Nishikata Film Review 西片映画レビュー

Cube by Rinpa Eshidan

2009-11-02T11:04:00.004+01:00

Rinpa Eshidan is an animation art collective that perform live-art events and film them on video. Their mission statement:

Instead of focusing on the finished project, we believe the process of creation itself is where art comes to life and our videos and live art aim to engage our audience in that process. Many people ask us how we can stand to erase the artwork we have worked so hard to create, but our focus is on the process of making art, not the end result. The good news is that the videos we make become a permanent record of the spontaneous artworks created during the filming.

They have just posted this new video 'Cubes' on their Youtube channel in order to promote their DVD which can be ordered by e-mailing a request to rinpaeshidan(at)me.com. The music featured on this video is by Super Samir. For more information on the group visit their website or contact them at info(at)rinpaeshidan.com

Fantastic Cells

2009-10-15T14:32:00.007+01:00

Mirai Mizue (水江未来, b. 1981) is an exciting young talent in Japanese computer animation. His work has recently been featured on the NHK’s ground-breaking Digista program (see Metropolis here).

Fantastic Cells (ファンタスチイック・セル, 2003) is an early work of Mizue’s that he completed while he was a student at Tamabi (多摩美術大学). In his animation, Mizue demonstrates an affinity for creating animation that is inspired by music. I think of him as a kind of Norman McLaren or Oskar Fischinger of the computer generation. For his music, Mizue chose Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ from the Nutcracker Suite. This choice of music is quite bold for a young artist. Not only is the piece an emotive, well-known favourite but, as Mizue mentions on his website, it was also used for a sequence in Disney’s Fantasia (1940 watch it here).

‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ begins quietly and Mizue mimicks the gentleness of the music by using the frame sparingly at first. The shapes that he creates are composed of little cells. As the music’s tempo and volume increases, the cells densely pack the screen creating beautiful creatures both realistic and fantastic. The film also starts out entirely in black and white, but when it reaches it’s climax, pastel colours are added to flagellate-like creatures that pop out of a pod like balloons. At the song’s peak, the colourful cells combine to briefly form the shape of a human before cutting to a title card. Throughout the film, I was reminded of moments from McLaren’s Begone Dull Care (1949) – particularly in Mizue’s use of the image to complement the music.

This film and others can be viewed using Quicktime on Mirai Mizue’s website. He also has a gallery of some of his illustrations which show the depth and range of his talent, from off-the-wall to mildly disturbing to the truly beautiful and inspiring. You can also read more about him at anipages.

Naoyuki Tsuji Ripped Off by Facets

2009-10-14T23:21:00.009+01:00

I have been a big fan of Naoyuki Tsuji　(辻直之)'s hauntingly beautiful charcoal animation since I first encountered it when I saw Image Forum's Thinking and Drawing. I have been collecting Japanese art animation for the past few years and looked into buying the American release of Tsuji's work earlier this year. One does not need subititles to understand it as the films have no dialogue, but I wanted to see if there were any films or extras of interest on the DVD. I was a bit hesitant to order anything from Chicago's Facets Video because while doing a research project in 2003, I ordered a copy of Nina Menkes's experimental film The Great Sadness of Zoharra (1988) from them. I was living in the UK at the time, and copies of Menkes's films were scarce, so the Facets VHS video was my only option. I was pretty shocked at the quality of the product. The VHS cover was merely a colour photocopy, and while one does expect poor image quality of a VHS tape it was exceptionally disappointing. I really could make no judgement of the artistic merits of the original film and had to rely upon the judgements of papers by academics who had seen the film projected.

After mucking about on the Facets website for a bit, I looked for reviews of the Tsuji DVD but found none. Eventually, I happened across a fiery discussion about Facets on the Criterion discussion boards. Needless to say, I decided it wasn't worth the trouble of ordering. I already have a copy of Columbia Japan's release Trilogy about Clouds (pictured above), which features not only the trilogy but also Sameru (Wake Up, 1992), Kiekaketa Monogatari-tachi no tame ni (For Almost Forgotten Stories, 1994), Yoru no Okite (Rules of the Night, 1995), and experiment (1997)., not to mention a documentary about Tsuji's time as a special guest at Cannes in 2005. Yami wo Mitsumeru Hane (A Feather Stare at the Dark, 2003) can be found on Thinking and Drawing.

It turns out that I made the right decision because representatives for Tsuji just released this statement earlier in the month:

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
October 1, 2009

Serious Problems in Facets Multi-Media’s DVD NAOYUKI TSUJI ANIMATION COLLECTION

Japanese artist Naoyuki Tsuji’s hand-made animations were packaged in DVD for the North American market and the DVD package titled NAOYUKI TSUJI ANIMATION COLLECTION was released in July 24th, 2007 by Facets Multi-Media (1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago IL 60614 U.S.A http://www.facets.org/).

During the DVD making process, neither the artist nor the video licensor had any chance to check the contents. They both finally checked the contents in February 2009 and found thefollowing problems in the DVD package:

An omnibus movie consisting of three shot films titled TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS was not contained with appropriate sound - the sound track from other piece was recorded there
FROM THE CLOUD, an episode of omnibus TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS was contained (with a wrong sound) but the credit for the episode was not recorded at all.
A short film titled EXPERIMENT was not contained at all.
There were some errors in the titles on the menu.
The jacket did not show the correct credit.

The most serious problem is TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS, which was officially selected inDirectors' Fortnight in Cannes Film Festival 2005, was not recorded in its original form – the picture comes with a totally different music.

Since March 2009, the artist and the video licensor have requested Facets Multi-Media to stop selling the DVD and to re-produce the package completely. However, Facets Multi-Media has never responded them and done nothing. Unfortunately, the DVD package is still on the market. For the reason above, the artist and the video licensor consider that Facets Multi-Media’s DVD titled NAOYUKI TSUJI ANIMATION COLLECTION is 100% illegal copy. Now, Facets Multi-Media is selling illegal DVD copies of Naoyuki Tsuji’s work.

If you have any questions regarding this matter, please feel free to contact:

Tomoyuki Suzuki
video licensor for North America / CEO, Tomo Suzuki Japan.Ltd.
e-mail: mail(at)tomosuzuki.com
phone: +81-3-5468-7172 fax :+81-3-6277-5779
address: Villa Moderna C-403, 1-3-18 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0002 Japan

From this statement, it is clear that Facets has acting extremely unprofessionally throughout. It sounds to me like the deal was that Facets would put English subtitles onto the Columbia Japan DVD while maintaining the integrity of the original image and soundtrack.

Facets Video is truly a mystery to me. Surely someone who is a fan of the rare artistic films that they produce videos and DVDs of would also be concerned about maintaining the artistic integrity of the films. Am I missing something here? There is money to be made in selling phony reproductions of blockbuster films, but the kind of people who like art and indie films are concerned about the quality of the image and the soundtrack. It just doesn't make any sense that they would tamper with an artist's work in this way.

I encourage all fans of indie film to boycott Facets Video until they start to treat the artists' whose films they reproduce with the respect that they deserve.

To support this artist, please order Trilogy about Clouds through a reputable dealer like cdjapan, yesasia, or amazon.co.jp.

Okamoto's 'Are wa Dare?´

2009-10-14T09:34:00.007+01:00

Despite having won the Noburo Ofuji Award more than any other animator, Tadanari Okamoto’s work is rarely shown outside of Japan. However, his ground-breaking animation will be instantly recognizable to many Japanese people – especially those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s because many of his films were used for educative purposes in schools and libraries across the country.

Of these educative films, my favourites are the Are wa dare? (Who’s that?, 1976) shorts. These ten tales, averaging about two minutes each in length demonstrate Okamoto’s true genius: using innovative animation techniques to tell simple but effective stories. Okamoto is famous for trying out new materials and techniques in each of his films. The figures in this series are formed by yarn (毛糸/keito) and shot on the painted glass of an animation table. The animation table has multiple layers of glass and scenes are shot from above looking down. Yarn is not an easy material to use in stop motion animation because it doesn’t hold its shape exactly and it blows away easily, so Okamoto’s animation team painted thin wires to match the yarn and inserted them carefully into each strand to allow for the fixing of shapes. Additional effects, such as the rippling water in Ie de (At Home) where painted onto a second layer of glass.

The charm of these shorts cannot be overstated. They are appealing both to the young children who make up their target audience and to parents. They would not be out of place if used as shorts during the the NHK children’s program Inai Inai Baa (Peek-a-Boo), which also hires contemporary animators like Maya Yonesho to do appealing little artistic shorts. Unlike the kind of short tales I remember seeing on TV as a kid, these films are not educative in the sense of teaching morals. Rather, they are slice of life pieces that point out the slight embarrassments and small joys that are a part of growing up. For instance, Ie de shows a young child arguing with his mother. In anger, he runs away from home swimming upstream. When he runs out of energy he falls asleep and the stream’s current brings him back home again into the embrace of his father. In the title film Are wa dare? (Who’s that?), a pair of fox siblings are out for a walk with their older sister (see image at top of post). They spot many different creatures along the way, asking their sister repeatly ‘Are wa dare?’ The older sister answers their questions confidently and patiently until a boy fox on a bicycle cycles by. When the younger siblings ask ‘Are wa dare?’ this last time, the older sister can only blush because, as the female narrator tells us, she has a crush on the boy.

The shorts are titled as follows:
1. いえで (At Home)
2. べんきょう (Study)
3. たんうきのかさ (Tanuki Umbrella)
4. ネコとネズミ (Cat & Mouse)
5. くまおじいさん (Grandpa Bear)
6. ながれぼし (Shooting Star)
7. キツツキ (Woodpecker)
8. やま (Mountain)
9. あれはだれ (Who’s that?)
10. おかあさん (Mother)

To see more sample images from the shorts including a brief video clip, see this Kiroku Eiga page. They are selling the film on VHS for an exorbitant amount of money. If you understand Japanese (sadly, no subtitles), a much better deal would be the volume 2 DVD of Okamoto’s work available here. True fans, will of course want the complete box set.

TV Asahi & TBS on Youtube

2009-09-30T21:03:00.004+01:00

It has been all over the news today that TV Asahi and TBS have struck a deal with Google to stream news programs on Youtube. Most of the articles, however, don't have links. I found it pretty tricky to find TBS's channel because someone else was already using their acronym. I hope they find a way to make it financially viable to stream more than just the news in the near future, but for the time being, check out tvasahi (who have celebrated the new deal with a cute little cartoon - which unfortunately they won't let me embed) and tbsnewsi. Of course, if you love alternative Japanese animation as much as I do, you should also be subscribed to NHKonline, because they post the latest Digista shorts regularly. For example, check out Mirai Mizue's latest animation below:

Tokyo Loop

2009-09-30T12:05:00.004+01:00

Tokyo’s centre for experimental and art cinema, Image Forum, under the guidance of program director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita, has a knack for putting together some clever screening packages together for the Image Forum Festival every year. Many of these packages, such as Thinking and Drawing, make their way into international festivals, and in some cases even onto DVD. Such is the case with the 2006 omnibus Tokyo Loop featuring the work of both established artists like Yoji Kuri, Taku Furukawa, Keiichi Tanaami, Nobuhiro Aihara, as well as exciting younger artists such as Kei Oyama, Mika Seike, Tabaimo, and Tomoyasu Murata.

Tokyo Loop came out of Image Forum’s desire to do something to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stuart Blackton’s animation “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906), considered by many the first publicly screened animated film. Sawa and Yamashita commandeered the help of Furukawa who contributed to the project with a film of his own and helped recruit other independent animation and experimental artists.

The 16 artists were asked to contribute a short film inspired by the city of Tokyo. The films would also be linked by the participation of Seiichi Yamamoto, a well-known musician from Osaka’s underground music scene who composed the score. Yamamoto corresponded with the artists during the production process. He composed the music in advance based upon the sketches and storyboards provided by each animator, then revised them to fit the final edit of the film. During a discussion that I attended following a screening of the film at Image Forum on the 12th January 2007, Yamamoto spoke of the difficulties posed by trying to compose the music in advance of seeing the films. In the end, he was very successful at using his music to complement the wide variety of styles and imagery that each artist brings to this collaborative process.

Masahiko Sato, renowned director of animated TV commercials, and his partner Mio Ueta kick off the omnibus with “Tokyo Strut,” an homage to the original line drawings of Blackton and also recalls the 2D experiments with line, shape, and motion done by Norman McLaren at the NFB. Sato and Ueta’s playful depiction of people and dogs out for a stroll reminds us of the advancement in technology since those early days of animation by shifting the image from 2D to 3D using CG animation at one point during the film.

“Tokyo Trip” takes us on a psychedelic ride through the colourful, trippy imagery that has made Keiichi Tanaami famous. While the nightmarish, often sexualized characters with exaggerated features are a trademark of Tanaami, he does weave in the theme of Tokyo subtly through his use of metaphors such as rain and train travel.

Tanaami’s work is followed by Mika Seike’s feminist parable “Fishing Vine” which depicts a woman as the object of male desire and voyeurism. Like her earlier films, two of which featured on the earlier Image Forum DVD Thinking and Drawing, “Fishing Vine” has been constructed through the scanning and laying of drawings, photographs, and real objects like leaves. Seike’s films are instantly identifiable by the black and white newspaper-like quality to the human figures.

Another artist also featured on Thinking and Drawing, Kei Oyama offers yet another disturbing but mesmerizing short film “Yuki-chan” about the death of a young girl. Yamamoto’s layered soundtrack complements the textured visual style of the animation and also conveys the somber tone.

The melancholy of Oyama’s work is countered by Kotobuki Shiriagari’s comical first foray into animation “Dog & Bone,” which keeps it simple with pencil drawings and cut-outs. The visual style is in keeping with the child-like scrawls he uses in his deeply subversive manga. A human line-drawing form with a cut-out dog head chases a spinning bone through various scenes from both contemporary Tokyo (Tokyo Tower, train crossing, movie theatre) as well as Tokyo’s past (rural scenes, fire bombings). The cheerful melody contrasts with the often violent imagery.

Tabaimo’s “Public Convenience”, which she also presented as a video installation at the Hara Gallery in 2006, takes place in a women’s public toilet. The setting is typical of the grungy public facilities generally found in JR stations. The colour palette and style is typical of Tabaimo’s work and is heavily influenced by ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). A scene in which a turtle tries to crawl out of the Japanese-style toilet recalls Hokusai’s famous work The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, 1832) in the way she draws the wave of water flushing the turtle back down. A fascinating piece that depicts the grim every day realities of public lavatories in the style of a moving painting.

Atsuko Uda won the newcomers prize at the Image Forum Festival in 1999 for her digital video film “Fukuda-san.” Her Tokyo Loop title "-blink-TOKYO-blink-" is creative nod to html script (the title is actually written with html brackets, but they were messing with with script on this page & had to be nixed). She was inspired by the city lights she remembers from her childhood growing up in the late Showa era. Her use of lights reminded me of the Lite-Brite toy that was all the rage in North America when I was growing up. Uda’s film captures all the motifs associated with the seasons with nods to traditional Japanese cloth and paper design.

At first Nobuhiro Aihara’s “Black Fish” gives the impression that it is an abstract interpretation of the music like Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s Begone Dull Care (1949) or Oskar Fischinger’s Motion Paintings and early abstractions. However, as the piece progresses, the camera moves back to reveal that the black swathes of ink are not random, but animations of strange faces that metamorphosize into the moving images of black fish.

Renowned experimental filmmaker Takahashi Ito’s work is not traditional animation. Rather, it is animation in the sense of ‘manipulation of moving images’. “Unbalance” depicts a dark vision of Tokyo as a place where people suffer under intense emotional states. An intense film with nightmarish imagery.

Maho Shimao’s “Tokyo Girl” starkly contrasts Ito’s deeply anguished film with a more light-hearted vision of Tokyo as a place of female sexual freedom. Shimao is perhaps most famous for her manga “Goriko, High School Girl” which she wrote as a teenager and has a popular teenage girl fan following. She comes from an artistic family, with both her parents working as freelance photographers. Her father, Shinzo Shimao is also a novelist, and her grandfather Toshio Shimao (1917-1986) was a renowned writer.

With “Nuance”, Tomoyasu Murata captures the rhythms and imagery of the city using a variety of different animation techniques, many of which were reminiscent of Norman McLaren. Taku Furukawa and Yoji Kuri both demonstrated the minimalistic pen & ink styles for which they are renowned to capture typical Tokyo scenes with black humour. Furukawa’s “Hashimoto” features a group of smokers on Hashimoto JR platform who transform into crows to peck to pieces a ‘rat’ smoker who does not conform to the ways of the group. His sin? Talking on his keitai! Kuri’s “Funkogarashi” also takes on socially unacceptable, yet commonplace behaviour: people who walk their dogs and don’t scoop the poop.

Many of the contributions to Tokyo Loop are abstract in nature. Atsushi Wada’s “Manipulated Man”, for example, presents a poetic dissection of the highly pressured salaryman using metaphors of manual manipulation, repetition, regurgitation and sheep. Koji Yamamura’s highly allusive, dream-like contribution “Fig” features a block-headed man with Tokyo Tower for a nose, while interactive media and installation artist Toshio Iwai plays with the concept of time flying by in the city by animating a clock with a series of images resembling a kaleidoscope in “12 O’Clock”.

The extras section of the DVD features ‘Making of’ profiles for ten of the artists. This gives a behind-the-scenes look at the wide range of techniques employed by the artists, from Aihara and Tanaami hand-drawing on paper and filming frame-by-frame on 16mm to Mika Seike scanning found objects into her computer for animation. The DVD comes with a book containing stills from each short film, bios for the artists as well as a short explanation of their inspiration for each piece. A CD of the soundtrack is also available.

For an interview with the producers, read this article from PingMag (an online bilingual art mag that I miss terribly since it succumbed to funding shortages at the New Year). Many of the artists featured here have their own homepages, so look for them in the sidebar.

Tomorrow (2007)

2009-09-27T16:53:00.005+01:00

Tomorrow is a very upbeat little puppet animation by Tomoyasu Murata. It would not be out of place in the NHK’s Minna no Uta series. Animated to the song ‘Tomorrow’ (uncredited, sung by a girl), which children of the 1980s will remember from the Orphan Annie musical, the three-minute short features a young girl with a red kerchief on her head. She has set up a picnic blanket in a European-esque town and prepares to throw a party. The town has that slightly bleak, worn-out feel to it that is very typical of Murata (ie Indigo Road), but it has been cheered up a bit by pastel touches to doors and shutters.

Using crayons and paper, the doll-like girl draws all of the food necessary for the party. She then opens her bag and some magical CGI stars fly out to decorate the invitations. She delivers the invitations to all the doors in town, but as night falls she grows sad as no guests have joined her yet. As she embraces her doll and closes her eyes with sadness, a 2D animated character tugs on her dress. Suddenly the sky is filled with 2D translucent characters that float down to join the party.

Most of Tomoyasu Murata’s films are for an adult audience, but this one appeals to all ages. My four year old daughter simply adores it. The song is very catchy and she is enraptured by the colourful array of dolls that join the girl’s party. There is an interesting mixture in this short film of the kawaii (cute) and the creepy (canted angles, the ghostliness of the towns and the 2D characters), but all great children’s work seems to balance a bit of both. It’s a beautiful, very memorable little piece. I have been particularly enjoying Murata’s mixing of media (puppet, cel, computer animation) in his recent films. Like the late, great Tadanari Okamoto, he doesn’t like to do exactly the same thing twice.

Kinuyo Tanaka Centenary

2009-09-26T22:18:00.003+01:00

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Japan’s first woman film director Kinuyo Tanaka (田中絹代, 1909-1977). As an actress, she was indisputably at the top of her profession starring in (according to imdb) 24 Gosho films, 15 Mizoguchi films, 10 Ozu films, 8 Shimazu films, 6 Naruse films, and even a Kurosawa film (Red Beard, 1965) . Her career spans both the silent and sound eras. She has the distinction of having starred in the first Japanese talkie: Madamu to nyobo (The Neighour’s Wife and Mine, Heinosuke Gosho, 1931) as well as starring in the only film directed by Hollywood legend Sessue Hayakawa (Taiyo wa higashi yori, 1932). Tanaka won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for her portrayal of a woman forced into prostitution during World War II in Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8 (1974). Her final appearance on screen was in another Kei Kumai film Kita No Misaki (1976) in the year before her death.

In honour of Kinuyo Tanaka’s outstanding career, the National Film Center in Tokyo is holding extensive screenings of her films from October 8th until December 27th. The screenings will be accompanied by an exhibition about her life and career. The exhibition opened earlier this month and will run until December 20th. The materials come both from the NFC collection as well as from personal belongings from the collection in her hometown of Shimonoseki.

Screenings will include 9 silent films and 44 talkies. This may sound like a lot, but as the Japanese Movie Database suggests that Tanaka was involved in the production of over 200 films, the screenings are really just a taste of Tanaka’s illustrious career. The screening series’ official title is ‘Film Actress Kinuyo Tanaka at her Centenary (Part 1)’ (生誕百年映画女優田中絹代（１）, which suggests that a second screening series is planned for the near future, which I presume will feature her work as a director.

Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008)

2009-09-16T12:27:00.005+01:00

Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008) is the latest installment in Tomoyasu Murata’s contemplative My Road series. Previous films featuring the pianist as a central character include Scarlet Road (朱の路, 2002), White Road (白の路, 2003), and Indigo Road (藍の路, 2006). Last month, I reviewed the film Sky Colour Flower Colour (空色花色, 2006) which also ties into the series of puppet animations. Like my other reviews of Murata’s work, this is really more of a ‘reading’ of the film than a proper ‘review’. Although I do call this blog a ‘review’, I do really see it more as a journal of my viewing habits and reactions to Japanese film, art, and literature.

Tomoyasu Murata creates a wide variety of animation and other art, and his Road series is among the most personal and introspective of his work. The films are also, perhaps the most iconic images of Murata’s for the average Japanese because footage from White Road was re-edited into a music video for the song ‘Hero’ by the popular J-Pop band Mr. Children. The films require several screenings because they don’t give up their secrets very easily. There is no dialogue or narration, but a great deal of emotion is imbued into the films by music. Most of the Road films have loss as a central theme: the death of a child (Scarlet Road), the death of a pet and lost friendship (White Road), and the loss of a partner (Indigo Road). Lemon Road, by contrast, is a film about recovery and starting anew.

The first indication that something different from his previous puppet animations is afoot comes with the startling open sequence which subverts our expectations both aurally and visually. Instead of the romantic music of the other films, Lemon Road (aka Lemon’s Road) opens with an avant-garde soundtrack that draws attention to the film as a film. The sound of a 16mm film projector whirs while a cacophony of sounds weave in and out mimicking the editing of the avant-garde style opening. Pastels on paper create, scribble out and recreate what we later learn to be images from the main narrative of the film. Sounds include a harmonica, a piano, and radio or TV feedback (from the days of turn-dial tuning). As Murata cuts to a wider shot we see that the images are actually appearing on an old-fashioned TV screen. The final images are done with cut-outs. We see a lemon being sliced, then a coffee and a tea appear on the screen with a lemon slice falling into the later. The scene then shifts to a rural scene with a gaping hole in the middle of it. As a ringing phone joins the cacophony of noise on the soundtrack, the cutout figures of a human and some animals get sucked up into the hole.

The TV turns off and we are introduced to a stark motel-like room as the soundtrack quiets down to just the sound of the phone ringing. The pianist character sits contemplatively on the sofa looking towards the sunlight coming in the window. On the whole the room is quite dull in its colours – greys, browns, blacks – but on the wall are two colourful paintings that add a glimmer of cheerfulness to an otherwise melancholy scene.

This seems to be general theme of the film: a gradual lifting of the melancholy that pervaded the previous films. After several viewings of the film, I have come to interpret it as a kind of literal and spiritual road trip that the pianist is going on. Whereas Scarlet Road had an Asian setting, and Indigo Road seemed influenced by the architecture of Eastern Europe, this film is set in the countryside of Arizona. From his lodgings, the pianist takes his scooter to and from a library across a typical North American roadside landscape with a wide open sky. The passing of time is indicated by the changing of the weather and it seems that the pianist has come to this location to do some kind of research.

Thematically, the library is a great location because it is a place where people often go alone, as shown in the film and it emphasizes the theme of solitude. The solitude that the pianist experiences in all of the Road films is a part of the spiritual journey of the character. The melancholy nature of this quest is emphasized by the theme music, which is composed by Tatsuhide Tado, who also did the music for Indigo Road. The music starts when the pianist opens his journal. The music recalls the theme music of Indigo Road but it features a guitar rather than the usual piano. The piano (joined by a bass and an electric guitar) does return in key sequences such as an extended dream sequence which occurs when the pianist falls asleep while watching TV. It begins with the ringing phone being dragged by the cord out of the window and into a gaping hole in the earth, then goes on to reprise many of the images from the opening sequence. In particular, the image of everything and everyone being swallowed up into the hole.

The dream sequence ends back in the pianist’s room but with a giant lemon filling the space. The lemon spits out a piece of paper like a ticket vending machine, which we later learn has a telephone number on it. The lemon fits with the theme of starting anew for the pianist because of its cleansing properties and its association with freshness. After he wakes up, the pianist takes the piece of paper to the phone booth on the side of the highway and tries dialing it. Although there is no answer and he leaves the paper behind, the film ends on an optimistic note with the pianist sitting in the sunshine outside his room drinking coffee.

Murata leaves the Road films deliberately ambiguous, so the film’s meaning is really open to numerous interpretations which would be influenced by whether or not one has seen the other films in the series. My own view, when considering this film together with Indigo Road and Sky Colour Flower Colour, is that the woman in Indigo Road did not die like the child in Scarlet Road or the dog in White Road. Rather the pianist and the woman have separated. The ending suggests to me the possibility of a reconciliation between the two. This idea is implied by the sound of the bird that one hears singing when the pianist makes the phone call. It is the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul), whose call was also a key theme in Sky Colour Flower Colour. Now the hiyodori would not be found in Arizona, so I am reading it as an aural reminder of the woman. This may sound like I am reading too much into it, but I feel that this interpretation is supported by the fact that a butterfly (which a theme in Sky Colour Flower Colour) flies out of the phone booth as the guitar theme song returns. Even though the phone call does not seem to be answered, perhaps the pianist has made peace with whatever problems there were between them. Another image that points to this are the red flowers that are growing up out of the cracks of the concrete outside the door of the pianist’s room. The red flowers are another image that thread through the Road films.

I really enjoyed the dream sequences in Lemon Road – not only are dreams are an important metaphor in Murata’s work they are also a recurring theme in films of many great filmmaking artists from Hitchcock to Cocteau. The dream sequences in Lemon Road give us many clues into the psychology of the mysterious pianist whose silence and sad eyes are so beguiling. The optimistic ending – the first time full sunshine has been used in the series – increases my desire to see what will happen to this fascinating character in the next installment. I do hope that his journey continues.

Lemon Road can be ordered online at tomoyasu.net (within Japan only). Customers outside of Japan should send requests to Murata's company by e-mail.

Repast (めし, 1951)

2009-09-09T12:23:00.002+01:00

Women form the central concern of the films of Miko Naruse (成瀬巳喜男, 1905-1969). Women play the main protagonists, the thematic concerns usually revolve around issues concerning women, his audiences were mainly women, and the narratives are often based on stories by women writers. Naruse’s 1951 hit film Meshi (めし/ Repast) is adapted from the final, unfinished novel by popular writer Fumiko Hayashi (林芙美子, 1903-1951). He would later to go on to make five other films based on her literary output including Hourou-ki (A Wanderer’s Notebook, 1962) which was based on her autobiography.

If I were a teacher of Japanese, I could imagine using Naruse’s Meshi to teach students about one radical difference between men and women in Japan: the use of language. The different usages of language between men and women in Japanese is apparent in all family dramas, but in Meshi it is foregrounded by film’s title, which is also a key motif throughout the film. The difference between men’s and women’s Japanese rarely comes across in the subtitles because it is difficult to translate. The translators of Meshi had a real problem translating the title in particular and I’m not sure that they were successful. ‘Repast’ is a rather formal-sounding French loan word and it's in my estimation, a bit of an archaic word for a meal in English. In contrast, the Japanese word ‘meshi’, as I will elaborate in a moment, is very informal. I can’t really criticize whoever came up with the title ‘Repast’ though, because there would also be the complication of the different usages of words for meals among different regions of English speakers (supper and tea have very different meanings depending on what side of the Atlantic you are one for example). The noun ‘meal’ itself also has multiple meanings just to add to the translation difficulties.

Focusing on the Japanese meanings of ‘meshi’ though, the first dilemma when translating the title of the film is that it can mean both a meal and rice. As rice is the staple of all traditional Japanese meals ‘gohan’, the synonym for ‘meshi’, also means both a meal and rice. ‘Gohan’ is the word that most students of Japanese will learn and it is what women will use with each other and when talking to men. It is more polite than ‘meshi’, which men will use with each other and when talking to their wives.

In Naruse’s subtle depiction of a marriage, the husband Hastsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto (Ken Uehara) often uses very blunt expression ‘Meshi ja nai ka’ to ask his wife Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) if supper is ready yet. It would be similar in English to a husband asking his wife ‘Isn’t supper ready yet?’ in a tone that implies that the meal should already be on the table. After five years of marriage, the shine has worn off. Their relationship is strained due to troubles making ends meet and Hatsu, worn out from his job, doesn’t see how the long, lonely days working as a housewife are affecting Michiyo. Her one solace is in the scraggly, tail-less cat who seeks her affection.

Michiyo’s feelings about living in Osaka are emphasized through the theme of ‘meshi.’ She finds that the imported , overpriced rice sold by a local woman tastes funny and longs for rice from back home. Without family in Osaka, Michiyo has grown tired of the endless chores of cooking and cleaning and wonders if she should return to Tokyo and find work for herself. Her husband works long hours and has become distant from her, leading her to lavish all her love on a mangy, tail-less cat.

The catalyst for change comes in the guise of a niece, Satoko, who drops in unexpectedly from Tokyo. Satoko has come to escape her parents and their marital expectations of her and seems to have a little crush on her uncle. Flirty, young, and naïve, Satoko’s presence reminds Michiyo of the woman she used to be, as does a reunion with her Tokyo friends. These women are important because they show the limited chances women had in the 1950s. Each suffers from their own situation (single vs. married) and thinks that the others have it better. After this interlude with her friends, Michiyo comes home to find that Satoko and her husband have done very little to contribute to the day’s chores and she decides that the time has come to make a change in her life.

From a modern perspective, Hatsu seems like a real jerk of a husband and in a lot of reviews of this film, Hatsu is described as being a stereotypical patriarchal husband. Thinking about him in the context of 1950s Japan, I actually found him quite a sympathetic character – especially when contrasted with the husband in Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain, 1954), another Naruse film starring Ken Uehara and Setsuko Hara as a couple with marital problems. Hatsu shows early signs of being a good guy – although he is curt in the usual way with his wife, he shows great patience when she’s angry with him and never responds with anger himself. Apart from his lack of contribution to household chores (which is sadly even today typical behaviour for men in many Japanese families), he also shows good judgment for the most part throughout. For example, he is always honest with his wife, telling her where he goes and with whom. He does not spend money overly rashly and avoids bad business decisions (ie the Marugaki scheme) despite heavy peer pressure. He also seems completely oblivious to the women who throw themselves at him during Michiyo’s absence.

While Naruse does give the husband’s perspective lots of screen time, our thoughts are never far from Michiyo. Unlike Fumiko Hayashi’s unfinished novel, which was written in the first person, Michiyo’s motivations throughout the film seem deliberately ambiguous. In doing so, Naruse allows his audience to use their own experience to interpret Michiyo’s actions and thoughts. This is only broken in the final scene on the train (no spoilers follow), where Michiyo is given a voiceover narration that explains her ultimate choice. This final scene was reportedly tacked on by the studio producers, much to the dismay of many critics. I think that it could have been left ambiguous with no voiceover dialogue. For me, the scene in the restaurant with Michiyo and her husband made the ending satisfying – especially when Michiyo laughs through tears as only Setsuko Hara can. This is a film that can be really appreciated by people, especially women, who have been married for a long time because it asks its audience to consider what happiness in marriage really means to them.

Setsuko Hara ¤ Michiyo Okamoto
Ken Uehara ¤ Hatsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto
Yukiko Shimazaki ¤ Satoko Okamoto (niece)
Yōko Sugi ¤ Mistuko Murata (Michiyo’s sister-in-law)
Akiko Kazami ¤ Seiko Tomiyasu
Haruko Sugimura ¤ Matsu Murata (Michiyo’s mother)
Ranko Hanai ¤ Koyoshi Dohya
Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi ¤ Kazuo Takenaka (cousin)
Keiju Kobayashi ¤ Shinzo Murata (Michiyo’s brother)
Akira Ōizumi ¤ Yoshitaro Taniguchi

Akira Kurosawa: a Century of Cinema

2009-09-02T19:11:00.003+01:00

The Venice Film Festival will be celebrating the centenary of the birth of Akira Kurosawa a few months early with a panel on Monday. The discussion will feature a number of prominent guests including Peter Cowie, Donald Richie, Teruyo Nogami, Michel Ciment, Richard Corliss, and Italian critic Aldo Tassone. Here is the blurb from their website:

To mark the imminent 100th anniversary of his birth, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa will be the subject of the international panel that will be held at the Venice Lido on Sunday September 6, 2009 at 3 pm in Sala Pasinetti (Palazzo del Cinema), organized by the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2-12 September) and moderated by Peter Cowie, film historian, author and founder of The International Film Guide.

On 23 March 2010 Akira Kurosawa would have been 100 years old. Given that his discovery in the West came as a result of the Golden Lion he won at the 1951 Venice Film Festival with Rashomon, and that the festival awarded him a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 1982, it is significant that his profile and his achievements as a filmmaker should be discussed in Venice this year.

The participants in the meeting chaired by Peter Cowie (Great Britain) will include some of the world’s best-known experts on Kurosawa’s work, such as Teruyo Nogami (Japan, writer and for many years Kurosawa’s chief assistant), Donald Richie (United States, writer, director and critic, authority on the culture of Japan – where he has been living since 1947 – and author of the ‘definitive’ study of Kurosawa, as well as firsthand witness to a half-century of his activity), Michel Ciment (France, writer and critic, editor of the magazine Positif), Richard CorlissTime) and Aldo Tassone (Italy, critic, director of the France Cinéma festival and author of several books on Kurosawa). (United States, critic for the weekly

The panellists will address the multiple aspects of Kurosawa’s figure and work, including: his vision of society and politics; the comparison between Kurosawa and the other great Japanese filmmakers; his relations with Eastern and Western culture (Shakespeare, Gorky, Dostoevsky, van Gogh); the enthusiastic reception given to Kurosawa by American culture and cinema; comparisons with other great Japanese auteurs such as Ozu and Mizoguchi; their numerous remakes; his sources of inspiration in Japanese culture; Kurosawa’s work on the set; his talent as a painter; his use of colour and music; the difficulty he often had in getting funding for his films in Japan; his love of history and the lessons that he has offered to each new generation.

For more information, go to the offical website.

Sky Colour Flower Colour (空色花色, 2005)

2009-08-07T20:51:00.006+01:00

This short puppet / mixed media animation by Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰) features the female character from Indigo Road (藍の路, 2006), the third film in his Michi (Road) Series. A key theme in each of the first three films of the series is loss: the death of a child (Scarlet Road), the death of a dog and the moving away of a childhood friend (White Road), and the dissolution of a relationship (Indigo Road).

Although there is no explicit suggestion in the title Sora Iro Hana Iro (Sky Colour Flower Colour) that this film belongs to the Road Series, fans of Murata’s puppet animation will spot the connection immediately. The woman, with her short black hair, white shirt, and expressive eyes is unmistakably the same puppet used in Indigo Road. The piano music that opens the film is also very similar to the piano themes in the Road films whose main protagonist is a pianist. Both Sakamaki Fumikazu (composer for Scarlet Road and White Road) and Tatsuhide Tado (composer for Indigo Road and Lemon Road) are credited alongside Murata himself for the music in Sora Iro Hana Iro.

The film opens on a train platform set against a bright white background with the woman sitting on the bench changing the film in her camera. She looks up to see an adult dog at the edge of the platform looking at her. Both the white background and the dog suggest the film White Road. The dog is a similar size to the adult dog in white road but has different coloring.

Towards the end of the first scene, the woman and dog stand together watching an indigo, computer animated butterfly as it passes through the station and flies into the fields. This again is a reference to Indigo Road, in which the man finds a broken butterfly on the ground after the woman has left him – a butterfly which was alive in flashback scenes.

The butterfly, a symbol of spiritual transformation that appears often in Japanese animation, links the opening scene to the following scene in which the woman and dog stand together in a lush green Japanese forest. I say Japanese forest, because my husband (a keen birder who has spent many years in Japan) recognized the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul) on the soundtrack – a very common bird native to Japan. The locations of the Road Series are unclear and likely purely an imaginary realm inspired by Murata’s own travels and aesthetic interests. Indigo Road looks like it’s set in a central European town, while Lemon Road could be set in rural Arizona. Murata has a love of old technologies, such as TVs and radios, and his puppet sets look like a slightly worn version of the 1950s.

The woman and the dog wander the forest side-by-side, always facing now in the same direction, like the elderly couple in Ozu’s Tokyo Story and the woman pauses occasionally to take photos. A car, that looks like it is driven by the woman, passes through the forest at the end of this scene, but as it goes by, we see the backs of the woman and dog walking into the forest. This doubling of the main protagonist also happened with the pianist in Indigo Road when he was cleaning the toilet. At this point, it becomes apparent that with Sora Iro Hana Iro, Murata has not made a straight-forward narrative story, but rather series of subjective impressions to tell us more about the state of mind of this female protagonist, whom I shall call the photographer from now on.

The piano theme returns with the return of the butterfly, and the photographer looks up through the trees at the bright sky. Bathed in the rosy colour of the setting sun, she sits down on a bench and closes her eyes, and we are treated to an ethereal dream sequence (likely computer animation) of neon and pastel figures of children, a carousel and floating lights that at times look like glowing fireflies and at other times like stars. This sequence (particularly the children, the carousel, and the bright colours on a black background) are very similar to the themes and aesthetic of another Murata film Merry-go-Round (2008).

The dream sequence ends by repeating the shot of the road through the forest with the car returning. This time the car stops and we are granted a closer shot to confirm that the photographer and the dog are both in the car watching the backs of themselves going into the woods. On this surreal note, the film fades to black and the piano theme continues over the credit sequence.

My interpretation of this film is heavily influenced by my knowledge of Murata’s other films, and it’s hard to say how much meaning I would have read into the film if I watched the film ignorant of his other works. In a way, it was a relief to find that the woman was alive – though with the dream-like imagery of this film she may only be alive in a spiritual sense. The deaths of loved ones are made clear in Scarlet Road and White Road, but in Indigo Road it wasn’t clear if the woman had died or left. For me, Sora Iro Hana Iro, tells me that the woman, an artist in her own right and not just the housewife she seemed to be in Indigo Road, has left to go on a spiritual journey. The colours of this film, are much more optimistic that Indigo Road, and so I have the impression that her journey is a positive one of growth for her. The title suggests the red colour of the flower that is a symbol of the Road Series, and the sky changes with the scenes (white, blue, rosy, and black night sky). The butterfly suggests that she is undergoing some kind of a spiritual transformation in her life.

Although the film seems to have actually been completed the year before Indigo Road, they seem to be partner films. And, there are many connections between it and the most recent installment in the series Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008). Sora Iro Hana Iro is a truly beautiful short film which, like most Murata films opens up more questions than it answers, but is an aesthetic treat all the same. As will become clear when I review Lemon Road in the next few days, Murata seems be mixing media more and more with his films. In many ways, he seems to be taking up the mantle of Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成, 1932-1990), a puppet animator who challenged himself with each new project to try out new methods and push the boundaries of animation made by hand.

Sora Iro Hana Iro and Merry-go-Round are two of 20 shorts (including animatied company logos) available on the DVD The Dream is Crouching (夢がしゃがんでいる) and can be ordered online at tomoyasu.net (within Japan) or by contacting his company for orders outside of Japan.

Musings on Yoji Kuri & Chair (Isu, 1964)

2009-07-15T21:46:00.005+01:00

Animator and artist Yoji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928) is one of the founding fathers of Japan’s art animation scene. Along with graphic designer and ad-man Ryohei Yanagihara (柳原良平, b. 1931) and renowned book cover designer Hiroshi Manabe (真鍋博, 1932-2000) Kuri formed the Animation Sannin no Kai (Animation Group of Three) in 1960. In doing so, the three animators were following in the footsteps of the Sannin no Kai composers of the 1950s (Yasushi Akutagawa, Ikuma Dan & Toshiro Mayuzumi), who had banded together in order to stage performances of their avant-garde style of music together. The Animation Sannin no Kai put on three events in which they showcased their work in November 1960, December 1962, and April 1963. From 1964 this event was expanded into a wider Animation Festival, which during its annual run until 1971 showcased the experimental fare of such artists as Taku Furukawa, Sadao Tsukioka, Goro Sugimoto, Keiichi Tanaami, and even Osamu Tezuka. (for more on these events see anipages)

Of the original Animation Sannin no Kai, Kuri was the only artist to make a career out of animation. Throughout the 1960s, his films appeared at international festivals throughout Europe and North America. His 1962 film Clap Vocalism (Ningen Doubutsuen, 3’), with a score by Toru Takemitsu (famed for his work on Akira Kurosawa’s films), won the Special Jury Prize at Annecy and the bronze medal at Venice. Over the years he has been celebrated around the world both as an animator and as an artist, having dabbled in a wide range of arts including sculpture, painting, illustration, and flip books.

Even now in his 80s, he is still very active as an artist and contributed a humourous short film Funkorogashi to Image Forum’s omnibus collection Tokyo Loop in 2006. Funkorogashi (see image at top of page), which poked fun at dog owners who resemble their pooches and allow the dogs to poop all over town, was in Kuri’s signature style: minimalistic line drawing animation (black on a white background) with some sections coloured in with bold reds, greens, yellows, and blues. It also demonstrated that he has retained his school boy humour after all these years.

It has taken me some time to warm up to Kuri’s work as an experimental animator. Normally, I am rather fond of black humour (Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Ealing Studios’ Kind Hearts and Coronets rate as 2 of my favourite comedies of all time) and, as a big fan of Buster Keaton, I do appreciate a good visual gag. But, the often sexist representation of women in Kuri’s films more often than not leaves me feeling cold.

On a purely aesthetic level, I appreciate the truly innovative use of the soundtrack in Kuri’s films. In an interview on his Takun Films DVD (sold by Anido), Taku Furukawa (古川タク) says that he and Kuri often did all the voices themselves. . . even the female ones such as the male and female Olympic athletes comically chanting “Chu Chu Chu Chu” in Au Fou! (Satsujin Kyōjidai, 1965, 13’). He also used the skills of cutting edge avant-garde composers of the day including not only Toru Takemitsu but also Akiyama Kunihara (1929-1996), Hayashi Hikaru (b.1933), Yoko Ono (b. 1933, yes, John Lennon’s wife), and also Ono’s first husband, the brilliant composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933). The soundtracks interact in fascinating and unexpected ways with the animation.

The film that brought me to a greater appreciation of Yoji Kuri as an experimental animator was Chair (Isu/ 椅子, 1964). My first thought upon seeing this film was that it must have been at least in part inspired by Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra’s stop motion film A Chairy Tale (1957). McLaren’s films were brought to Japan in the late 1950s and as Kuri had been attending international festivals throughout the early 1960s, I would be surprised if he had not seen the film.

The premise of Chair is this: Kuri asked a number of people from a wide variety of walks of life to sit on a chair for 15 minutes in front of his single camera set-up. In the opening title card he asks the spectator to imagine what they would do with the time and says that the film is about the unease that modern people feel when they don’t have anything to do. The regular people (a school teacher, a young girl, a university student, a salaryman, a Buddhist priest, a cop, among many others) were paid a fee for their time, while the celebrity figures such as artist Taro Okamoto (岡本太郎), singer George Ai (アイ・ジョジ), the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (谷川俊太郎), and the aforementioned composer Ishiyangi (一柳慧) did not receive any payment for their services.

I don’t know if Kuri actually edited out frames of the film by hand or if he used a time-lapse camera technique of shooting a frame every so many seconds (This is the most likely case: time-lapse as a technique does date back to the silent films of Georges Méliès and Arnold Fanck ), but the end result is that the 15 minutes are reduced to a matter of seconds. The result is mesmerising. The most impatient people are made comical by the jerky movements that result from the time-lapse effect.

I wondered when watching if all the participants were aware of the camera, because most seemed to pay it no heed at all. Some, like Kuri himself (see screencaps above) who is the last subject before the camera, clearly did know and probably plan what he would do. Many of the subjects are very patient at waiting (surprisingly one young child does the best job of doing absolutely nothing) while others fidget and move about. Some seem to have come prepared with things to occupy themselves with, while others only have the chair to interact with. The junior high school teacher inexplicably takes off his clothes down almost to his skivvies then gets dressed again.

This kind of film is, in my opinion, experimental film at its best: when an everyday situation is turned made extraordinary and the spectator has to re-evaluate something that they take for granted. Although the film is over 40 years old now, it still seems very contemporary. Some would say that people find waiting even more difficult now than at any time before because the young generation with their keitais (mobile phones) and iphones don’t know how to ‘do nothing’. It would be interesting to do this same experiment with today’s generation. Would all the subjects just text message their time away? To answer the question in the title card “What would you do?” I just thought about what I do in waiting rooms or on trains: I always have a book with me so I would be reading and crossing and re-crossing my legs.

What would YOU do with your 15 minutes?

Noriaki Tsuchimoto: The Life of a Documentary Filmmaker

2009-07-06T13:02:00.004+01:00

June 24th of this year marked the first anniversary of the death of leading documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto (土本典昭, 1928-2008) . Tsuchimoto’s career was marked by a willingness to take risks with politically sensitive causes. He was best known for his series of films examining the impact of Minamata disease: the notorious mercury poisoning scandal that rocked post-war Japan.

Born in Gifu prefecture in 1928 but raised in Tokyo, Tsuchimoto joined the Japanese Communist Party while studying at Waseda University in 1946. He began working at Iwanami Film Studios in 1956 where he learnt filmmaking and got to know other documentary filmmakers such as Kazuo Kuroki and Shinsuke Ogawa. His career was shaped in part by the cinematographer Seiji Yoshino who served on the board at Iwanami. Initially, Tsuchimoto worked on promotional films, but then made his first foray as a director with his film Aru Kikanjoshi (An Engineer’s Assistant, 1963). Important works in his career included Chua Swee-Lin (Exchange Student, 1965) about the prejudice felt by a Malaysian-Chinese student at a Japanese university, Paruchizan Zenshi (Prehistory of the Partisans, 1969) about student extremists, Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai (Minamata: The Victims and Their World, 1972), and Umi-tori shimokita hanto hamasekine (Stolen Sea: Shimokita Peninsula, 1984) about a traditional community threatened by commercial interests.

In 1989, Tsuchimoto went outside of Japan to make the film Afghan Spring (1989) in collaboration with Hiroko Kumagai and the Afghan filmmaker Abdul Latif. This film looked at society and politics in Afghanistan as the Soviets were withdrawing from the region. The film has become an invaluable artifact of a culture and community later destroyed by the Taliban.

In his later years, Tsuchimoto devoted much of his time to writing and political activism. He continued to bring awareness to the victims of Minamata with a 1996 exhibition called Minamata-Tokyo which gathered over a thousand photographed of the suffering victims of this dreadful disease. Tsuchimoto’s works shocked audiences with their subject matter and his compassion for the people he profiled was self-evident.

A documentary about his career entitled Cinema is About Documenting Lives (映画は生きものの記録である土本典昭の仕事) was produced by Toshi Fujiwara in 2007. Here is the trailer:

The National Film Center’s exhibition includes photographs and mementos owned by his family, friends, and peers. A documentary on his life will be screened in the small auditorium. Throughout the summer Tsuchimoto’s films will be screened at NFC, and there will also be three events with guest speakers discussing his life and career. The exhibition opened on June 30th and will run until the 30th of August. For more information, visit the NFC's website.

Events:

Date: Saturday, July 11th
Guests: Motoko Tsuchimoto (Noriaki Tsuchimoto's wife), Kenji Ishizaka (film scholar)

Date: Saturday, August 1st
Guests: Hideyuki Nakamura (Professor, Faculty of Psychology, Rikkyo University)

Date: Saturday, August 22nd
Guest: Ryutaro Takagi (Film producer, former President of Seirinsha)

Anime Alice in Wonderland

2009-07-03T12:35:00.005+01:00

There’s a lot of hype in the blogosphere at the moment over Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (see recently leaked images) despite the fact that the film won’t be released until spring 2010. It got me thinking about the prevalence of Alice in Wonderland-type themes in Japanese animation.

The first one that comes to mind is the classic anime series Alice in Wonderland (ふしぎの国のアリス/Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu, 1983-1984) directed by Shigeo Koshi and Taku Sugiyama. The series was a German-Japanese co-production involving Nippon Animation which aired on in Japan on the NHK and in West Germany on ZDF. Nippon Animation (formerly Zuiyo Eizo) has a long history of producing classics from world children’s literature. They were the studio responsible for the World Masterpiece Theatre (世界名作劇場/ Sekai Meisaku Gekijō) anime series, which ran from 1969 to 1997. It’s a beautifully animated little series. I don’t know if it has ever shown on TV in English – I would imagine that there might be copyright problems with Disney - but it’s widely available on DVD here in Germany and repeats were shown on the children’s broadcaster KiKa earlier this year.

The popular series InuYasha (戦国御伽草子犬夜叉, 1996-2008) has an Alice in Wonderland theme. It follows the adventures of a young girl who is drawn into a fantasy world when she falls down an old well. Viz, the company who translated the series into English, gave nods to the influence of Lewis Carroll in their translations of some of the titles. For example, of the third episode in the first series as "Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again." (骨喰いの井戸からただいまっ!) The second movie was called The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass (映画犬夜叉　鏡の中の夢幻城, 2002). The use of the archaic term ‘looking glass’ instead of ‘mirror’ as a translation for ‘kagami’ (鏡) makes the Lewis Carroll reference clear.

The Clamp manga Miyuki-chan in Wonderland (不思議の国の美幸ちゃん) puts an erotic, lesbian spin on the Lewis Carroll tale. It was adapted into a 30-minute OVA anime by Kiyoko Sayama in 1995. This anime was not really my cup of tea, but its fansub is pretty popular viewing on youtube. The screenshot above features a female embodiment of the Cheshire cat seducing Miyuki-chan.

Ouran High School Host Club (桜蘭高校ホスト部) takes on Alice in episode 13. Entitled "Haruhi in Wonderland"(不思議の国のハルヒ), the episode features Haruhi having a fantastical Alice in Wonderland dream about the day of her admission into Ouran High School.

Nagisa Miyazaki’s adaptation of the Kaishaku Kagihime Monogatari Eikyū Alice Rondo manga (鍵姫物語永久アリス輪舞曲, 2006) was also inspired by the Alice in Wonderland story.

My favourite, however, is Atsuko Ishizuka’s contribution to the NHK’s Minna no Uta series: Tsuki no Waltz (Waltz of the Moon, 2004). After making a big splash with her independently produced animation shorts, Madhouse snapped Ishizuka up as an in-house animator. However, the studio was kind enough to let Ishizuka do one short animation for the NHK. Tsuki no Waltz is easily in my top ten Minna no Uta animations of all time because the dream-like animation is just stunning. It fits with the romantic Mio Isayama song perfectly, and each frame of the animation could be printed, framed, and hung on the wall as art. You can check out the video here.

Can anyone think of one that I've missed?

Shiho Hirayama (平山志保)

2009-07-01T08:00:00.005+01:00

The week always brightens considerably upon the discovery of an exciting young animation talent. This week, I stumbled upon the work of Shiho Hirayama (平山志保). Her minimalistic style and sense of humour (epitomized in the cute little animation of herself at work in the About Me section of her website – see screenshot above) are very appealing.

Born in 1979 in Saitama Prefecture, Hirayama has been working since 2006 as a freelance animator and illustrator. She uses computer animation (Flash, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Premiere) to create simple (in the sense of uncluttered) line drawing-style animations with a creative spirit reminiscent of early animators.

Hirayama’s recent short animation, Hiragana-gao (Hiragana Face), reminded me of Norman McLaren’s V for Victory (1941, 2’). Just as McLaren’s propaganda film to sell war bonds (watch it on the NFB site) features the metamorphosis of the letter V, Hirayama does the same thing with hiragana (the cursive Japanese syllabary). The symbol む(mu), for example transforms into this face:

And the symbolふ (fu) transforms into this face© Shiho Hirayama

I am hoping that this film is a work in progress, because if she were to lengthen it a little bit and add music, it could be a truly wonderful film.

The extent of Hirayama’s talent can be seen in her 2008 film swimming, which won her a Special Prize at the 8th Laputa International Animation Festival. It also received a special mention at the 12th Japan Media Arts Festival. The short animation evokes all the awkwardness of a school swimming class. A chubby young boy, steps up reluctantly for his turn, after watching the sporty prowess of his peers. After clumsily jumping into the pool, however, his imagination turns the negative experience into a positive one. A beautifully animated little film. The changing of perspective (above water to underwater; variety of camera distances) is expertly handled and makes the film a joy to watch from beginning to end.

To see Hirayama’s films for herself visit her website. All three films can be viewed in full there.

Filmography

2006 まる (Maru, 25”)
2008 swimming (4’17”)
2009 ひらがな顔 (Hiragana Face, 1’30”)

Tetsuo Nagata, cinematographer

2009-06-28T13:49:00.005+01:00

Japanese cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata (永田鉄男) has garnered a high profile recently due to the international success of Olivier Dahan’s biopic of Edith Piaf (La vie en rose/ La môme, 2007) starring Oscar award winning actress Marion Cotillard. Nagata won his second César (the French equivalent of the Oscars) for best director of photography for La môme. His first César had been for La chambre des officiers (François Dupeyron, 2002). In 2007, Variety named him one of their ten best cinematographers of the year.

Born in Nagano 1952, Nagata moved to Tokyo in 1970 where he indulged in his passion for cinema. He was a particular fan of the films of Pier Paolo Passolini and Jean-Luc Godard. His passion for the Nouvelle Vague led to him starting a French cinema club in Tokyo.

In 1972, Nagata travelled to France where he studied at the Université de Paris VIII. Returning to Japan in 1975, he had the opportity to work as an assitant cameraman for Hiroshi Segawa 瀬川浩. Segawa is most renowned for his cinematography on the Hiroshi Teshigahara’s (勅使河原宏, 1927-2001) adaptation Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna/砂の女, 1964) which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar.

On his website, Nagata claims to have worked at both Toei and Toho during his years as an assisant cameraman. In an interview in inCamera in October 2008, he mentions having worked on science fiction films in the early part of his career; an experience which he contrasted with his most recent work on the science fiction film Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009). Splice is due out this fall and stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley.

Nagata returned to France in the 1980s and since his debut as a director of photographer in Michel Thibaut’s Faut pas rêver (1992), he has built an impressive career for himself as a cinematographer of feature films, music videos and commercials. He has worked twice with directors François Dupeyron (France), Jan Kounen (Netherlands), and Vincenzo Natali (Canada).

As a director of photographer, Nagata has produced both realistic as well as highly stylized work. He seems to have a particular fondness for sharply defined colours and deep blacks. The colour pallette in La vie en rose is particularly dark with greys and blues pedominating the chidhood sequences and warm colours saved for the period of her discovery on the streets of Pigalle. The scenes of Piaf performing onstage have a sepia quality about the light that shines upon her ravaged face. Although I was a bit disappointed in the script for La vie en rose (I don’t think that it truly captures the complexity of her life or the intensity of her charisma), the cinematography combined with Marion Cotillard’s performance certainly resonate long after one has seen the film. The most impressive sequence in the film is the steadicam sequence when Piaf discovers her lover has died in a plane crash.

Nagata’s only Japanese film as director of photographer thus far is Takahashi Minamoto’s 2005 romantic drama Daiteiden no yoru ni (Until the Lights Come Back) released domestically in Japan to fairly upbeat reviews. He is currently shooting Hisako Matsui’s (松井久子) biopic of the life of Léonie Gilmour: the American editor who had an affair with the writer Yone Noguchi (aka Yonejiro Noguch (i野口米次郎) and was the mother of the renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi (野口勇) and the modern dancer Ailes Gilmour. The film will star Emily Mortimer and Shidō Nakamura　II (二代目中村獅童).

I am also really excited by the upcoming release of Nagata’s first film with one of my favourite French directors, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amélie). Tetsuo Nagata’s penchant for deeply contrasting colours will work very well with Jeunet’s surrealistic aesthetic.

To get an idea about Tetsuo Nagata’s often dark aesthetic, check out the images and trailers he has assembled on his impressive offical website (available in English and French).

Filmography

1992 Faut pas rêver (Michel Thibaut)
1996 Le dernier chaperon rouge (赤ずきん, Jan Kounen)
1999 C’est quoi la vie? (うつくしい人生, François Dupeyron)
2000 Stand-by (Roch Stéphanik)
2001 La chambre des officiers (将校たちの部屋, François Dupeyron)
2002 Riders (スティール, Gérard Pirès)
2003 Laisse tes mains sur mes hanches (夢の中に君がいる, Chantal Lauby)
2004 Blueberry (aka Renegade, Jan Kounen)
2004 Narco (ナルコ, Tristan Aurouet/Gilles Lellouche)
2005 Animal (Roselyne Bosch)
2005 Daiteiden no yoru ni (大停電の夜に, Takashi Minamoto)
2006 Paris, je t’aime (パリ、ジュテーム: マドレーヌ界隈(8区)
segment: 'Quartier de la Madeleine' directed by Vincenzo Natali
2007 La môme (エディット・ピアフ〜愛の讃歌〜, Olivier Dahan)
2009 Splice (Vincenzo Natali, due to be released this autumn)
2009 Micmacs à tire-larigot (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, due to be released in October)
2010 Léonie (Hisako Matsui, in production)

Walking in my Mind

2009-06-25T13:06:00.005+01:00

The Hayward Gallery in central London is currently hosting an exhibition of artists whose work “explores the inner working of the artist's imagination through dramatic, large-scale installation art.”

Walking in My Mind features the work of ten international artists. It uses both indoor and outdoor spaces, with each sculptured space representing the individual mindscape of a different artist. One important theme is the blurring of boundaries between inner and outer space.

The exhibition has been co-curated by Mami Kataoka who works as a senior curator at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Kataoka’s presence has ensured that three exciting Japanese artists: Yayoi Kusama, Yoshimoto Nara, and Chiharu Shiota.

Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生, b.1929)

The oldest artist in the exhibition and probably the most internationally recognized of the ten. Kusama’s work demonstrates her obsession with pattern (particularly polka dots), repetition, and accumulation. Her work has been associated with surrealism, l’art brut, and abstract expressionism. Kusama suffered severe trauma as a child and as an adult has struggled with mental health issues. These struggles are an inextricable part of her art, which to me has always demonstrated how in the souls of even the most troubled one can find things of indescribable beauty. Kusama’s work has been used in the poster art for the event (see above).

Yoshimoto Nara (奈良美智, b. 1959)

As an artist, Nara came to international recognition as a part of the 1990s J-pop art movement. Like Kusama, Nara has a minimalist aesthetic, but underneath his seemingly harmless subject matter (cute children and animals drawn or sculpted in a manga-influenced manner) lies some disturbing elements. For example, often the children have nasty expressions on their faces. At other times, there is something disturbing lurking somewhere else in the painting, drawing, or sculpture. Despite the sometimes spooky nature of his art, there is something quite magnetic about it that captures one’s attention.

Chiharu Shiota (塩田千春, b. 1972)

This young Kansai artist has a nightmarish element to her art which reminds me of the work of Fuyuko Matsui (松井冬子). Although the two women are working in two very different artistic aesthetics (Nihonga vs. modern art), both of their work succeeds in being both spellbinding and giving me a chill up my spine with its deeply macabre nature. Themes in Shiota’s work include entanglement, binding, and entrapment. I particularly enjoy the architectural elements to her installation work. Shiota has an extensive gallery of photographs of her work on her official website.

For more about this exhibit, see the Guardian’s video review of the event, or go to the Hayward’s website.

Japanese women behind the scenes

2009-06-21T11:58:00.008+01:00

At Nippon Connection in April a podium discussion was held about the current status of women in Japanese cinema. The reason for this was the sudden jump in numbers of films being presented at the festival with women at the helm as directors. Guests at the festival included Yuki Tanada with her film Ain’t No Tomorrows (俺たちに明日はないッス, 2008), animator Naomi Nagata (Animation Soup), Musabi students Ayako Shinohara (Baby Complex) and Mariko Tanji (Drown Breath) as well as producers Kanako Yoneyama, Hiroko Namba and Yukie Kito. Screenings were also held for three films from Momo Matsuri (Peach Film Festival): emerger (Aki Sato, 2008), Bunny in Hovel (月夜のバニー, Mayumi Yabe, 2009), and Csikospos (クシコスポスト, Yumiko Beppu, 2009). (The Peaches films will be screening in Toronto in August)

The podium discussion was moderated by Dr. Roland Domenig of the University of Vienna. Yukie Kito was representing women producers having presented Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata at the festival. Mayumi Yabe from Peaches represented emerging women directors. Kayoko Nakanishi represented the promotional aspect of the film industry, and Nami Asakawa gave us the perspective from the point of view of translators and subtitlers.

I was impressed by the passion all four women had for the film industry in Japan. The general message seemed to be that while big name women directors have been scarce in Japan (and I might add I most countries around the world), women have come to dominate behind the scenes. Kito and Nakanishi felt that there were more women than men working as producers and promoters in Japan. Kito’s rationale for this was the fact that women make up more than 70% of film audiences. This would also explain why so many romantic comedies and dramas are produced every year in Japan. Kito also pointed out the growing number of women cinematographers, such as Akiko Ashizawa (芦澤明子, b.1951) who has become a favourite with Kiyoshi Kurosawa working on Tokyo Sonata, Sakebi (2006) and Loft (2005). Ashikawa was interviewed for the documentary Women Behind the Camera (Alexis Krasilovsky, 2007).

Since the podium discussion, I have thought a lot about women behind the scenes, so I thought that for my final contribution to the Blogathon, I would mention a number of such women that deserve more credit for the amazing body of work they have contributed to Japanese cinema history.

Kinuyo Tanaka (pictured above with Bette Davis)

The first Japanese woman to work as a director was the actress Kinuyo Tanaka (田中絹代, 1909-1977). This luminous star was a favourite of Kenji Mizoguchi (she appeared in 15 of his films!!) and appeared in over a hundred films in the course of her career. Largely due to her star status, Tanaka was given the opportunity to direct starting with Love Letter (Koibumi) in 1953. She went on to direct five more films ending with Onna bakari n yoru in 1961. Ozu, who had directed Tanaka in Equinox Flower, co-wrote her 1955 film Tsuki wa noborinu. I do hope that someone has the foresight to put her work on DVD so that it becomes more widely available outside of Cinematheque and Japan Foundation screenings.

Teruyo Nogami

Nogami (野上照代　b. 1927) was a colleague and friend of Akira Kurosawa for almost 50 years. She started out as script girl (continuity) on Rashomon (1950). By the end of his career, she had become a vital part of the team that he gathered around him for every film production. Since Kurosawa’s death in 1998, Nogami has played an important part in the shaping of Kurosawa’s legacy. In her memoir, Waiting on the Weather, she shares anecdotes about his working methods, his relationship within the Japanese filmmaking community, and his encounters over the years with great directors from around the world.

Natto Wada

Most fans of Japanese cinema know the films of Kon Ichikawa (市川崑, 1915-2008) but fewer people have heard of wife Natto Wada (和田夏十born Yumiko Mogi 茂木由美子, 1920-1983). The two met while working at Toho. At the time, Wada, who had a university degree in English literature, was working as a translator. After the couple married, Wada collaborated with her husband on the screenplays for many of 34 as his films (mainly adaptations, but some original screenplays). Wada retired from screenwriting after Tokyo Olympiad (1965) but is said to have continued to act as her husband’s closest advisor. She sadly died much too young of breast cancer in 1983.

Animation has been a place where women have played important roles on animation teams, often working as inbetweeners and storyboard artists. Benjamin Ettinger, who seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge about Japanese animators, wrote a highly informative article on the Women Behind Ghibli on his blog Anipages back in 2007. The article discusses the animation of Akiko Futaki, Atsuko Tanaka, Masako Shinohara, and Megumi Kagawa.

Ettinger also wrote a great piece about Kazuko Nakamura and Reiko Okuyama, two important female pioneers in Japanese animation
Read:
Two pioneer women animators
Reiko Okuyama passes away

There have also been a number of great husband-wife partnerships in the world of Japanese animation.:

Renzō & Sayoko Kinoshita (木下蓮三+木下小夜子), made wonderful short films together for over 20 years and founded the Hiroshima International Animation Festical. Read more about them here.

Uruma Delvi (うるまでるび) is the pseudonym of a husband and wife team who specializes in Flash animation. Their animated short, Bottom-Biting Bug, was a cult hit a couple of years ago. Read more about them here. Or check out their website here.

Shinzo & Yukie Yuki (行信三+ゆきゆきえ) have worked at Toei as art directors and background artists for years. Most recently, they worked on the background art for Cassern Sins. Read about it at anipages.

Writing this post made me think of Keiko McDonald and what a tragedy it was that she passed away last September. When she died she was working on a book about Japanese Women Filmmakers. I do hope that someone picks up the torch and finishes her book because much, much more needs to be written about the history of Japanese Women and Cinema.

Tricky Women 2010: Call for Film Submissions

2009-06-19T11:54:00.005+01:00

The Tricky Women Animation Festival has just announced that the 2010 festival will take place in Vienna 4th - 8th March, 2010. Many Japanese animators have screened films at this festival. Most notably, Maya Yonesho, who has worked as an artist-in-residence at Tricky Women. At this year's festival, the director of the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, Sayoko Kinoshita, put together a selection of contemporary animation by Japanese women (see programme here). It looks like the festival falls on my daughter's birthday again next year, but I would love to attend at least some of it if I can.

This is a great opportunity for women animators to promote their work and to network with other artists. The festival also produces DVDs of the best films from each year.

Some excerpts from the e-mail the festival sent out:

Tricky Women is the first and only festival of animated film that is dedicated exclusively to animation by women. Ø The festival offers an international competition of animated short films realised by female artists and produced in 2008 or 2009.

The deadline for applications for the preliminary selection is 30th October, 2009.

Awards:

Tricky Women Award of the City of Vienna worth 4,000 Euro
Synchro Film & Video Material Prize worth 1,500 Euro
Hubert Sielecki Award worth 500 Euro (for Austrian animation)
Audience Award

Tricky Women Festival
Museumsplatz 1
quartier21 / MQ
1070 Wien

fon: +43 1 990 46 63
fax: +43 1 990 46 64

The entry form and more details about the festival are available on the Tricky Women website.

My Favourite Japanese Art Animators

2009-06-18T20:25:00.013+01:00

For those of you who don’t know already, since discovering an art exhibit by Tomoyasu Murata in on Hongo Dori in 2006 (the photo above is of my kids watching the installation in the front display window) I have developed a huge passion for Japanese Art Animation. My love of avant-garde and experimental animation in general dates back to my discovery of Norman McLaren’s work at the central library in my hometown when I was a teenager (hurray for the NFB! You can watch some of his films online on their website). There is a kind of circularity in this because it was a screening of McLaren’s work in Japan in the 1950s that brought the term “animation” into the Japanese vocabulary and inspired a generation of innovative animators in Japan. Before that, animated films were referred to as “manga eiga” (literally: cartoon movies).

It is hard for me to whittle down a list of “favourites” because there are so many different styles of art animation and it’s hard to judge one against the other. What follows are a selection of artists whose work excites and inspires me.

Animators who got their start in the 1960s & 1970s:

Taku Furukawa (古川タク, b. 1941)

He first worked under Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928), then founded his own studio in 1970. Furukawa’s films range from his tribute to the 19th century optical amusement, the Phenakistoscope, to a humorous modern revision of Ozu’s Tokyo Story called Jyōkyō Monogatari (1999). Furukawa mentors young artists as a lecturer and vice-president of the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. He holds regularly exhibitions of his art at galleries as well as publishing manga and picture books for children. Would live to find a DVD of his (& his contemporaries) Minna no Uta work.

Kihachiro Kawamoto (川本喜八郎, b. 1925)

Kawamoto’s puppet animation brings together European puppet animation (he studied under Jiri Trnka in the 1960s) with bunraku traditions (Japanese puppet theatre). He is best known in Japan for the elaborate television puppet dramas he did in the 1980s and best known outside of Japan for his short film work. Kawamoto inherited the presidency of the Japan Animation Association from Osamu Tezuka and has been very active in the past decade organizing the Winter Days (2003) project as well as his spectacular feature film Book of the Dead.

Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita (木下蓮三/ 木下小夜子)

Renzō Kinoshita’s films probe questions about what it means to be Japanese and how Japan is seen from the outside world. His 1979 anti-war film Pica-don depicts the Hiroshima bombing from the perspective of the ordinary citizens going about their everyday life. His wife Sayoko collaborated on his films as producer, scriptwriter and animator. Together they founded the Hiroshima International Film Festival which has become an important place for Japanese animators to have their work shown and to see work by artists from abroad. Sayoko has continued this work after Renzo passed away in 1997.

Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成, 1932-1990)

Influenced by Czech puppet animation, Okamoto became a pioneer in Japanese puppet animation. An award-winning filmmaker, he is famous for using a different medium for each of his films including relief puppets, cut-outs, cel animation, and more. Read more about this amazing artist at Anipages.

The younger generation:

Tomoyasu Murata　(村田朋泰, b. 1974)

An award-winning Tokyo-based artist, Murata produces a wide variety of art including stop-motion animation, cel animation, installations, manga, photography and paintings.

Meike Seike　(清家美佳, b. 1975)

A Kansai-based animator who has a distinctive visual style achieved by scanning real objects (leaves, photographs) and colouring and animating them on the computer. Her films are deeply allusive and concern a wide range of feminist themes. Her work featured on the Image Forum Thinking and Drawing program.

Tabaimo (束芋, b. 1975)

Internationally renowned artist Tabaimo incorporates elements of animation into her installations, which often include collaborations with dancers and other performance artists.

Naoyuki Tsuji (辻直之, b.1972)

Instantly recognizable for his pencil and charcoal cel animation aesthetic, Tsuji is also known for his illustrations, short manga and outdoor installations. Since 1999, Tsuji and Takumi Terakami have hosted a guerilla art exhibition called Scrap Festival which features sculptures and installations throughout the city of Yokohama.

Atsushi Wada (和田淳, b. 1980)

Wada has a unique style of drawing human figures that distinguishes him from other animators. His rather conservative looking male protagonists are put in unusual circumstances. Meaning is made in these thought-provoking films through subtleties of character movement and symbolism that are often absurd in nature.

Kōji Yamamura (山村浩二, b. 1964)

Perhaps the best known art animator of his generation, Yamamura’s films have received numerous awards world-wide. He has dabbled with various styles of animation, but is best known for his distinctive multi-planed aesthetic. His films range from accessible themes for children to the surreal. His best film to date would have to be Kafuka Inaka Isha.

Maya Yoneshō (米正万也, 1965)

Influenced by the work of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, and Taku Furukawa, Yonesho spends part of each year in Europe and is known for used found objects in her animation. Here's an article I wrote about her after exchanging e-mails with her last year.

Takashi Ishida (石田尚志, b. 1972)

An active artist on the international art scene, Ishida makes animated films, video installations, and collaborative art. His art explores the limits of the screen and questions of space, form, and perspective. One of my favourite works by him is Umi no Eiga.

Mami Kosemura (小瀬村真美, b. 1975)

Both a scholar and an artist, Kosemura’s “moving paintings” come out of both Nihonga and Yōga (Western art) traditions. The subtlety of movement in her work raises interesting questions about the relationship between art and time.

I hope that you will check out some of the websites of this artists because their work is truly amazing! Other links in this entry will lead you to previous articles I have written about the artsits.

TOMORROW'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE BLOGOTHON: WOMEN BEHIND THE SCENES

My Favourite Animators (Mainstream)

2009-06-18T12:25:00.007+01:00

Isao Takahata (高畑勲, b. 1935)

Takahata’s films have the power to move audiences in unexpected ways. Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is, along with Imamura’s Black Rain (1989) and the Kinoshitas’ film Pica-don (1979), one of the most powerful anti-war films that I have ever seen. On the other end of the spectrum, I have rarely laughed as much during a feature length animated film as I did while watching My Neighbours the Yamadas (1999). I also love Pom Poko, not to mention his work on television series in the 1970s (Anne of Green Gables and Heidi!).

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿, b. 1941)

Little can be said about Miyazaki that has not already been said. I love all his films. If pushed to pick a favourite, I would have to say Tonari no Totoro (1988). Miyazaki’s young female protagonists stand head and shoulders above the female characters that inhabit most anime. They are strong and heroic.

Atsuko Ishizuka (いしづかあつこ, b. 1981)

Tsuki no Waltz (2004) surely rates as one of the best Minna no Uta animations of all time, and demonstrates why Madhouse snapped Ishizuka up so quickly after her graduation from art college. I have enjoyed her work in Nana (2006-7) and Mōryō no Hako (2008), but I am really itching for Madhouse to give her the opportunity to direct her own feature. Or to give her some time to do short animation on the side. Sigh, one can always dream.

Rintaro (りんたろう, b. 1941)

Love love love LOVE Galaxy Express 999 and Metropolis. Although I am not the biggest fan of 3DCG, with Rintaro at the helm I am quite excited about seeing Yona Yona Penguin when it finally comes out. The trailer looks fantastic!

Satoshi Kon (今敏, b. 1963)

Kon is from a place dear to my heart, Kushiro in Hokkaido. He seems unafraid to try new things and to push the boundaries of where animated features have gone in the past. He can be surreal, like in Paprika (2006), but he can also create a heart-wrenching drama with wide appeal like Tokyo Godfathers (2003).

Osamu Kobayashi (小林治, 1945)

Kobayashi is an innovator. I particularly enjoy his method of montaging photos with mainstream style anime. His use of colour is also a real treat to watch. Although he may have had some differences of aesthetic opinion with manga-ka Ai Yazawa, I love what he did with Paradise Kiss (2005), though I wish they’d stretched it 24 episodes instead of squishing the story into 12 episodes. Kobayashi’s work on Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora (Someday’s Dreamers, 2008) is also excellent.

Coming Tomorrow: MY FAVOURITE ART ANIMATORS (for a short list see the links of filmmaking artists in my sidebar)

My Favourite Japanese Directors

2009-06-17T21:41:00.005+01:00

Following on Nippon Cinema's and Wildgrounds' contributions to the Japanese Cinema Blogathon (June 15th – 21st), I thought I’d also make a list of some of my favourite directors. I say ‘some’ because I like a wide range of directors and making lists is not so easy for me. This list will comprise non-animators and I will do a list of my favourite animators in a separate entry.

So here it goes, in the order in which they popped into my head:

Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎, 1903-1963)

I love Ozu’s films for the delicate way in which he teases out the complexities of relationships within families and communities. I sigh whenever I here someone call him “the most Japanese of all Japanese directors” or old-fashioned because I think that his themes are universal and can be understood across cultures and generations. He is one of a very few directors where one could capture a still of any shot in any of his film and immediately identify it as an Ozu film by the framing and set design.

Nagisa Oshima (大島渚, b. 1932)

Oshima’s films can be very challenging to watch because the situations are often disturbing or upsetting. I admire Oshima for his uncompromising efforts to confront his audiences with difficult truths about the society in which they live. My favourite Oshima film is Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence for the way that it reveals the parallels between two colonialist empires (Britain and Japan) underneath the superficial differences that most people see.

Shohei Imamura (今村昌平1926-2006)

The emotional depth and visual beauty of Imamura’s films never ceases to amaze me. The most powerful film of his that I have seen is Black Rain (黒い雨, 1989) about the bombing of Hiroshima.

Kon Ichikawa (市川崑, 1915-2008)

While many may find his films depressing or bleak, it is truly remarkable what a wide variety of films Ichikawa made during his long career. Tokyo Olympiad ranks in my books as the best sports documentary of all time. I have a double reason for liking this film as my Aunt Marian has a brief cameo in the film. During a sequence about heartbreak at the Olympics, she can be seen being carried off the track in a stretcher after taking her infamous tumble during the hurdles. When I asked her about it, she said that her strongest memory of the Tokyo Olympics was of the kind generosity of the Japanese, who felt so bad for the Canadian girl who knocked herself unconscious when she tripped on the hurdles that they filled her hospital room with gifts.

Akira Kurosawa (黒沢明, 1910-1998)

Who doesn’t like Kurosawa? It goes without saying that the man was a genius. My favourite Kurosawa film is Ikiru (生きる, 1952).

And of the young generation filmmakers, my faves are:

Naomi Kawase (河瀨直美, b. 1969)

Her beautiful, contemplative films are a sheer pleasure to watch. I wish that I lived closer to Cannes so that I could see her films the moment they debut in Europe.

Nobuhiro Yamashita (山下敦弘, b. 1976)
There are very few directors that make excellent films about the lives of children and teenagers without falling into the traps of making the kids stereotypes, superficial or too grown up. Abbas Kiarostami is one such director, and Yamashita is another. Linda Linda Linda (2005) and A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007) are two of the most delightful films about young people that I have seen in the past five year.

Koki Mitani (三谷幸喜, b. 1961)

I think I like Mitani’s films because I also love old Hollywood films, and like a Hollywood film from the golden age, Mitani’s films are invariably big production numbers, like Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997) and The Uchōten Hotel (2006). His films are often choreographed (both cast and camera) like a Busby Berkley movie and full of laughs.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢清, b. 1955)

I am not normally a fan of the J-horror genre (or any horror genre for that matter), but I find Kurosawa’s films riveting. The reasons for this are not just his masterful cinematographic techniques, but also his repeated use of the actor Kōji Yakusho (橋本広司), on whom I have admittedly had a wee crush since I saw first him in Shall we Dance? back in 1996.

AK: Akira Kurosawa (Chris Marker, 1985)

2009-06-17T12:00:00.004+01:00

Like the film Ran itself, Chris Marker’s documentary, which he shot during the on location production of Kurosawa’s 1985 epic, is a kind of an intellectual exercise. In the process of looking up information about the making of this documentary, I discovered that fans of Kurosawa had blasted Chris Marker’s directorial efforts on the comments pages of imdb. One person suggests that it’s an example of “how to make a very good film out of somebody else’s masterpiece” while another calls it a “making of at its worst.” I paid these comments little heed until discovering that the New York Times review by the late Vincent Canby also blasted AK as being “singularly superficial.”

Imdb users can be excused for not “getting” AK, I think, because the film is currently packaged as an extra on DVDs of Ran (Criterion and Universal). The film was made before the advent of DVDs and as such it is not a “making of” in its current context and could therefore disappoint viewers’ expectations. Although it may not have been devised as a DVD extra, Ran and AK share the same producers: Serge Silberman, who produced films for Jean-Pierrre Melville & Luis Buñuel among others, and Masato Hara, who is perhaps best known as the producer of Hideo Nakata’s Ring movies. Despite this, judging from the film itself I’m pretty sure that Chris Marker was given a free hand with AK, because it bears the imprint of his directorial style: a self-reflexive, poetic exploration of a topic.

Unike the imdb crowd, Vincent Canby should have known better than to dismiss Marker’s film so cynically as “not good enough”, as he at least saw the film in the context of art cinema back in 1986. He had reviewed the films of the French New Wave and American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s and had particularly championed directors like Fassbinder and Woody Allen. For its debut in New York the film showed at Film Forum and was paired with Agnès Varda’s short film Ulysse (1982), which Canby also suggested was pretentious and, “oblique” and “self-absorbed.” In Canby’s defense, he was reviewing films in a time when journalists saw a screening once, then had to rely on their notes. This could result in snap judgments and occasional errors – such as his pointing out that AK introduces seven men as the “seven samurai” who have dedicatedly worked for Kurosawa over the years. The seven actually included one woman, of course, Kurosawa’s script girl and assistant Teruyo Nogami.

For me, AK is the kind of film that improves upon repeat screenings and whose real delights are discovered by the patient and observant spectator. Chris Marker is renowned for his avoidance of conventional narrative forms, so one must approach AK with an open mind. He belongs to a generation of documentary filmmakers who rejected the ‘objective’ documentary voice in favour of a more subjective voice. In fact, I hesitate to call AK a documentary as it is much more of a poetic essay that explores the themes of Ran in relation to Kurosawa’s oeuvre. The film also pays homage to both Kurosawa’s methods as a writer and director.

The film foregrounds at the very beginning the fact that the film is a construct by using a first person narrator and opening with a shot of a television and a hand holding a tape recorder against a red backdrop. As the tape recorder plays, we hear the voice of Kurosawa talking about his methods. It is pretty clear that Marker is using this technique to show that although we will be hearing Kurosawa’s voice throughout the film, his words and images are being edited by someone else. The film returns to this red scene throughout the film to show images from Kurosawa’s past films and personal history.

Marker divides AK into eleven sections separated by title cards in Japanese, English, and French. The introductory section is followed by Battle, Patience, Faithfulness, Speed, Horses, Rain, Lacquer & Gold, Fire, Fog, and Chaos. Canby saw these sections as ploys to “upgrade his footage,” yet if you read the film as a poetic essay, then it only makes sense to divide the film up into thematic sections. All of the title cards represent not only themes within the film Ran, but themes and motifs that Marker has noticed throughout Kurosawa’s oeuvre.

The true delight of Chris Marker’s AK is in the framing of the documentary footage his crew took on location. Wonderful scenes that capture true spirit of a film shoot: the waiting, the attention to finicky details about costumes and sets, and the weather. In fact, as the title cards Patience, Rain, and Fog suggest, Chris Marker’s film could have easily had the same title as Teruyo Nogami’s collection of anecdotes about working with Kurosawa called: Waiting on the Weather. In fact, I would highly recommend reading Nogami first then watching AK second as they truly complement each other.

Some of my favourite moments in AK include the contrast of extras in historical costume framed by modern-day cars, Kurosawa patiently reining in Tatsuya Nakadai’s performance, and the wonderful image of composer Tōru Takemitsu exploring the set in the fog. There is also a loving tribute to Fumio Yanoguchi who, the narrator tells us, passed away during the editing of AK. Over an image of the great sound engineer sitting with his recording devices, Marker plays some of the sounds Yanoguchi had captured to add texture to the soundtrack of the film. Yanoguchi had worked on twelve films with Kurosawa starting with Stray Dog in 1949. He also did the sound for a couple of the Godzilla movies. They must have been a pretty tight group of friends and colleagues because the director of the Godzilla movies, Ishirō Honda, is a constant presence in AK standing behind AK and offering him advice when needed.

With AK, Chris Marker has created a poignant homage to not just Kurosawa, but to the entire team working with him on Ran. My only reservation in my praise for the film is the use of an English narrator. I know that most of Chris Markers films, such as La Jetée and Sans Soleil, were released with English narrators. I can only guess, because Chris Marker provides little information and gives few interviews, that he makes this choice for aesthetic reasons such as the subtitles detracting from the image. With AK, the narration has been written by Marker, and is delivered in the first person, suggesting that it is the filmmaker’s voice that we are hearing. I have never heard Marker interviewed, but I would imagine that his English has a French not an American accent. The narrator is also not given credit, but Vincent Camby’s review says that Robert Kramer is the voice that we hear. Kramer (1939-1999) was an American actor-director who made most of his films in France because, like Woody Allen, he had trouble finding funding in the States. While the narrator does a very capable job, I think it would have had a stronger impact if it had been the voice of the elusive Chris Marker himself.

Let me know what you think. I'd also be interested in hearing from any French readers if the French version of this film is narrated by Chris Marker himself.

Ran （乱, 1985)

2009-06-04T13:12:00.004+01:00

Western and Japanese theatrical traditions interact in an extraordinarily seamless way in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic film Ran. The film takes the basic plot and themes of Shakespeare’s King Lear and transposes it to an ancient Japanese setting. The King Lear character becomes Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai). Lear’s three daughters are transformed into three sons: Taro (Akira Terao), Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), and Saburo (Daisuke Ryu). The film also retains the character of the fool (played by Peter aka Shinnosuke Ikehata) and Kent, the loyal kinsman who his banished, becomes Tango (Masayuki Yui).

The adaptation to a Japanese setting was apparently influenced to a great extent by the life story of the 16th century daimyō Mōri Motonari. Some (Roger Ebert) also suggest that the film incorporates autobiographical elements from Kurosawa’s own life. The result is a very theatrical film that for me was more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional journey. As a spectator, one does not become as heavily invested in the plight of Hidetora as one does with Lear.

There are many reasons for this. First, it is hard to see past the horrific past war crimes of Hidetora such as the massacres of the families of his daughters-in-law, Lady Kaede and Lady Sué. Secondly, there is the inevitability of the plot ending in tragedy once you cotton onto the fact that the film is following the King Lear plot. Finally, as visually stunning and carefully composed as the film is, the staginess of the mise-en-scene keeps the spectator at an emotional distance from the subject matter. Especially if one compares the coldness of Ran to the emotional intensity of Kurosawa’s earlier films like Rashōmon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and High and Low (1963).

A good example of how the mise-en-scene creates a distant observer (and not in the Noël Burch sense) is how Kurosawa’s use of colour works both for and against the film. The colour clearly functions in a symbolic manner. Each son has a different colour in order to distinguish their fighting men in battle scenes (yellow, red, blue). Hidetora literally becomes a ghost of his former self with his white costume, hair, and skin colour when he is cast out by his two eldest sons. The focus on colour became so extreme that in Chris Marker’s documentary AK, one sees Kurosawa directing the crew to paint the grass golden for a night see that was later cut. The bright colours -- such as so-red-it’s-obviously-paint blood that splatters during the battle scenes -- become very theatrical to the point that it’s like watching a 1950s Technicolor musical.

The theatricality of the costumes and sets is emphasized by the performances, which seem heavily influenced by Noh. Lady Kaede, in particular, reminded me of the crazy, vengeful female character often found in Noh. She also reminded me of the disturbing character of Lady Wakasa in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.

I have often wondered why the distributors chose to keep the Japanese title “Ran” for this 1985 Kurosawa film. While watching Chris Marker’s documentary AK, which accompanies my German DVD as an extra (it’s also on the Criterion DVD) I realized that the answer probably lay in the multiple interpretations of the kanji 乱, all of which suit the film: chaos, excessive, reckless, rebellion, revolt, and so on. Ran is a bold, fascinating film whose imagery is not easily forgotten.

The German DVD was released by Universal and includes subtitles in German, English and Dutch. There is also a German dub and an English dub available. The latter of which really seems like a waste of money. I wonder when and why it was done. Unlike Germans, most English speakers only enjoy dubbing in spaghetti westerns. On the whole though it’s a decent transfer and worth the purchase for the Chris Marker documentary.