weary. One has the impression that these two could not survive in the wild for long on their own. Out of the fog, they suddenly glimpse the lit windows of the Wild Cat Restaurant. They are greeted, not by a host but by a sign which welcomes them in. It is all very odd, but the men are terribly hungry so they enter.

They ring the bell in the lobby, but again no one appears. They look around the lobby and discover a shooting game. After many attempts, the tall and slender man finally “kills” one of the deer in the game. After much waiting they spot another sign which bids them to enter further into the building. They encounter a room with a sink where a sign asks them to use the products provided to clean themselves up. The men are a bit taken aback by this request but imagine it must be a pretty fancy establishment with beautiful women so they do as they are told.

They then enter a church-like space with giant stained glass windows depicting scenes from nature. A giant spider startles the men and they shoot the glass. In a brilliantly animated sequence the shards transform into butterflies which overwhelm the men before flying away. After several more adventures in this labyrinthine building, they do eventually find a table set for dinner in a cavernous room. But are they really the guests in this establishment or is there a more sinister plot underfoot?

This is my favourite kind of film: one which does not rely upon narration or written text but instead tells a story using visuals only. The original Miyazawa story did have dialogue, so this is an aesthetic decision made by Okamoto. The lack of voice-over narration increases the impact of the short notes that the two hunters encounter in the unusual restaurant of many orders. In addition to the stained glass/butterfly sequence the dancing sequence in which wraith-like women transform into wild cats is also quite remarkable. The depth of field and the attention to detail in each frame is truly stunning.

For the look of the film, Okamoto wanted to make a 2D film that nevertheless had texture and came up with the idea of having the film resemble a moving copper plate engraving. In order to achieve this look he asked Reiko Okuyama to join his animation team. Okuyama had recently retired from Toei Dōga after nearly 3 decades as an animator and had taken up the art of copper plate engraving. If one compares The Restaurant of Many Orders to the animated short that Okuyama, with the assistance of her husband Yōichi Kotabe, contributed to the collaborative film project Winter Days (Kihachirō Kawamoto, 2003), one can see that Okuyama contributed a great deal to the look of Okamoto's last great work.

According to Anipages, The Restaurant of Many Orders was intended as a warm up for Okamoto’s first feature-length film which he intended to call Hotarumomi. Unfortunately, this prolific animator’s future plans were cut short by liver cancer and The Restaurant of Many Orders was left in limbo upon Okamoto’s passing on Febrary 16, 1990. Fortunately, fellow puppet animator Kihachirō Kawamoto took up the task of seeing his close friend and Puppet Anime-Show collaborator’s final film through to completion.

The Restaurant of Many Orders won high praise from both critics and fellow animators. In fact, it won a many prizes including the prestigious Noburo Ofuji Award. Okamoto continues to hold the record to this day for the most Noburo Ofuji Awards won. Okamoto himself was even awarded a special prize posthumously by the Mainichi Film Concours for his outstanding contribution to animation in Japan. The Restaurant of Many Orders ranked #115 on the Laputa 150 poll in 2003.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.3

Order now

This film is available on the DVD The Collected Works of Tadanari Okawamoto, vol. 3 and in the Box Set (both JP only). This review is part of my ongoing series dedicated to the Noburo Ofuji Award.

©cmmhotes 2012

Reviews of Okamoto’s Home My Home, Are wa dare?, A Wonderful Medicine, and MORE….

Direction:

Tadanari Okamoto　岡本忠成

Kihachirō Kawamoto 川本喜八郎

Screenplay/Producer:

Tadanari Okamoto　岡本忠成

Original Story:

Kenji Miyazawa　宮沢賢治

Production Assistant:

Yoshihiro Shinohara　篠原義浩

Cinematography:

Akihiko Takahashi 高橋明彦

Mikio Nakaide　中出三記夫

Editing:

Fusako Shuzui　守随房子

Music:

Ryohei Hirose　広瀬量平

Sound:

Isamu Koufuji 甲藤勇　

Art Department:

Noriko Kawashita　川下倫子

Setsuko Onowzawa　小野沢節子

Masami Tokuyama　徳山正美

Animation:

Nobuko Abe　阿部信子

Reiko Okuyama　奥山玲子

Keizo Kira　吉良敬三

Satoru Yoshida　吉田悟

Takako Yokokawa　横川たか子

Eiko Miyabayashi　宮林英子

Mitsuko Ōya 大宅光子　

Tamaki Kōbe 神戸環　

Kazuo Tashiro　田代和男

Katsushi Boda　保田克史

Hiroshi Kagawa　香川浩

Shin'ichi Suzuki　鈴木伸一

Hiroshi Taisenji　泰泉寺博

Katsushi Wakui 和久井克史　

Mitsuhiro Kimura　木村光宏

Setsuko Kagawa　香川節子

Lighting:

Yuzuru Sato　照明

Click here to learn more about the Noburo Ofuji Award Winners.

3rd Tokyo Gohan Film Festival (第３回東京ごはん映画祭)

2012-10-02T16:36:00.000+02:00

The 3rd Tokyo Gohan Film Festival

第３回東京ごはん映画祭

6-21 October 2012

This year’s Tokyo Gohan Film Festival – also known as The Tokyo Food Lover’s Festival – is being hosted by Image Forum with some events being held at Spiral Hall and other venues around town. The programme includes perennial favourites such as Naoko Ogigami’s Seagull Diner (Kamome Shokudo, 2006) and Percy Adlon’s Bagdad Café (1987) as well as recent hits such as Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia (2009) and Shūichi Okita’s The Woodsman and the Rain (2011) starring Kōji Yakusho and Shun Oguri which won the audience prize at this year’s Nippon Connection. There are also some great docs on the menu including Gereon Wetzel's El Bulli (2011) about chef Ferran Adrià's famed restaurant in Catalonia, Spain. To learn more about the programme check out their official website.

Penguin Fūfu『ペンギン夫婦の作りかた』

Katsutoshi Hirabayashi, JAPAN, feature, 2012

http://www.penguinfufu.jp/

eatrip

Yuri Nomura, JAPAN, documentary, 2009

http://www.eatripfilm.com/

The Help『ヘルプ〜心がつなぐストーリー〜』

Tate Taylor, USA, feature, 2011

http://thehelpmovie.com/

Bread of Happiness 『しあわせのパン』

Yukiko Mishima, JAPAN, feature, 2012

http://shiawase-pan.asmik-ace.co.jp/index.html

Marie Antoinette 『マリー・アントワネット』

Sofia Coppola, USA, feature, 2006

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress『エル・ブリの秘密世界一予約のとれないレストラン』

Gereon Wetzel, GERMANY, documentary, 2011

http://elbullimovie.com/

Julie & Julia 『ジュリー&ジュリア』

Nora Ephron, USA, feature, 2009

The Woodsman and the Rain『キツツキと雨』

Shūichi Okita, JAPAN, feature, 2011

http://kitsutsuki-rain.jp/

Seagull Diner 『かもめ食堂』

Naoko Ogigami, JAPAN, feature, 2006

Read Review

Bagdad Café 『バグダッド・カフェ』

Percy Adlon, GERMANY/USA, feature, 1987

A Good Year『プロヴァンスの贈りもの』

Ridley SCOTT, UK, feature, 2006

Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution 『未来の食卓』

Nos enfants nous accuseront

Jean-Paul Jaud, FRANCE, documentary, 2008

http://www.uplink.co.jp/shokutaku/

Antique 『アンティーク〜西洋骨董洋菓子店〜』

Min Kyu-Dong, SOUTH KOREA, feature, 2011

http://www.cinemart.co.jp/antique/

Dinner Rush『ディナー・ラッシュ』

Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaugnessy, USA, feature, 2000

Taipei Café Story『台北カフェ・ストーリー』aka Taipei Exchanges

Ya-chuan Hsiao, TAIWAN, feature, 2010

http://www.taipeicafe.net/

Kickstart Masaaki Yuasa’s Latest Anime “Kick-Heart”

2012-10-01T20:17:00.000+02:00

Today Production I.G. launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstart for Masaaki Yuasa’s latest animation project: a 10-minute animated short called “Kick-Heart”. Yuasa is the animator behind such innovative, award-winning anime as Mind Game (2005) and Kaiba (2008), The Tatami Galaxy (2010).

It has never been easy for cutting edge animators to get funding in Japan, but in recent years the squeeze has gotten even tighter. Companies would rather put their money into tried-and-true franchises rather than take a risk on animators who think outside the box like Yuasa. As he says in the above video:

“I would like to create something interesting. I am not interested making the same kind of projects that other people have already created. My hope is that investors would pay for what they think is interesting but they don’t. I think crowd-funding is a great attempt for individuals who want to try to work on these types of projects. I think it’s a great system.”

This is a great opportunity for fans of anime around the world to show their support for indie animation. From an artistic rather than a corporate perspective the risk involved in backing this project is very low. Not only is Yuasa a proven talent, but the legendary director Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor 2, Ghost in the Shell, Innocence, The Sky Crawlers) is also a consultant on the project. Production I.G. also has a proven track record with such anime classics as Ghost in the Shell (Oshii, 1995), Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (Hiroyuki Okiura, 1999), and Blood: The Last Vampire (Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 2000), and Innocence (Oshii, 2004).

For as little as $15 US you can have not only feel pride in having supported talented animators, but you will also get a digital download of the film. The more money you donate, the better the thank-you package. Donate now.

Learn more about Yuasa by reading my review of Mind Game or my coverage of his visit to the Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund last year: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

©cmmhotes 2012

UPDATE 8 October 2012: Kick-heart is already up to 1000 backers and has reached 50% of its goal. If they exceed their goal and make it to $400,000 they are promising to make a second 10 minute companion film. If they make it to $1 million they will turn Kick-heart into a feature film!! Read more here.

Last Fragments of Winter (冬の断片, 2011)

2012-09-30T23:30:00.000+02:00

Memory can be such a fleeting thing, often taking the form of fragments of images, sounds, tastes, and smells. Tokyo-based filmmaker Edmund Yeo’s latest short film Last Fragments of Winter (冬の断片/Fuyu no danpen, 2011) is an assemblage of just such snatches of memory. It is beautifully shot and poetically arranged in a non-linear fashion.

As the film opens, it is not quite clear whose story is being told and what the relationship is between the wintery traditional village of Shinagawa-go in Japan and the urban and rural landscapes of Malaysia. Gradually, scene by scene, the characters and story begin to reveal themselves. Before long it becomes apparent that these fragments of memory belong not just to one person but to three members of the same family: a mother, a father, and their young son. In spite of their youth, all three have had to deal with a world of troubles and sorrows.

The father (Berg Lee) attends the Buddhist funeral of a former lover and speaks to her ghost, the young son (Foo Kang Chen) is sent on an errand in place of his absent sister, and the mother (Tan Ley Teng) struggles with a mysterious illness that is making her progressively weaker. The mother has a passion for photography which dates back to her youth. As a young woman (played by Arisa Koike in the flashback sequences) visiting Japan, she quietly walks around the village of Shinagawa-go as though she is loathe to disturb its tranquility. The only sounds are the chatter of the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbuls), the cry of a distant jungle crow, the crunch of the snow beneath her feet and the click of the shutter on her Mamiya camera. This scene is paralleled with a similarly idyllic outing she takes later in life with her young son to photograph a rice patty field in her native Malaysia. The woman’s desire to record the world around her evokes the theme of the ephemerality of life on earth.

In collaboration with cinematographers Kong Pahurak and Tan Teckzee, Edmund Yeo has put together a hauntingly beautiful film. From the greens and blues of the family’s Malaysian apartment to the white and black of rural Japan in winter, each scene has been carefully crafted to create just the right tone. There is an other-worldliness to the scenes of Arisa Koike in the snow that suggest that this may not just be the youthful memories of the mother but an eternal place where weary souls may go to rest.

The story was inspired by a short story called “The Moon” by celebrated writer Mieko Kanai. Kanai seems an ideal choice for adaptation as her stories are highly visual in nature. Yeo has managed to capture the dream-like quality of a Kanai story while adding unique elements from his own personal experiences. The film won Yeo an award at the recent Sapporo Short Film Fest (learn more) and has also played at festivals in Dubai and Nara. Keep an eye out on Yeo’s official website for information about future screenings.

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This is the latest in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam. Click on the film titles below to learn about his other works.

Edmund Yeo Filmography (homepage)

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)

Fleeting Images (2008)

Love Suicides (2009)

kingyo (2009)

The White Flower (2010)

Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)

NOW (2010)

Inhalation (2010)

Exhalation (2010)

Jane Eyre (ジェーン・エア, 2011)

2012-09-27T10:54:00.000+02:00

Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic romance Jane Eyre (1847) presents many challenges to a screenwriter looking to adapt the story into a film. Not only is one burdened with the usual pressures remaining faithful to the characters and flavour of the novel while creating a new work, but Jane Eyre has been adapted dozens of times to film, radio, television, and the stage. From the 1943 classic Hollywood adaptation starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine with its impressive score by Bernard Herrmann to the much loved BBC adaptations such as in the 1983 version with Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke, it has been done well so many times that it is a challenge to find a new angle to take with the story.

When I heard that Cary Jōji Fukunaga had taken on the challenge, I was both excited – surely the director of an impressive debut feature like Sin Nombre (2009) could bring something new and refreshing to Jane Eyre! – and trepidatious. The trepidation was not only because of the great adaptations mentioned above but also because there have been two solid adaptations in recent memory: Franco Zefferelli’s 1996 version starring William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the wonderful 2006 BBC adaptation with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson. That being said, it is rare for even a very good adaptation of Jane Eyre to tick all the right boxes for me. The biggest pitfalls are: making Jane too plain/boring, making Rochester so temperamental and creepy that one couldn't imagine Jane falling for him, and not exploring the Gothic nature of the story far enough.

Fukunaga’s version manages to avoid all of these pitfalls: Mia Wasikowska, with her expressive eyes, plays Jane as an intelligent young woman who knows her place in society but has just enough backbone to stand up for herself when she feels she is being badly treated. Michael Fassbinder, who is one of those rare actors able to transform himself completely into his characters, makes Rochester sympathetic enough for us to understand why Jane learns to love him, while at the same time showing him to be a man conflicted by the miserable cards that life has dealt him. There is also real chemistry between Wasikowka and Fassbinder – a must have when depicting a period where more is said through looks and demeanor than action. A nod must also be given to the supporting cast – particularly Judi Dench who brings a great deal of warmth to Mrs. Fairfax, and Sally Hawkins who is practically unrecognizable as the horrid Mrs. Reed. This is the first time that I have seen Hawkins play an unsympathetic character and she really took advantage of the opportunity to show her range as an actress.

This adaptation easily ranks as one of the best versions of Jane Eyre for two reasons: its use of landscape and its exploitation of the Gothic romance genre. The moors play such an important role in setting atmosphere in the novel and this is the first adaptation that I felt really got the fact that the landscape like another character in the story. Shot in the Hathersage moors (not quite Haworth moor but one probably couldn't shoot there without tourists getting in the way), Fukunaga and cinematographer Adriano Goldman really capture the connection between the landscape and the character of Jane.

The cinematography was also a key element of the Gothic look of the piece. Being "Gothic" is not just about finding the right castle – it is also about capturing the romance and suspense of a Gothic novel. The interior scenes set at night in this adaptation make great use of dark and light. This was a time where rooms would have only been lit by fireplaces, candles, and Paraffin lamps (aka Kerosene lamps in North America). The lighting in these scenes not only captures the historical reality but the shadow also adds to the general suspense. The scenes where Jane hears noises but does yet know what their source is are so expertly done that I found myself on the edge of my seat even though I knew exactly what was going to happen. Many adaptations concentrate so strongly on building the character of Jane that they forget that the story belongs to the Gothic romance genre. The dash of Hitchcock added to the mix made Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre well worth the price of admission.

cmmhotes 2012

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Cary Jōji Fukunaga is a Japanese-Swedish American director. His debut feature film Sin Nombre (2009) won him much acclaim including the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival. Warner Brothers has signed him up to adapt Stephen King’s It in two parts with Chase Palmer writing the screenplay. See The Hollywood Reporter for more details.

Japan in Germany 9: Shinro Ohtake at documenta 13

2012-08-31T09:22:00.004+02:00

See more photos

The first weekend in August, my husband and I visited documenta 13 in Kassel. The amount of art, live performances, and film on offer at documenta 13 is simply overwhelming, so we picked out a few artists whose work we definitely wanted to see and saw a number of other interesting works incidentally while wandering through the installation spaces.

Soil-erg.2012 by Claire Pentecost

My husband, being a conservation biologist, was interested in American artist Claire Pentecost’s installation of soil shaped like gold bars at the Ottoneum. The concept of soil being as valuable as gold is very relevant to our times as we enter the post-oil era. (b. 1956, artist profile) (artist website)

Image of a metronome in Kentridge's "The Refusal of Time"

I happily stood in line for ages to get into the William Kentridge (b. 1955) installation “The Refusal of Time” (2012) in the Hauptbahnhof North Wing. Kentridge’s animation has been highly influential – one can see the influence in the charcoal animations of Japanese experimental animator Naoyuki Tsuji, for example (see: Angel). “The Refusal of Time” is projected on 5 screens with a mechanical machine in the middle. It explores the various ways humanity has tried to capture time: metronomes, pressurized clocks, time zones, music, and so on. There were elements of animation (stop motion, drawn) and live action with Kentridge himself even appearing in some scenes. It is a complex work and I wish I could have spent the whole day in the installation just to be able to take in the diverse elements at work in it. Learn more about the installation in this interview with the artist.

Also high on my list of things to see were the paintings of Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871-1945, CBC article) on display at the Neue Gallerie. I had previously only seen a couple of her paintings in person at the McMichael Gallery in Ontario. It is such a different experience to see her work in person than reprinted in books – they create a certain atmosphere that is hard to put into words. The seven paintings on display were of her later work and the influences of Fauvism and Cubism were very evident. Dark and hauntingly beautiful pieces.

As much as I love Emily Carr, she seemed a bit out of place in the documenta. She seemed to have been selected to balance out the two Australian artists sharing a room with her – Margaret Preston (1875-1963) and Gordon Bennett (b.1955) – whose work is also influenced by aboriginal art. All three were surrounded by conceptual and installation art – which represents the bulk of documenta works. The neighbouring room, for example, featured the work of Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967), which was perhaps the most popular installation at the documenta. “Leaves of Grass” has been featured widely on magazine covers and newspaper articles – it has mass appeal not only because of the immensity of the project but also because of the popular subject matter: pictures cut from 5 decades of Life magazine (see Guardian review). The link to Carr is that Farmer is also from British Columbia and attended the art college named after her – but it terms of style and subject matter these two could not be more different.

Japan was represented at documenta 13 by Shinro Ohtake (b. 1955, official website). Ohtake is known as a collector from his ongoing series of “Scrap Books” (1977-) to the strange collages and ephemera decorating the “I Love Yu” Bathhouse in Naoshima, Kagawa Prefecture (article). Ohtake’s “Mon Cheri: A Self Portrait as a Scrapped Shed” installation in Karlsaue Park shares much in common with the “I Love Yu” Bathhouse. “Mon Cheri” is an example of a “snack bar” – the kind of hut one might find frequented by eccentric locals at an off-the-beaten track seaside town. The neon sign was apparently found by Ohtake ten years ago and the Scrapped Shed was inspired by a defunct snack bar in Uwajima.

We could hear the Mon Cheri snack bar before we could see it as we traversed through the expansive grounds of Karlsaue Park. At first the music was tinny and difficult to recognize, but as we got closer the song changed and I heard the familiar strains of Kyu Sakamoto’s rendition of the Jimmy Jones hit “Good Timin’.” The snack bar has been installed under an impressively huge tree, and boats of various kinds are strewn around the bar on the ground and in the tree. There is also a small caravan next to the snack bar. The snack bar is covered with newspaper and magazine clippings from both Japan and Germany. The bar was wall-to-wall with a collection of junk from bicycle tires to a guitar and even miniature video screens displaying abstract videos.

The junk in the tree caused a number of German commentators to suggest that this was a reference to the devastating tsunami of March 2011, but the title of the installation suggested to me that this was a much too literal interpretation. As a self portrait, it seemed to me that the artist sees himself as being formed from the random detritus of popular and disposable artifacts of modern culture. One could detect a sense of humour in the way in which the objects and clippings had been assembled – Ohtake appears to both love all this junk and be aware that all these things are simply fleeting in their nature.

Judge for yourself by checking out my photo album of Ohtake’s installation.

documenta 13 runs until September 16.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Hiroshima International Animation Festival 2012

2012-08-27T14:11:00.000+02:00

The biannual Hiroshima InternationalAnimation Festival 2012 came to a conclusion today. The final competition consisted of 66 works selected from 2,110 entries from around the world. The international jury included Aleksandra Korejwo (Poland), Igor Kovalyov (USA), Irina Margolina (Russia), Kosei Ono (Japan), and Marv Newland (Canada) – whose classic film Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) was screened on 16mm at my 10^th birthday party and had a profound effect on me ;) The international honorary president of the festival was Peter Lord of Aardman. A selection of Lord’s works were also screened at the festival.

The winners are as follows:

Grand Prize

I Saw Mice Burying a Cat (Dmitry Geller, China, 2011)

Hiroshima Prize

Kali, the Little Vampire (Regina Pessoa, Portugal/France/Canada, Switzerland, 2012)

Debut Prize

Sticky Ends (Osman Cerfon, France, 2010)

Renzo Kinoshita Prize

Futon (Yoriko Mizushiri, Japan, 2012)

Audience Prize

Head Over Heels (Timothy Reckart, UK, 2012)

Special International Jury Prize

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, USA, 2011)

Ursus (Reinis Petersons, Latvia, 2011)

Sunday (Patrick Doyon, Canada, 2011)

Tram (Michaela Pavlátová, France, 2012)

Chinti (Natalia Mirzoyan, Russia, 2011)

Special Prize

two (Steven Subotnick, USA, 2011)

Howl (Natalie Bettelheim+Sharon Michaeli, Israel, 2011)

The Little Bird and the Leaf (Lena von Döhren, Switzerland, 2012)

The Great Rabbit (Atsushi Wada, France, 2011)

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, Canada/Japan, 2011)

Read more about the winning films at the official website for Hiroshima 2012.

Seven works by Japanese artists made the official competition:

The Great Rabbit (Atsushi Wada, 2011) (read review)

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, 2011) (read review)

The Light (Yuka Sukegawa, 2010)

Rain Town (Hiroyasu Ishida, 2011)

SPONCHOI Pispochoi (pecoraped, 2010)

Yonalure: Moment to Moment (Ayaka Nakata + Yuki Sakitani, 2011)

Futon (Yoriko Mizushiri, 2012)

In addition to the competition, this year’s festival celebrated the 30^th anniversary of ASIFA-JAPAN, which was founded by the co-founders of the Hiroshima festival – the current ASIFA president Sayoko Kinoshita and her late husband Renzo Kinoshita (read more about them). The ASIFA-JAPAN 30th Anniversary Special Program celebrated the works of its members through screenings of their animated works and an exhibition of objects related to their works including puppets, paintings, books, and installations.

I was deeply disappointed not to be able to attend the festival this year as there were many special presentations I would have loved to have seen: a Jiří Trnka Special Program to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of his birth; an homage to the late Nobuhiro Aihara (see poster for this year's festival), whose works are so rarely screened outside of Japan; and a focus on animation from Norway. There was also an omnibus presentation of the best in recent world animation, a special on contemporary Japanese animation, a program for children, and a program on works by students. In a nod to the founding ethos of the festival, a selection of peace-themed films were also screened dedicated to “the spirit and the heart of Hiroshima.”

cmmhotes 2012

Ink Brush Animator Reiko Yokosuka

2012-08-22T17:31:00.000+02:00

I first became aware of the beautiful ink brush animation of Reiko Yokosuka (横須賀令子) when I saw Kihachiro Kawamoto’s renku animation Winter Days (2003). Yokosuka was one of several notable women animators (which I discussed in my Forum des Images postings earlier this year) to participate in the collaborative project. Her interpretation of stanza 24 by Yasui (1658-1743) is minimalist in comparison to the animations of Keita Kurosaka and Yuko Asano that precede and follow her. Delicate lines of black ink brushed onto washi paper flow gracefully across the screen transforming into a path on which a veiled lady in a broad hat walks. As it begins to rain, ghostly forms of bamboo appear behind her as she removes her hat and veil and closes her eyes to take in the elements. The vignette ends with the woman dancing in the wind, her long hair and kimono swirling around her as she transforms into a tree.

Yokosuka’s animation style comes out of the tradition of sumi-e (brush painting) and she has experimented with the medium since her very first animated short Illusions (1981). Yokosuka was born and raised in the small city of Hitachinaka in Ibaraki Prefecture where she developed an interest in both the natural and supernatural with trees, mermaids, and the spirit world appearing regularly in her works (source). Growing up she was a fan of the female mangaka such as Ryoko Yamagishi (山岸凉子, b. 1947), whose work often has occult themes, and the “founding mother” of modern shōjo manga Moto Hagio (萩尾望都, b. 1949).

In 2003, Yokosuka participated in the Laputa Top 150 Japanese and World Animation poll where she revealed a fondness for an eclectic range of animation styles foreign and domestic, popular and alternative. Among the mainstream works that she listed were Horus: Prince of the Sun (Isao Takahata, 1968), Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984), the anime adaptation of Takashi Yanase’s Ringing Bell (Masami Hata, 1978), and even Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996). Works she lists by her fellow alternative animators include: The Man Who Planted Trees (Frédéric Back, 1987), Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein, 1975), Dojoji Temple (Kihachiro Kawamoto, 1976), Revolver (Jonas Odell/Stig Bergkvist/Marti Ekstrand/Lars Olsson, 1993), The Snowman (Dianne Jackson, 1982), The Restaurant of Many Orders (Tadanari Okamoto/Kihachiro Kawamoto, 1991), The Sand Castle (Co Hoedeman, 1977), ATAMA (Keita Kurosaka, 1994), PULSAR (Katsushi Boda, 1990), The Bead Game (Ishu Patel, 1977), Bavel's Book (Koji Yamamura, 1996).

In addition to ink brush on washi paper, Yokosuka has experimented animating with coloured pencils, pastels, watercolour, and even copper. Her works are quite difficult to track down, but fortunately the Sapporo Short Fest did a retrospective of her works in 2009 and posted sample clips from some of her films online:

A Piper (aka Crater Tree, 1987):

Movement (2003):

GAKI Biwa-Houshi (2005):

She also did a short short called Monban (Gatekeeper) for an animation omnibus sponsored by Open Yokohama which they posted earlier this year:

Yokosuka is currently based in Sapporo. For more information, check out her official homepage (JP only). I also just posted her profile on the Japanese Animation Filmography Project.

Bavel’s Book (バベルの本, 1996)

2012-08-22T17:22:00.001+02:00

In many ways, Koji Yamamura’s animated short Bavel’s Book (バベルの本, 1996) marks the beginning of his maturity as an artist. In terms of technique, Yamamura very early became a master of the craft of animating frame-by-frame by hand, but from Bavel’s Book on his films start to engage more deeply with literary and philosophical themes. Inspired in part by the short story “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, Bavel’s Book is reminiscent of Michael Ende’s novel The Neverending Story (Die Unendliche Geschichte, 1979) in its depiction of the magical world of a book come to life.

One winter's day, a young boy and his little sister race to catch the bus but are disappointed when they miss it, despite the fact that an older bald man boarding the bus spots them approaching. They sit down on the bench to await the next bus, panting from the exertion, and discover that the man has left a large leather-bound book on the bench. Upon opening the book, the children are blasted with hurricane force winds that shoot out of it. To the children’s wonderment, when the wind abates the ancient tower of Babel grows out of the pages of the book. Peering inside a hole at the top of the tower, the boy sees a hexagonal library with hexagonal galleries. This is Yamamura's interpretation of Borges’ famous Library of Babel:

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. . . From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below – one after another endlessly. . . In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite – if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . .”

- Borges, “The Library of Babel”, Fictions (Penguin Modern Classics), p. 65

A miniature figure of the bald man is sitting at a large desk in the centre of the lowest level of library reading a book. As he turns the pages, strange figures and shapes seem to come out of the book as if by magic, and just as mysteriously disappear again. When the man leaves the library, the boy reaches down to grasp the tiny book. Opening it he finds that he and his sister are transported to the sea where they fish from a pirate ship and drag their giant catch up the sand of a desert island. They roast and eat their fish peacefully, unaware that danger lurks underneath them in the form of a giant sea monster. Can the children use their imaginative powers to save themselves from the monster? You must watch the film for yourself to find out!

The layers of depth to the story are mirrored in Yamamura’s trademark layering of the image using an animation table. He employs a variety of techniques including drawn animation, cutouts, ink splotches – Yamamura is never a purist – he uses whatever materials he needs in order to get the visual results that he desires. Bavel’s Book is complemented by an inspired soundtrack composed by the microtonal pop group Syzygys (Hitomi Shimizu + Hiromi Nishida), who frequently collaborate with Yamamura (Pacusi, Atama Yama, Kafka Inaka Isha, etc.). The film brought Yamamura widespread acclaim including awards at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival and the ’97 Seoul Animation Expo. It was featured in the Panorama section at Annecy 97 and is one of ComicBox’s picks for the 30 Treasures of World Animation that did not make the Laputa 150 in 2003.

*** A note on the title: In Japanese, “Babel” is written in katakana バベル. The character ベ (be) is also often used to represent “ve” in Japanese as they do not have an equivalent to the “v” sound in their language. For example Venezuela is written ベネズエラin katakana which would be rendered “Benezuela” in romaji. Thus the “Bavel” in the official English title is likely the result of the word “Babel” being translated to katakana and back to romaji again. Confusingly, the compound ヴェ is also sometimes used for “ve” as in the city of Verona (ヴェローナ). Transliteration is not an exact science. ***

cmmhotes 2012

The film is available on the following DVDs:

Order from Japan via cdjapan:

Atamayama - Koji yamamura Sakuhinshu (JP with EN subs)

Order from the USA:

Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and other Fantastic Films by Koji Yamamura

kingyo (2009)

2012-08-16T16:25:00.000+02:00

The young female protagonist of kingyo (2009) is dressed in a maid’s costume and wanders the streets of Akihaba offering maid tours of the district for ¥10,000. Business is going slowly except for an odd request by a creeper, but then the woman (Luchino Fujisaki aka Rukino Fujisaki) encounters her former university professor (Takao Kawaguchi) who pays for a tour in order to enjoy an hour of her company.

Sensei looks tired and haggard and we soon learn that the pair were once lovers. When the woman broke it off, she gave sensei the parting gift of a pair of goldfish which he took home and gave to his wife (Amane Kudo). Affairs, even when both participants are single, more often than not create an emotional mess when they go sour but when a spouse is cheating it adds the pain of deceit and disloyalty into the mix. Visual cues suggest that sensei loved both his wife and his lover and is torn apart by the fact that in caring for the beautiful goldfish his now recently deceased wife was unwittingly nourishing his memories of his former lover. The man’s dilemma is eloquently expressed not only in the face of the talented performance artist Takao Kawaguchi playing the sensei, but also in director Edmund Yeo’s innovative use of the split screen technique.

Split screen is a technique that goes back a long way in cinema history, but in my opinion it has not yet reached its dramatic potential. It has been used for comic effect – as in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedy Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) and these days is often used to liven up music videos or concert footage. A number of directors have used it successfully for dramatic effect such as Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments (2007). Yeo’s use of the split screen is similar to that used by Roger Avary in The Rules of Attraction (2002): showing two actions that are happening simultaneously. It works both to build tension (such as the parallel actions of the sensei and the student in Akihabara) and to add atmosphere to scenes (two shots of same scene: the wind blowing the curtains gently as the wife observes the goldfish in their bowl. It also adds suggestive story information as in the brief split screen of the wife and the lover.

The most difficult section to shoot and edit must have been the dialogue between sensei and the student during his “tour” of Akihabara. Yeo used a two camera set-up and it all looks very minimalistic and graceful, but having worked on film shoots in Toronto, I imagine it must have been technically very challenging to get the lighting and camera positioning right.

Like Love Suicides (2009), kingyo is another adaptation of a short story by Yasunari Kawabata. The original story “Canary” (1924) featured canaries instead of goldfish. Yeo informed me that he thought goldfish were more Japanese than canaries, and they certainly look stunning in close-ups. The choice of fish reminded me of Kuniko Mukoda’s short story “Mr. Carp” which involves a former mistress giving her married lover a koi fish. If I remember correctly, the starring fish evokes feelings of guilt on the part of the man.

It is a beautifully shot and edited film. Yeo has a delicate touch when it comes to creating atmosphere in his films. I was particularly taken with the actors’ performances – particularly Kawaguchi who has an extraordinarily expressive face. kingyo made the short list for best short film at Venice in 2009 and won awards at the Larissa Mediterranean Festival of New Filmmakers and the Eibunren Awards 2009.

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This is the third in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

Edmund Yeo Filmography (homepage)

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)

Fleeting Images (2008)

Love Suicides (2009)

kingyo (2009)

The White Flower (2010)

Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)

NOW (2010)

Inhalation (2010)

Exhalation (2010)

Tada’s Do-It-All House (まほろ駅前多田便利軒, 2011)

2012-08-16T13:16:00.002+02:00

The fictitious town of Mahoro in Kanagawa prefecture is one of those inbetween communities framing the edges of Metro Tokyo. Not a major city center in itself and with most people commuting to jobs in Tokyo, there’s really not much of interest going on. It doesn't even draw tourists as it’s too far from the sea and not in the mountains. The people who live there don’t really have much ambition to leave, and if they do, they usually come drifting back.

At least, that is how it seems to Keisuke Tada (Eita), who runs a benri-ya (do-it-all-house) near the train station. He advertises himself as a jack-of-all-trades doing everything from babysitting a chihuahua to working as a handyman. He’s handsome and seems intelligent, so it is a bit of a mystery as to why he is doing such low paying work instead of working for a company in Tokyo.

Order from cdjapan:

Mahoroeki Maetada Benriken Standard Edition

This mystery is the main element that creates tension in the film and awakes our curiosity to learn more about him. The mystery deepens one evening when, after finishing up a job spying on bus drivers for their suspicious boss, Tada discovers that the chihuahua he is babysitting has gone missing from his truck. He finds the dog sitting on the lap of a guy who looks a bit down on his luck at the bus stop. It turns out that this man, Haruhiko Gyoten (Ryuhei Matsuda), went to school together with Tada, and that Tada had been responsible for Gyoten seriously injuring himself on a table saw during shop class.

Gyoten uses this old injury to guilt Tada into letting him crash at his place for the night. One night turns into several days, and before long Gyoten is a permanent fixture at the benri-ya tagging along on jobs as Tada’s semi-reluctant assistant. Although he seems like a deadbeat, there are many clues that Gyoten too may have once had a regular job. He chastises Tada for not marketing himself properly and wonders why Tada, who seemed to have a promising future in front of him, is stuck in a dead end business.

Both men also seem determined to stay on the fringes of life, but they keep getting pulled into sticky situations due to their natural desires to help others. They are drawn into action by a young boy called Yura (Kota Yokoyama) whose mother (Manami Honjou) has hired them to pick him up from cram school. They start to realize that Yura’s strange behaviour is more than just insolence but is hiding the fact that someone is using him and they decide to help him get out of his predicament. This subplot is tied up with another subplot about a “Columbian” prostitute called Lulu (Reiko Kataoka) and her fellow prostitute and house mate Haishi (Anne Suzuki) and the dodgy men in their lives.

The film is adapted from Miuri Shion’s bestselling novel of the same name which won the Naoki Sanjugo Prize in 2006. It starts out well, and the relationship between Tada and Gyoten evolves in an interesting way. Both Eita and Matsuda are excellent actors and the mystery surrounding their circumstances generates interest in what little plot is retained in this adaptation. Unfortunately, the film has trouble sustaining interest and has many moments that just don't make sense at all (yes it's great to rescue a prostitute from a stalker but throwing her onto a train without belongings/money/somewhere to go/telling her friend is a bit odd to say the least). One could argue that the directionlessness of the plot mimics the directionlessness of the two main protagonists, but the there are just too many head-scratching moments that lessen one’s enjoyment of the film. The film’s biggest flaws are the one-dimensional female characters who would be laughable if they weren’t so disturbing.

Director Omori Tatsushi won international acclaim for his avant-garde directorial debut The Whispering of the Gods (2005). While Tada’s Do-It-All House shows that he is quite good at getting great performances out of his male actors, the film just suffers from a problem quite prevalent in contemporary Japanese films: weak editorial decisions. With a few nips and tucks to the second half of the film, this could have been a great star vehicle of Eita and Matsuda.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

This film screened at Nippon Connection 2012:

Osaka Hamlet (大阪ハムレット, 2008)

2012-08-10T07:58:00.001+02:00

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

- Polonius, Hamlet I,iii, 78-9

Polonius` words of farewell to his son Laertes in the first act of Hamlet sum up the moral message of director Fujirō Mitsuishi’s live action adaptation of Hiromi Morishita’s award-winning manga Osaka Hamlet. The film intricately intertwines the coming of age stories of three brothers – Masashi, Yukio, and Hiroki Kubo beginning with the death of their deadbeat Dad. Embarrassingly, their mother (Keiko Matsuzaka) does not appear to be in mourning at all and even more worryingly, their long lost Uncle Takanori (Ittoku Kishibe) moves into the house and tries to make himself useful.

There could not be three more unalike brothers than the Kubo boys. The eldest, Masashi (Masahiro HIsano), is a quiet, bookish type who is inspired to boldly come out of his shell when falls head over heels for a beautiful, wayward older woman he meets by chance. In order to get to know Yu-chan (Natsuki Kato) better, he poses as a college student and even humours her cringe-worthy father fixation.

The middle brother, Yuki (Naoyuki Morita) is a thug who bullies others and seems to enjoy getting into violent scraps with other thugs. When he hears that the geek of the school has called him “Hamlet” he is at first offended because another kid at the school has a hamster named "Hamlet". Upon threatening the young man over the perceived insult, he learns about the play by Shakespeare and is actually interested enough to take his first book out from the library. At first, he cannot comprehend the language in the play, and has another outburst when he discovers Hamlet’s unusual relationship with his mother. The most interesting part of Yuki’s character development is how he comes to terms with Shakespeare’s text. Another Shakespearean element to Yuki is his capacity for extreme violence which recalls some of Shakespeare’s bloodier plays (ie. Mercutio vs. Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet).

The youngest brother, Hiroki (Tomoya Otsuka), is coming to terms with the fact that he would rather be a girl. His family is remarkably understanding – even the thug Yuki whom one could imagine harassing people for being different. “Koki” sports an androgynous haircut and wears a pink T-shirt. The one person he identifies with most is his Aunt Aki (Manami Honjo) who is in the hospital with cancer. Aki is also a bit different and enjoys role play and dressing up in costumes. Some of the more touching moments in the film come when Koki visits his aunt in the hospital.

Even Koki’s classmates are supportive of him being true to himself. When they decide to put on a class production of Cinderella, they collectively decide that Koki would be the best to play the lead role and cast a girl in the role of the prince. The climax of the film comes when the play is put on and poor Koki has to endure taunting from three bullies in the audience as well as bad behaviour from other parents. This was the most uncomfortable scene in the film as the acting was over-the-top and extremely unlikely. First of all, it is not unusual in Japanese culture for men to play female roles, and secondly, the dialogue was really unlikely. It turned an otherwise decent film into a TV sitcom for a few scenes.

The storylines of each of the family members have one thing in common: role play. Masahi is pretending to be older than he is and role playing the father Yu-chan never had, Yukio has carefully constructed a tough guy façade for himself, and young Hiro-kun is getting to live out his fantasy by playing Cinderella in his school play. Even their uncle is playing at being a house husband, even though he himself is not sure he is able to fulfil that role in their family.

The theme of role play and even the plot have much more in common with A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Hamlet. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Osaka Hamlet has three interlocking plots and is a kind of comedy of errors. It’s a decent little drama with much of the credit for originality of plot going to the excellent mangaka Hiromi Morishita.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

I saw a special screening of this film hosted by Nippon Connection in Frankfurt. It is also available on DVD:

Osaka Hamlet Deluxe Edition

Love Suicides (信, 2009)

2012-08-01T16:04:00.002+02:00

When love goes sour it can bring out the worst in people. Sounds and gestures which were once held dear transform into irritations for the heart gone cold. Edmund Yeo’s Love Suicides (2009) tells the tale of a woman (Kimmy Kiew) who has been abandoned by her husband. She and her daughter (Arika Lee) live a quiet, simple existence near a rice paddy field in rural Malaysia.

The daughter takes pleasure in the few things she has to play with: she diligently practices on her woodwind recorder or plays with a red balloon that hangs limply on the string. Brief letters marked airmail begin arriving from the husband which mysteriously suggest that he can hear every sound the girl and her mother make:

“Dear wife, don’t let the child play the flute. It’s too noisy. My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t send the child to school wearing shoes. It’s too noisy. My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t let the child eat from the porcelain bowl. It’s too noisy. My heart aches.”

Although the woman and daughter appear to be completely alone, the woman follows her husband’s instructions to the letter. The daughter says nothing, but her words and actions suggest a growing sense of anger and resentment. In the excerpt below, the mother is force feeding the daughter because the little girl is not allowed to eat on her own from the porcelain bowl:

There are many ways to read this short tale – the film itself being an interpretation of the even darker short story of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata. From my perspective, it is a tale of abuse. The quietness of the film – the excerpt above features the word of dialogue, there is no music and only a few incidental sounds (the recorder, shoes on gravel, the waves on the shore) – intensifies the tension that builds in the film. It is a tension that leaves unspoken the at worst physically violent and at best verbally abusive relationship that must have existed for this mother to unquestioningly follow out her husband’s cold written instructions.

Cinematographer Lesly Leon Lee (vimeo) has done an inspired job shooting the film in cool colours and dark shadows. Each sequence is beautifully framed. The profoundest shot for me was the one of the mother lying on a tangled web of a fishing net. It is an eloquent metaphor for the situation she finds herself in.

The original short story is one of the many gems contained in the Kawabata The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories collection translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. Love Suicides premiered at the Festival Paris Cinéma 2009 and Yeo won Best Director for the film at the China Mobile Film Festival 2009 and the Doi Saket International Film Festival 2010. The film was produced by Greenlight Pictures.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

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This is the second in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

Edmund Yeo's official website

Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)

Fleeting Images (2008)

Love Suicides (2009)

kingyo (2009)

The White Flower (2010)

Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)

NOW (2010)

Inhalation (2010)

Exhalation (2010)

Fleeting Images (2008)

2012-08-01T13:13:00.001+02:00

“Time, which changes people,

does not alter the image we have retained of them.”

- Marcel Proust

Cinema grew out of the human desire to capture the fleeting images of our lives in some kind of permanent record. Image, time and memory were favourite themes of the recently departed filmmaker Chris Marker (1921-2012) and this short film by Edmund Yeo is an homage to Marker’s meditative, poetic documentary Sans Soleil (1983).

Like Sans Soleil, Fleeting Images is narrated by a woman who conveys her interpretation of letters she has received from a close male friend. The letters are a poetic contemplation of the passage of time and the tenuous strands of fate that connect people of varying circumstances, times, and places together.

Instead of drawing on T.S. Eliot or Racine as Marker did in Sans Soleil, Yeo turns to Proust for inspiration. Memory is the central theme of Proust’s great work À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927). Sights, sounds, and smells trigger involuntary memories from the past for the narrator and the novel was groundbreaking in its exploration of how we perceive time.

Although Fleeting Images is only 10 minutes long, Yeo manages to capture the essence of his Proustian theme using montages of contemporary images and motifs. The letters are sent to the female narrator (played by Nicole Tan but narrated by Tsai Yi-Ling) by email, and the life experiences of blind Indian children and elderly Tibetan refugees are contrasted with imagery of the modern streets of Tokyo. These fleeting images haunt the letter writer as he seeks to understand the world as it is seen by others. There is a sweet little montage of animation by Julian Kok as the letter writer wonders if the world of the blind children’s imagination could possibly be more colourful than we imagine.

The disconnect that city dwellers have with the natural world is represented in the film with great poignancy when the letter writer despairs of being completely oblivious to the setting of the sun while caught in the swelling sea of humanity flowing through the streets of Shibuya. The setting sun becomes a motif for the passage of time and it recalled for me the Buddhist notion that impermanence and change are the undeniable truths of our existence. For the cynical viewer, Edmund Yeo’s Fleeting Images may dip a little bit too far into sentimentality, but for such an early, experimental work by a young filmmaker I think this may be forgiven.

Fleeting Images won the Grand Prix at the CAN CON Movie Festival in 2009 from an international jury which included film critic Chris Fujiwara and director Naomi Kawase.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

This is the first in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984). A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda. His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

To learn more about Edmund Yeo visit his official website.

Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)

Fleeting Images (2008)

Love Suicides (2009)

kingyo (2009)

The White Flower (2010)

Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)

NOW (2010)

Inhalation (2010)

Exhalation (2010)

Coming Out Story (カミングアウトストーリー, 2011)

2012-07-16T23:43:00.001+02:00

And in the journal you kept by the side of your bed. . .

Confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women's clothes

Compulsions you never knew the reasons to

“Searching for a Former Clarity”, Against Me!, 2005

Although there are many manga and anime that feature positive transgender characters, the reality of coming out as transgender in Japan is pretty harsh. The social pressure to fit into the expectations of the community is so enormous, that most transgender people keep their struggle with their identity a secret for years. Sex change operations did not even become available in Japan until the late 1990s, and it was only in 2004 that laws changed so that some transsexuals (unmarried, childless) could change their officially registered gender (learn more).

These small, but significant changes are thanks to the hard work of activists fighting for recognition and acceptance of transgender people in their communities. Kei Umezawa’s award-winning documentary Coming Out Story (2011) follows the story of one such activist: Itsuki Dohi. Dohi is a middle-aged high school math teacher born a boy in the 1960s who has been slowly making the transition to living as a woman for more than a decade. Dohi always knew that she wanted to be a woman, but as a child there was no one to whom she could speak to about her feelings and so she kept them hidden until well into adulthood. It wasn't until a co-worker came out to her as gay and lent her a book that mentioned transsexuality, that she even had a word for the deep truths that she felt about herself. Before that, she feared that she was "hentai" (a pervert). Now, aged 49, she is finally ready to go through with gender reassignment surgery.

Umezawa’s documentary is remarkable for its ordinariness. There are no flashy camera movements or artsy shots. The focus is simply on telling the story of Dohi, her friends, her community, the other transgender people whose lives she has touched, and her efforts to bring awareness to the human rights concerns of those of varying sexualities/genders. Many films about transgender people focus on outlandish transvestites or people who have been the victims of hate crimes. The transgendered in this film are shown to be just regular folks who are active members of their community. Dohi teaches math and runs a broadcasting club, one of the young people she is mentoring is an out and proud young trans man working in a care home for the elderly, while others are students just barely out of puberty who are just embarking on the path of coming to terms with their true identities.

It is an understatement to say that the journey these transgender people are on is a challenging one. One of the more poignant moments in the film comes when a friend Dohi has tried to mentor loses his/her grip on reality, dresses as a woman and tries to rob a store. The resulting newspaper headlines lead Dohi to feel that she could have done more to save her friend. Although many of Dohi’s friends – mostly women and other transgender people – testify about their experience with her, it struck me that there were no interviews with family members of the transgendered featured in this doc. Their absence spoke volumes as to the difficulties transgender people face in coming out to their family and friends. The greatest fear of all is rejection by the people and communities they care so much about. Films like Coming Out Story are crucial to educating people to love and accept all members of their community without prejudice.

Another great little film about growing up transgender in Japan: the short fiction film Jellyfish Boy

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (星を追う子ども, 2011)

2012-06-28T00:55:00.001+02:00

“. . . it came in a language

Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,

Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,

So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope

Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.”

- from “Orpheus Alone” by Mark Strand

The Continuous Life: Poems

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990

For his latest anime, Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo, 2011), animator Makoto Shinkai delves into legends about the underworld. In Japanese creation mythology, it is said that the female deity Izanami dies and goes to Yomi – the “shadowy land of the dead.” The male deity Izanagi goes after her and tries to bring her back to the land of the living. The tale has many similarities to the ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, and Shinkai draws on the symbolism of both of these tales in this, his most complex animated film to date.

The central character is a lonely preteen girl called Asuna Watase. Her father died when she was very young and her mother often works night shifts at the hospital which means that Asuna is frequently left to fend for herself. In addition to her schoolwork she cleans her own clothes, makes her own meals, and does other chores around the house to help out as much as she can. Although she is doing well in school and seems to get along well with her classmates, Asuna spends a lot of time on her own. She often sits on the hillside listening to strange music that she can pick up on the crystal radio left to her by her father.

Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo

(Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) (Theatrical Anime)"

subs: English/Japanese/Chinese

One day while crossing the rail bridge, she is attacked by a giant, bear-like creature. A mysterious boy named Shun rescues her and the next day they bond with each other listening to the crystal radio. Shun tells her that he comes from another land called Agartha and there appears to be a connection between his native land and the music Asuna listens to on her radio. They promise to meet up again the next day, but Shun has disappeared and is rumoured to have fallen to his death into the river.

Meanwhile, Asuna’s teacher goes on pregnancy leave and is replaced by a charismatic male teacher called Morisaki. Asuna is fascinated by Mr. Morisaki’s tales of the underworld and visits him at his house to learn more. It turns out that both Asuna and Morisaki are destined to journey into the underworld (Agartha) together – Asuna is drawn there by her natural curiosity and her desire to be loved, whereas Morisaki has been driven mad by his grief for his late wife and he uses violence to go on his Orphean quest to resurrect his wife.

Makoto Shinkai has admitted in interviews that he has been deeply influenced by the films of Hayao Miyazaki and the influence is very strong in Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below. Asuna has a little cat-like creature – which the medicine man in the underworld calls a yadoriko – which is very similar to the fox-like creature Teto in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). The Quetzalcoatls resemble some of the kami from Princess Mononoke (1997) as well as the stone robots of Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1987). The use of a flying ship – the Shakuna Vimana ark – is also very Miyazaki.

While the Miyazaki influence is undeniable, I am not one of those critics declaring Shinkai as the next Miyazaki. First of all, I think that’s putting way too much pressure too soon on a director who has not yet fully matured as an artist. Second of all, Shinkai’s films have a very different feeling to me than Studio Ghibli films. Shinkai’s work takes itself much more seriously than a Studio Ghibli film. A typical Ghibli film is full of visual gags and self referential humour, whereas there are few laughs in Shinkai. What sets Shinkai apart from his peers is that he is the master of dreamy landscapes. He uses such a colourful palette – and not just for landscapes. Some of the interior sequences of the medicine man's home looked as colourful and intricate as a patchwork quilt. One of the more interesting sequences was the flashback to all the famous world leaders from Caesar to Napolean, from Hitler to Stalin who, according to the legends of the bottom-dwellers – tried to plunder the riches of the underworld. The sequence was painted like an elaborate wall mural.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below is on the one hand the moving story of a lonely girl’s quest to make sense of the world she is living in. On the other hand, for the viewer it is a philosophical journey into the realms of the possible. Although there is some influence of the Orpheus myth, the ideas in this film largely come from Shintō, Buddhist, and even some Sanskrit thought, with the medicine man reminding us that while it is normal to grieve the dead, we should not pity them for the cycle of life and death is a natural one. Death is not to be feared but accepted. We need to count our blessings and learn to let go of the past in order to continue on our journey into the future.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

This film screened at: