Tadanari Okamoto Film Works Box Set

Throughout his career as an independent animation artist Tadanari Okamoto (1932-1990) challenged himself never to do the same style of animation twice. Along with his mentor Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-1999) and his friend and colleague Kihachiro Kawamoto (b. 1925), Okamoto is considered one of the pioneers of puppet animation in Japan. Unlike Mochinaga and Kawamoto, his work is rarely shown outside of Japan. Geneon Universal's release in June 2009 of a 4-disc box set of Okamoto's complete works made his films more widely available again for the first time since the 1996 re-release of films on laserdisc. The National Film Center in Tokyo held an exhibition of artworks from his animated films (ie storyboards and the puppets and sets that he used to make his films) in 2004, but as far as I'm aware no retrospective of his works has ever been held outside of Japan. I was lucky enough to see a couple of his films at Nippon Connection in 2008 together with films by Kawamoto. .  .

Read the rest of this review at Midnight Eye.   This month's Midnight Eye also features a wonderful interview with Momoko Ando.  I am looking forward to watching Kakera at Nippon Connection!

Tadanari Okamoto Zensakuhin Shu DVD Box

Animation

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

Animation

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.2

Animation

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.3

Animation

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Karel Zeman Exhibition in Kariya City

On his blog last month, Kōji Yamamura reported that he is helping Kariya City Art Museum in Aichi Prefecture set up their exhibition Another Czech Anime Master: Karel Zeman (チェコ・アニメもうひとりの巨匠　カレル・ゼマン展). Karel Zeman (1910-1989) was an acclaimed animation and special effects pioneer and this will be the first time that the Japanese public will have a chance to view Zeman’s puppets, storyboards, and original art in person. Go to Yamamura’s blog and click on the images to see amazing photographs of some of the original puppets as he unpacks them from their shipping crates. I recognize the  doll in the third photo as the neglected toy in The Christmas Dream (Vánocní sen, 1946), a film which won for best animation at the Cannes Film Festival and catapulted Zeman into worldwide recognition. 

The work of Karel Zeman is historically significant to Japanese art animation history because his work, along with others of the Czech puppet animation school, inspired Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成, 1932-1990) to go into puppet animation. I believe that Okamoto encountered Zeman’s work while studying at Nihon University. Like Zeman, Okamoto was an innovator with the materials he used to create his animated films.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Zeman, who is particularly famous for his work combining stop motion with live actors. Yamamura seems to be planning to hold a talk and a workshop about the career of Zeman to coincide with this event. Keep an eye on his blog (Japanese only) for more information in the coming weeks. 

Earlier this week, Yamamura posted photographs of a scuba helmet used in The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958), which was an adaptation of Verne’s 1896 novel Facing the Flag (悪魔の発明).  As I won't be in Japan this spring, I do hope that Yamamura continues to post photos from this amazing exhibition.

The Karel Zeman exhibition runs from April 17th until May 30th. Screenings of Zeman’s films are also planned. Go to the announcement on Kariya City Art Museum’s website for more details and some more beautiful photographs of exhibits.

Kariya City Art Museum     

4-5 Sumiyoshi-cho,

Kariya City

Aichi 448-0852

Tel 0566-23-1636

〒４４８-０８５２　

愛知県刈谷市住吉町４丁目５番地　

ＴＥＬ.０５６６-２３-１６３６

ＦＡＸ.０５６６-２６-０５１１

bijyutsu@city.kariya.lg.jp

I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS - Spit or Swallow?

A (very true to the) real life story of Steven Russel (Jim Carrey) - a Christian, a family man, and a closet homosexual - who after a devastating car crash decides he's going to ditch the lies and be true to himself. And that means moving to Miami, becoming as queer as a $12 note, and starting a life of crime, deception and fraud to fund his exuberant "out" lifestyle.

When the conman is finally caught - he goes to prison in Texas where he meets and instantly falls in "love" with the effeminate, vulnerable Philip Morris (Ewan McGregor). The rest of the story documents the jail-breaks, cons and increasingly incredible antics that Russel employs to get close and stay close to Morris. The true story (1, 2) is faithfully represented on screen - and is so strange that it warrants the "This really happened... It really did" on-screen message in the titles.

So that's the basic plot - but what is this film really about? I think the whole experience can be summed up in four points:

1. An unflinching and uncompromising look at gay sex. You expect some boundary-pushing stuff from the directors of BAD SANTA - and I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS doesn't disappoint. If you're uncomfortable with seeing men bone, you've got a real problem here. Whole sequences revolve around homosexual fellatio. Russel's sexuality is revealed by a graphic and unexpected scene of anal intercourse. Ewan McGregor gives more head than a hooker on a Saturday night. The big black guy behind me in the cinema repeatedly told his girlfriend "I'm not comfortable with this" while squirming. The depiction of sex in this film is pretty gritty and down to earth - and very funny - and challenges the Hollywood status quo of not depicting graphic homosexuality. It's an acquired taste - don't take your Granny.
2. A parody of the "gay" scene, and the prejudice it faces. "Golf? But you're a homosexual!" says Morris to Russel as he tries to fit in in a homophobic Texan workplace. The gay stereotype is exposed as fake - Russel's obsession with being as "gay" as he can be takes him to a caricatured extreme which reflects his real character and feelings but little. Russel's wife and colleagues on the other hand comically reflect southern homophobia (and racism). "So does the gay thing and stealing thing go together?" asks Russel's evangelical Christian wife to his boyfriend. In this way both extremes are held up to ridicule. You could argue that they were easy targets though, and the attacks aren't substantial enough to form a really coherent thread.
3. A raucous comedy that shows that real life is stranger than fiction. There's no doubting this film is funny. It wasn't made to shock - rather it was made primarily to amuse. Carrey and McGregor carry off the smitten gay couple perfectly - Carrey especially amuses throughout and gives a performance that thankfully relies little on rubber-faced humour, and far more on talent and comic timing. The sheer bare-faced cheek of his antics, and the exuberant gayness of whole flick, makes it utterly entertaining from beginning to end. It's worth seeing just for a laugh.
4. A dark and tragic portrayal of a broken man. Other reviewers have interpreted I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS as a romance. Don't be fooled, there's nothing romantic about it. Russel suffers acute separation anxiety due to his adoption and later summary rejection by his birth mother. He becomes the ultimate people-pleaser - defining his sense of worth by what others think of him, unable to tell the truth or approach anything resembling intimacy. This vacuum in his sense of identity drives him to attach to models and stereotypes of what he feels he ought to be - the best Christian ever, the best husband and father ever - then the most screaming queer ever, the biggest liar ever. Progressively deadened spiritually and emotionally, he seeks some sort of connection with life and feelings through compulsive thrill seeking - addictive spending, compulsive lying. Finally, he defines himself through a love-addicted and completely dishonest attachment to Philip Morris. Morris is complicit as the co-dependent in this - flattered by Russel's attentions and turning a blind eye to his obvious dysfunctions. Ultimately, Russel becomes nothing more than his pathology - a borderline personality in the truest sense - his sense of self completely eroded.

So in summary, this is a very black comic tragedy, looking the audience straight in the eye and never flinching from giving us reality, however ugly, sweaty or gay. The real tragedy of course is that it's a true story - Russel is a genuine product of a abandonment, dysfunctional family life, prejudice and stereotype.

His various addictions and compulsions are funny, but only in the sense that a visit to the asylum is funny. He represents the spiritual corruption and emptiness of man. His wife, through her prejudice, unwittingly stumbles on a truth - asking whether the gay thing and stealing thing go together. In Russel, we cannot be sure whether any part of his personality is genuine - or whether it is merely another attempt to self-define or self-affirm through some outside object or activity.

Russel is a pathetic character in the truest sense - his tragic end the inevitable conclusion of his many character flaws.

So, overall expect a shock, expect a challenge, expect a laugh - but don't expect to walk away happy.

This is a really solid film - the acting is consistently excellent, the way the story is told is clever, and it covers some very challenging subject matter. But it's not a romance, it's not DUMB AND DUMBER, and it's not for the fainthearted. With that caveat, it comes highly recommended.

I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS played Sundance and Cannes 2009 and was released earlier this year in Belgium, France, Russia, Taiwan, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania and Kazakhstan. It is currently on release in Japan, the UK and the Philippines. It opens next month in Iceland, Brazil, the Netherlands and Germany. It opens in the US on May 7th.

THE BLIND SIDE - insidious, manipulative schmaltz

THE BLIND SIDE is a deeply insidious movie that has been rewarded with Oscar gold, one suspects, as a gesture toward Sandra Bullock's track record in bringing home the cheques with her trademark fluffy romantic-comedies. It is based on the true story of Leigh Anne Tuohy, an All-American soccer mom who gives a home to an enormous black kid from a deprived neighbourhood, seemingly on a whim. Once she has committed to raising him, Leigh Anne does so with ferocious commitment, eventually seeing him into a successful American football career. There is no dramatic tension. Neither is there suspense. It is quite clear that from the polished veneer that we are in the kind of territory where good triumphs over evil and where racial politics are reduced to offensive bland statements. Note how Quinton Aaron, as Michael Oher, is essentially objectified - a passive object with a skill, merely there to respond to Bullock/Touhy's sympathy and actions. I find the Academy lauding this film, and Sandra Bullock's role in particular, rather fascinating. On the one hand, the racial politics of this film affirm the Liberal credentials of the Academy, and you can see them just desperate to acknowledge this film in the same way that they acknowledged CRASH. On the other hand, Leigh Anne Touhy is a character straight out of a liberal humanist's worst nightmares. And I quote, "If you so much as set foot downtown you will be sorry. I'm in a prayer group with the D.A., I'm a member of the NRA and I'm always packing." And so, ladies and gentlemen, we have the current aspirations of both left and right wing America wrapped in a one lady - racially aware but also gun-totin' and bible-quotin'. It does rather feel like Hollywood is trying to have its cake and eat it.

THE BLIND SIDE was released last year in the US and Canada. It was released earlier this year in Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Uruguay. It is currently on release in Argentina, Kuwait, Brazil and Mexico. It opens this weekend in Germany, Portugal, Austria and the UK. It opens on April 19th in Finland and on May 6th in Denmark. It is released on Region 1 DVD today.

Additional tags: Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Jae Head, Lily Collines, Ray McKinnon, Kim Dickens, Alar Kivilo

Mad, Bad, & Dangerous to Know

At the Japan Society in New York:

At the opposite end of the stereotype of docile Japanese women—heroic good mothers, chaste daughters and hardworking faithful wives—actresses Ayako Wakao, Mariko Okada and Meiko Kaji embodied the transgression of limits, breaking rules, flouting norms and generally upsetting everyone.

This series explores the idea of unconventional beauty that these spellbinding actresses created through an unparalleled body of films. Both Wakao and Okada were muses and inspiration for two major film directors, Yasuzo Masumura and Kiju (Yoshishige) Yoshida, respectively, while Kaji navigated between filmmakers, a wild card of Japanese cinema at the time. Put together, their films delineate what one could call an aesthetic of “convulsive beauty” (André Breton).

Learn more at the Japan Society.  Check out the trailer for this event below:

Japanese Women Directors at Nippon Connection

Possibly due to the influence of Raindance 2009, or just the fact that there are more female directors in general than there used to be, Nippon Connection seems to have even more women directors showing films this year than last year. As usual I have been having trouble deciding which films to go to, so I may have to make animation and women directors my focus. . . even if it means missing out on Toad’s Oil (ガマの油, 2009). This would be a trial as I simply adore Kōji Yakusho, but at least his films are easy to acquire on DVD for future viewing. 

So, what are the women bringing to the table this year?

A Piece of Our Life – Kakera (Momoko Andō, 2009)

Bare Essence of Life (Satoko Yokohama, 2009)

One Million Yen Girl (Yuki Tanada, 2008)

Moon and Cherry (Yuki Tanada, 2006)

Dear Doctor (Miwa Nishikawa, 2009)

Sona – The Other Myself (Yonghi Yang, 2009)

And… this has me the most excited: Megane (Glasses, 2007) by Naoko Ogigami. I just loved Kamome Shokudo back in 2007.

Lots and lots of women are represented in the three sets of animated shorts. Here are a few names I have plucked out:

Digista Animators:

Cellphone Caprice (Hasuna Karasuda, 2008)

Ascension (Kiyomi Tajima, 2008)

Qoma (Team Qoma, 2008)

suipasu zuirpursa (Kozue Kodama & Yoko Tanabe, 2008)

The Tide (Yurika Kaneko, 2008)

DOME Animation Special:

Pattern (Miyuki Okuyama, 2008)

The Promise of a Man at the Window and the Woman on a Prairie (Miku Kogawa, 2009)

John (Mitsuo Toyama, 2008)

Scenery of Loneliness (Kuniko Shimoto, 2008)

The Source of Myself (Nanae Hishimoto, 2008)

The Last Train (Mana Fuji, 2009)

Open Art Animation

chorus (Arisa Wakami, 2008)

I can't wait! . .  . and I've already waivered... I MUST fit Toad's Oil in somehow!

GREEN ZONE - too simplistic, too late

GREEN ZONE is Matt Damon and Peter Greengrass' risible attempt to sucker the fanbase of the BOURNE films into watching a movie with a more avowedly political subject matter. Which just goes to show that the mainstream audience isn't that dumb. Just because it's got shaky handheld camera work and Matt Damon running around looking earnest and puzzled, doesn't mean that a movie is suspenseful or fundamentally politically interesting. I think the basic problem with GREEN ZONE, other than that it's not BOURNE 4, is that it's trying to make something we now taken as read look interesting. Yes, yes, it's a crying shame that we were taken into war in Iraq on the false premise that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. But, seven years later, I think the public is too jaded to really care. We were lied to - we're in a mess - now what? Kathryn Bigelow broke through the apathy with her micro-psycho take on the archetypal figure in a street-fighting war - the bomb disposal expert. Her film, THE HURT LOCKER, was tense, but also took us into a side of the war that we genuinely might not have know about before. But GREEN ZONE, for all its earnest good intentions, tells us nothing new, and shows us nothing new. Roger Ebert says that GREEN ZONE looks at war in a way no other war film has, insofar as the US is the dupe not the hero. I beg to differ. Hollywood has been making great films about the vicious lie at the heart of most wars for decades, not least about Vietnam and more recently with THREE KINGS. Ebert also damns with praise here: "By limiting the characters and using typecasting, he [Brian Helgeland] makes the deceit easy to understand". Respect to Ebert, but no. If you have to debase yourself with typecasting, then you're just not up to the job. And at any rate, this film really just isn't that complicated. The trick missed is to show the personal human price paid. As THE HURT LOCKER took inside the insane world of the lead character, we should've seen more about how a stand-up guy like Damon's CWO Roy Miller would've reacted psychologically to realising that he'd been duped. What happens when the naive man grows up? That to me is more interesting than how fast and where he runs around.

GREEN ZONE is on release in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Canada, Finland, Indonesia, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Egypt, Germany, Kuwait, Switzerland, and Austria. It opens this weekend in Denmark, South Korea and Estonia. It opens on April 14th in Belgium, France, Argentina, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens in Italy on April 23rd, in Turkey on April 30th, in Japan on May 14th, in Hungary on June 3rd and in Poland on June 4th.

THE GHOST WRITER - the joy of skewering Bliar

I eagerly anticipated the release of Roman Polanski's latest film, THE GHOST WRITER. Partly because I think Polanski is a fascinating director, with a technical mastery beyond many of his contemporaries and an obsession with the sinister that is as compelling as it is unwavering. Partly because I have always loved Robert Harris' intelligent, well-researched, political thrillers. And partly because his novel, "The Ghost", is a thinly veiled skewering of a particularly slippery figure - Tony Blair. I was not disappointed. THE GHOST WRITER reminded me a lot of MICHAEL CLAYTON - it's intelligent, suspenseful, provocative and beautifully made. Indeed, quite superbly photographed by DP Pawel Edelman.

The plot centres on an un-named writer (Ewan McGregor) who has been hired to ghost the memoirs of an oleaginous former Prime Minsiter, Adam Lang (a perfectly cast Pierce Brosnan). The plot is driven by his investigation of the accusation that Lang illegally handed war criminals to the CIA. The Ghost doesn't know whether to trust Lang, his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), his mistress (Kim Cattrall) or his aides. And of course, this being Polanski, there are no idealistic pay-offs for truth-seekers.

When I left the screening I had a wistful feeling. Because as polished and convincing as THE GHOST WRITER is, somehow, because you know it was made by Polanski, and you know what he is capable of achieving, you end up feeling a little short-changed by a "mere" good thriller. I loved the Hitchcock reference, but it wasn't necessary to the plot. And that kind of slight mis-step seemed to me indicative of a true auteur turning in a "place-holder" film.....

THE GHOST WRITER played Berlin 2010 where Roman Polanski won the Silver Bear. It is on release in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, the US, the Philippines, Belgium, France, Canada, Greece, Israel, Estonia and Italy. It opens this weekend in Denmark and Norway. It opens on April 8th in Portugal and on April 16th in Finland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. It opens in May in Thailand, the Netherlands and Romania. It opens in June in Hungary and the Czech Republic, and on August 19th in Argentina and Slovakia.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - a faithful adaptation of a great thriller

Niels Arden Oplev's screen adaptation of the wildly successful Stieg Larsson thriller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, is a sure crowd-pleaser. Though still coming in at two and a half hours, it is an admirably condensed and faithful adaptation of a complicated thriller. As fans will be well aware - and I'm assuming most people who see the film will have already read all three books - the movie is about two people who form an unlikely bond in order to investigate an old crime in one of Sweden's most prominent families. Years ago, a young girl disappeared from the wealthy island inhabited largely by her family - the Vangers. In old age, her grand-uncle hires disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist to re-examine the case and the rogue's gallery of former Nazis and selfish old bastards that make up the Vanger family. Blomkvist is a like-able decent guy - and in his relationship with his long time mistress and best friend Erika, as well as with his new found aide, Lisbeth Salander, he proves that he is a "man who loves women". He enjoys their company, enjoys making love to them, treats them as equals and with respect. But Lisbeth Salander - the true star of the books and this film - is a prickly character - highly intelligent, gifted with computers, a victim of extreme abuse, and as uncomfortable in her skin as Blomkvist is at peace.

I found the direction to be workmanlike in all but the elegant way in which the IT hacking was depicted. What set the movie apart was, source material notwithstanding, the genuine sympathy between, and charisma of, the two lead characters. Michael Nyqvist is superb as the laconic Blomkvist, and Noomi Rapace commits physically and psychologically so fully to being Lisbeth Salander that you can feel the ferocity. And this is important, because inevitably, in order to compress the film, the side relationships - and the smaller characters at Millenium and Milton Security - have been stripped away. As a result, the film lives and dies by whether you are emotionally affected by an abused woman opening a small sliver of her life to Blomkvist. This is much more pivotal than solving the "whodunnit". After all, if there's any real message to Larson's novel, it's that the establishment in its entirety did it.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was released in 2009 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Finland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Austria, Poland and New Zealand. It opened earlier this year in Japan and Estonia. It is currently on release in the US and UK and opens next weekend in Australia. It opens on April 23rd in Brazil.

Additional tags: Jacob Groth, Jens Fischer, Eric Kress, Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lagercrantz, Ewa Froling, Tomas Kohler, Gosta Bredefeldt, Niels Arden Oplev.

CRAZY HEART - sanitised

CRAZY HEART is an earnest and handsomely made film from debutant director Scott Cooper. It's a simple story about an old country singer, reduced to playing small gigs while his mentee plays stadiums. He falls for a well-meaning, likeable young woman, and is finally compelled to seek help for his alcohol addiction when he imperils her son. The movie has an air of intimacy thanks to Scott Cooper's predeliction for warm tones, close-ups and lingering shots. It has an impeccable country score, masterminded by T-Bone Burnett, and played out by Jeff Bridges as the ageing Bad Blake and Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet. But there is no "wow" factor - nothing that makes you think this is an Oscar-winning movie or an Oscar-winning performance. Sure, Jeff Bridges turns in an affecting performance, but where's the savage psychological daring of THE WRESTLER? Where's the hurt and hopelessness and sheer Sisyphian pain or endurance? Nah. CRAZY HEART is soul-bearing-lite. It's grinds through its gears, and we reach the end, still basking in the honey glow of an all-too-easy conversion to sobriety, as cheerful as the cute little kid. It's too easy. Too sanitised. Too forgettable.

Additional tags: Barry Markowitz, T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton, James Keane, Thomas Cobb, Scott Cooper.

CRAZY HEART was released in 2009 in the USA. It is currently on release in the UK, New Zealand, Mexico, Norway, Belgium, France, the Philippines, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Malta, Argentina and Turkey.

Normal service will resume shortly....

So, I've had a bunch of emails pitched at varying stages of directness asking where the new reviews are. The intern will have these on line by the middle of next week, apparently, after I detox and write them (it was the variety of wine that did it.) In the meantime, know that I rather liked THE GIRL IN THE PEARL EARRING; was deeply underwhelmed by both THE BLIND SIDE and CRAZY HEART; depressed by OLD DOGS; charmed by I LOVE YOU PHILIP MORRIS; and very sorry that Thomas Turgoose hadn't been given a better script in THE SCOUTING BOOK FOR BOYS.

Kihachiro Kawamoto & Absolut Vodka (1997)

 Li Po  ( 李白) celenrating hanami with a sip of vodka

In 1996, renowned puppet animator Kihachirō Kawamoto (川本喜八郎, b. 1925) was one of twenty-four international animators to contribute to a ground-breaking internet marketing campaign by Absolut Vodka. The campaign was called Absolut Panushka, after the curator Christine Panushka, and it launched on the internet in January 1997. Today, using short animated video clips to advertise on the internet is par for the course, but in 1997 this campaign was groundbreaking.  

Li Po finds himself inspired by the vodka.

 

Each contributing animator was asked to design a ten second animation that featured the signature Absolut bottle shape. The animation was put into historical context with written text by historian Dr. William Moritz (1941-2004), an expert in visual music and experimental animation. Although the website has been taken down, many of the fifty short articles that Moritz wrote for the site can be viewed at The iota Center.

A screencap of the website as it looked in 1997.

The chosen animators were already well established in their careers. Notable names included Pritt Parn, Jules Engel, Ruth Hayes, and of course, Christine Panushka herself. The styles were as varied as the nationalities represented ranging from the abstract to the comic. The creative director of the project was Debra Callabresi, current president of N-Tonic, on whose website many of the video clips can viewed (warning Pritt Parn’s contribution is funny, but NSFW).

Although Kawamoto is now associated with the high art style of his puppet animations, he actually got his start in much more commercial fare. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he partnered with Tadasu Iizawa and Shigeru Hijikata to form Shiba Productions. During their peak years making puppet animation for such companies as Asahi Beer and Mitsuwa Sekken, they were making up to 12 commercials a month with Kawamoto designing and animated the puppets.

"That's me. The laureate in a bottle."

With this background, it comes as no surprise that he was able to come up with an animation for Absolut Vodka that is both visually striking and humorous. A doll of the Chinese poet Li Po(aka Li Bai aka 李白/りはく) sits under a cherry blossom tree sipping vodka, the narrator and visuals suggest that Li Po finds his poetic inspiration in a bottle of vodka. The short fulfils the brief, while at the same time maintaining Kawamoto’s reputation for exquisitely designed animated puppets. Watch it here.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

The Village Festival (村祭, 1930)

Chiyogami cutout animation

Mura Matsuri (The Village Festival aka Harvest Festival (1930) by animation pioneer Noburo Ōfuji (大藤信郎, 1900-61) is a deceptively simple film depicting a typical Japanese festival. It is an early example of Japanese manga-eiga (literally ‘cartoon movies’ as animation was known in Japan pre-1960s). As Japanese artists only began to create animation for public consumption beginning in 1917, it was still a relatively novel screening experience. 

Japanese animators learned their craft through careful study of animated films imported from countries like France, England, and the United States. Some clues about Noburo Ōfuji’s screening habits can be gleaned from this short little film that runs at under 3 minutes. To begin with, I suspect that he has been watching Max Fleischer (1883-1972) films because he uses a “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique with the kana that spells out the lyrics for the audience to read along. This gimmick is commonplace today, but it was an innovation at the time that began in September 1925 with My Bonnie (Max & Dave Fleischer) and was used extensively in the Fleisch brothers’ Ko-Ko Song Car Tunes of the 1920s and 1930s. Ōfuji puts his own creative touch onto the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique by having the ball interact with other objects related to the matsuri (festival) and at times substituting the head of characters in the matsuri for the ball

Innovative 'Follow the Bouncing Ball'... or Dragon head?

 

This type of read along song animation became a staple of Japanese television in the 1960s with programmes like the NHK’s popular Minna no Uta (Everybody’s Song) series which pairs animators with new songs. In many ways, Mura Matsuri is, along with other musical shorts from the period, a grandfather to the modern Minna no Uta classics.

It is clear that Ōfuji is primarily targeting this film primarily at an audience of children. The expectation of a child audience is indicated through the young voice of the singer Eiko Hirai, and through the use of kana in the song lyrics. Interestingly, the kana are used in a similar fashion to contemporary usage for young children: hiragana for common Japanese words and katakana for sound words like don don (ドンドン). I find this interesting because Nishikata, where I lived when I started this blog, is quite close to the Yayoi Museum & Takehisa Yumeji Museum (behind Tōdai, near Nezu Station). I saw a wonderful exhibition at the Yayoi Museum of children’s books and magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the material written for children at this time appeared to be written exclusively in katakana. 

Chiyogami + Follow-the-Bouncing-Ball

At the time that this film was made, sound film was already all the rage in North America and Europe. The technology cam much later to Japan much mainly due to the benshi wanting to hold onto their jobs. Mura Matsuri is a film that straddles the silent and sound eras. The 16mm film itself is silent because it has no optic track. Instead, it is an example of a ‘Record Talkie.’ The song was recorded onto an SP record and played simultaneously with the film. For the digital restoration of this film they took the 16mm print and added the soundtrack from the SP record. The match between character movement and the tempo of the music is quite good.

Ōfuji is generally credited with being a pioneer of chiyogami (traditional Japanese coloured paper) cutout animation. While aesthetically, this gives films like Mura Matsuri a very Japanese look, the choice of chiyogami may have been more practical than artistic. When Ōfuji began making chiyogami cutout animation in the 1920s celluloid was prohibitively expensive in Japan. The average animator really didn’t have access to celluloid until the mid-1930s. Cutout animation is also a less labour intensive method of animation that drawing on celluloid.

Even when celluloid became more widely available, Ōfuji continued to make chiyogami films. In an interview with Armen Boujikanian at Frames per second, Akira Tochiga points out that in his post-war career, Ōfuji used coloured cellophane instead of celludiod: “. . . because of the materiality of the [cellophane] paper, [he had] to find ways to economize the motion of the characters. And this seems very associative with TV animation. As you may know, when Osamu Tezuka started the program Astro Boy, thirty minutes of animation were aired on TV weekly. It was pretty hard to make original pictures for thirty minutes amount of work per week.” The economy of character movement later became a staple of TV anime in Japan, with animators like Tezuka animating only 8 pictures per second instead of 24 in order to save on time and money.

With films from the 1930s, one always looks for evidence of war propaganda. Although Mura Matsuri actively promotes Japanese culture, it is not classed as propaganda. It was produced a year before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and predates the widely acknowledged first official propaganda animation Momotaro’s Sky Adventure (空の桃太郎, Yasushi Murata, October 1931). According to the brochure for screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise, the song was already popularly known through national school curriculum. When I watch old films I like to try to imagine the context in which they were originally screened. A light-hearted film, I imagine audiences singing and clapping along to Ōufuji’s delightful celebration of the harvest festival.

This film is available on DVDs offered by Digital Meme and Zakka Films.

Style of Kon Ichikawa - Art + CM + Animation

Japanese Movie

France Art Anime Kessakusen DVD Box [Limited Pressing]

Animation

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

To Shoot Without Shooting (不射之射, 1988)

When my copy of Kimstim’s The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto came in the post last year, I was deeply disappointed to find that only 7 of the 11 shorts featured on Geneon’s DVD were represented. Missing from Kimstim’s collection are the 4 minute version of The Trip (旅/Tabi, 1973 – the long version is 12 min.), Self Portrait (セルフポートレート, 1988), To Shoot Without Shooting (不射之射/Fusha no sha, 1988), and Briar Rose, or the Sleeping Beauty (いばら姫またはねむり姫/ Ibara-Hime matawa Nemuri-Hime, 1990). The strangest omission was Self Portrait, as it is only a minute long and required no subtitles. With the others, I can only think that they must have blown their budget on their unnecessary English dubbing of The Book of the Dead (死者の書/Shisha no sho, 2004), which they released at the same time.

I finally got a chance to watch a decent version of To Shoot Without Shooting this week, and it has quickly become one of my favourite Kihachirō Kawamoto (川本 喜八郎, 1925) films. Kawamoto is of course most famous for his puppet animation, though he has dabbled in other animation types, and this 25 minute film is a definitive example of his ningyō jōruri (人形浄瑠璃) style animation. The ningyō (人形) have been exquisitely made by hand, with highly detailed sets, innovative cinematography, and a tight, philosophically intriguing storyline. 

 Ji Chang with his determination to be the best written on his face

Most Kawamoto films have strong storylines inspired by folktales, traditional theatre, or literature (both ancient and modern). With very rare exceptions, his work derives from Japanese and Chinese literature. The only exceptions I can think of are Briar Rose, although it is a Japanese writer’s interpretation of a Western fairy tale, and The Trip, which is partly inspired by Western art but at the same time is heavily informed by Buddhist philosophy. To Shoot Without Shooting is an adaptation of the story Meijin-den by Atsushi Nakajima (中島敦, b. 1909-42), which itself is derived from a traditional Chinese tale.

Chinese culture plays an important role in many aspects of Kawamoto’s career. Chinese language and folktales have strongly influenced the theatrical traditions that inform Kawamoto’s films. Furthermore, Kawamoto’s mentor, Tadahito Mochinaga (持永只仁, 1919-1999), had ties to the Chinese animation community, having worked there in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I would surmise that Mochinaga’s connections with China played a role in Kawamoto’s first grand-scale puppet theatre production in the 1980s of an epic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (人形劇三国志, 1982-84) for television. The project was a joint CCTV (China Central Television) and NHK production which resulted in 68 45-minute episodes. To Shoot Without Shooting also involves Chinese crew including music by the celebrated composer Jin Fuzai (b. 1942) and animation assistance by Sun Daheng.

 Ji Chang and his wife on opposite sides of the loom

To Shoot Without Shooting tells the story of a young archer by the name of Ji Chang who aspires to become the greatest archer in the world. He seeks out the assistance of legendary archer Fei Wei, who can shoot willow leaves individually off of trees. Fei Wei first gives Ji Chang some skills he must master (sleeping without blinking and training the eyes to see very small details) then agrees to train him. Once trained by Fei Wei, Ji Chang is still not satisfied. His desire to become the greatest archer in the world controls him like a drug, leading him to attempt to kill his mentor in a duel. After this confrontation, Fei Wei sends Ji Chang to seek the advice of an elderly sage Gan Ying, who teaches Ji Chang that the ultimate goal for an archer is to learn to ‘shoot without shooting.’

The greatest deed is to refrain from action

The essence of speech is silence

The ultimate in archery requires no shot

Fusha no sha (To shoot without shooting)

This lesson comes from Buddhist teachings – a philosophy that informs many of Kawamoto’s films including The Book of the Dead (2005) and The Trip (1973). It occurred to me at the end of this film, that it would be rewarding to teach it together with anti-war and anti-nuclear bomb animations like Pica-don (ピカドン, Renzō & Sayoko Kinoshita, 1978) and Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓/ Hotaru no Haka, Isao Takahata, 1988). This idea that the ultimate goal is the attainment of knowledge itself, rather than acting upon it has deep implications. When Ji Chang realizes this, he reaches a kind of Buddhist enlightenment. Kawamoto registers this through character expression. In the scenes leading up to the moment of enlightenment, Ji Chang’s face is set with a stoic expression of determination. When his egocentric ambitions lead him to challenge Fei Wei, the determination on his face becomes an ugly scowl. After his enlightenment, Kawamoto softens Ji Chang’s face. Within the storyline itself, the change in Ji Chang is seen and felt by all the villagers when he returns just by their looking onto his face.

 Ji Chang with smoke obscuring his face

Ji Chang with with a serene expression of enlightenment

As always with Kawamoto, the cinematography in To Shoot Without Shooting, is masterfully executed. He uses unexpected angles and camera movement that transform the film from merely puppet theatre into a truly cinematic experience. Some striking examples include opening the film on the main protagonists back and he strides towards a gate. The shot reverse shots between Ji Chang and his wife through the loom are perhaps the most memorable visually. The play of light and shadow in this scene is beautiful and it also demonstrates Kawamoto’s penchant for using a Japanese aesthetic in his framing: the balancing of positive and negative space and slightly off-centre framings. Every detail, from the painstakingly handcrafted sets and costumes to the overlaying of drawn animation on glass to depict smoke, has been carefully considered. Each frame from this film could stand alone as a piece of art in itself.

This film is available on Geneon’s DVD of Kawamoto shorts. The Book of the Dead is also available on DVD from Geneon with documentary extras left out of Kimstim’s release of the film (including a 47 minute Making Of documentary). The only drawback to Geneon DVDs are their lack of English subtitles.

Kihachiro Kawamoto Sakuhin shu

Animation

Shisha no Sho

Puppet Show

Ningyougeki Sangokushi Zenshu 6

Puppet Show

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D - what is Tim Burton trying to say here?

My response to ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D was much the same as my response to Tim Burton's Roald Dahl adaptation, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The production design, costumes, and sheer visual imagery were wondrous to behold. But Tim Burton had made poor choices regarding the narrative structure, tone and very heart of the subject matter.

So let's go back to the beginning. This movie originates in the children's novels Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The novels were written by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, better known as Lewis Carroll. On one level, the novels fall into the category of nonsense literature, in the same vein as Edward Lear. When the little girl Alice chases a small white rabbit, clothed in a waistcoat, down a rabbit hole, she enters a world that is surreal, sometimes sinister and that defies narrative logic. Potions and mushrooms make you larger or smaller. Animals talk, have tea parties and smoke hookah pipes. There are riddles, logic puzzles and chess moves; wonderful explorations of mirror-ing, double-ing and mathematical concepts; satirical sketches of donnish Oxford life; references to the Wars of the Roses - but ultimately, it's all just one giant non sequitor. Anything can happen because anything can follow. For a little child, this is a wonderfully liberating, but also an extraordinarily frightening concept. (The same conflicting reaction is at the heart of the most sinister of all the very sinister late Victorian and early Edwardian childrens' novels - Peter Pan. To this day, I am shocked that this is marketed as a children's novel rather than as horror.)

The genius of the original illustrations by Tenniel was to capture that strangeness - at once captivating and repulsive. Alice with her dark eyes and obnoxious self-confidence - the stern Victorian politicians anthropomorphicised into baffling characters. Wonderland is a world where one can fear drowning in a sea of one's own tears and where power is abused by a series of tyrannical and clearly insane aristos. It's hardly Disney. Unless of course you are watching the bland saccharine Disney version of the film. As adaptations go, it was faithful in the superficial - the characters were all there as were the each of the famous scenes in the right order - but completely failed to capture the sheer oddness of the world. To that end, Jonathan Miller's BBC film is my adaptation of choice - he fully explores the concept that Wonderland is really Oxford and makes the characters there so very close to real people, Wonderland isn't "other" or "under" but sits alongside reality.

Given how dark and surreal the source material is, I would've thought that Tim Burton would've been the perfect director for ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D. And as the publicity stills were released I got more and more excited. I loved the make-up for Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter - he looked like a psychedelic version of McAdder. Helena Bonham Carter's encephelatic head as what I thought was the Queen of Hearts looked superb. Matt Lucas, who I'll always think of as the baby on Shooting Stars, looked born to play Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. And when you looked down the cast list you could see lots of high-class British character actors in the voice roles, from Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat to most surprisingly and perfectly Barbara Windsor as the Doormouse. Most wonderfully of all, I was longing to Crispin Glover - a fascinating but little seen actor - as the Knave of Hearts. I suppose my suspicions might have been aroused by the casting of Australian Mia Wasikowska as Alice - not on the grounds that she can't act - she makes a perfectly decent fist of her role - but because she isn't a child. So there was obviously some serious re-writing at hand. And then, with the very appearance of the Tweedles and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) they were clearly conflating the two novels, most notably in the character that looks like the Queen of Hearts but is called the Red Queen.

The resulting film is a strange beast indeed, but in all the wrong ways. Script-writer Linda Woolverton (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, MULAN, ALLADIN) has made Alice a teenager being pressured into marriage. She runs away from her fate and down the rabbithole, but refuses to believe that she has been there before, as a child, despite being haunted by recurring nightmares of talking caterpillars and smiling cats. When she reaches the Underland, which she had mistakenly called Wonderland, she finds a landscape of scorched earth, stormy skies and familiar characters suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. To echo LA Times reviewer, Kenneth Turan, the Mad Hatter's tea party seems to be set in a sort of ill-conceived Mordor and the Mad Hatter himself has lost his mind in reaction to the Red Queen's hostile take-over of Underland. When events get too much for him he trips into a pitch perfect Scottish accent, but this only serves to make him even more McAdderish! The loose plot sees Alice journey to the Red Queen's palace to capture the Vorpal Sword and free the Hatter. She then visits the White Queen and summons the courage to defeat the Jabberwocky on the frabjous day (calloo callay!) in a finale that would've mean more appropriate to LOTR.

Despite the lovely creations that are the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the lovely costumes for Alice, the movie feels rather dismal and flat. I suppose that can't be helped as this is a vanquished world, but somehow, that wasn't a problem for Narnia or Rohan. Alice is supposed to find herself but the transformation isn't particularly convincing. Back in the real world, the idea that she would then become a neo-feminist adventuress is ludicrous. I think the problem is that the movie shifts in tone rather abruptly. In the same scene, you'll have Johnny Depp playing it utterly straight as the traumatised hatter, but Anne Hathaway pastiching the idea of the pure, slightly unpractical, narcissistic White Queen, with her pure white dress but scarily black lips and nails. Both are fine, but do they belong in the same film? And the sheer ill-judgement of the 1980s dancing that the Hatter roles out in the penultimate scene defies description.

Overall, then, while I can see consistency of design, I didn't see a consistency of vision as to what this movie was really about and what it was trying to say. A fatal flaw, no matter how lovely the costumes. Burton refuses to let ALICE be a wonderfully nonsensical nonsequitor. He wants to give characters a back story and feeeeeelings. But at the same time, he doesn't take the time to actually explore them properly. Worst of all, with the exception of the rather lazy introduction of some real-world twins, nowhere do we see Alice's visions as subconscious reworkings of people she has seen in the real world.

Additional tags: Mia Wasikowska, Dariusz Wolski, Christopher Lee, Geraldine James, Tim Piggott-Smith, Frances de la Tour, Marton Csokas, Barbara Windsor, Leo Bill, Linda Woolverton.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND is on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is a movie that is utterly, wretchedly disappointing. Despite an all-star cast, and handsome production values, the resulting film is uneven in tone, superficial where it wants to be profound, and undeserving of the big emotional punches it tries to pull.

The film was written and directed by Rebecca Miller(THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE), based on her own play. It features the eponymous Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) as a middle-aged woman, questioning her life choices through a series of flashbacks. Despite her picture perfect middle-aged existence, we learn that, as a young girl, Pippa was damaged by her exposure to her mother's addiction to speed and resulting psychological problems. The young Pippa (Blake Lively) thus high-tails it to New York where she almost falls into become a soft-porn model for her aunt's girlfriend (Julianne Moore) out of sheer boredom, develops a drug habit of her own, but then is rescued by an older man (Alan Arkin.) Fast forward to her present day crisis, and Pippa is living with her aged husband in a retirement community. She is insulted by his affair with a damaged even younger woman (Winona Ryder) and so trips into an affair of her own with an equally damaged young man (Keanu Reeves).

As I said, this is a well-cast film, and handsomely photographed. I have no doubt that Miller is trying to earnestly explore middle-aged feminine angst and to say something profound about self-esteem and addiction. The problem is that none of it seems real. It all seems like a very stage-y very contrived set of scenes, clumsily shuffled into a movie. At times it almost seems like a caricature of one of those Woody Allen films, except without the wry humour, where old men seem to be able to attract ever younger more attractive women and everyone spends the whole time discussing their neuroses and committing suicide.

Enough already.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE was released last autumn and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick0named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Eran Creevy, Riz Ahmed, Nitin Ganatra, Jay Simpson, Dannielle Brent, Jazon Maza, Harry Escott, Molly Nyman, Ed Wild.

The Red Thread (赤い糸, 2010)

The Red Thread (赤い糸/Akai Ito) by Kazuhiko Okushita (奥下 和彦) was featured on the NHK’s Digista program in February. The film takes a simple idea – creating a picture using a simple thread – and transforms it into an engaging flow of animated images. The concept itself is not new. The Italian Cartoonist Osvaldo Cavandoli (aka Cava, 1920-2007) had a very famous series of shorts called La Linea (The Line, 1972-1991) that showed on television around the world. It was a comical series featuring a male figure who talked like Pingu (in fact, it’s the same voice actor: Carlo Bonomi) and interacted in a humorous way with the cartoonist himself. Okushita’s film made me nostalgic for children’s television programming on TVO in the 1970s and 80s. 

 Cavo's La Linea #215 (watch here)

 The thread brings the couple back together in Akai Ito

While the basic design concept is similar to that of La Linea, Okushita takes the concept to a whole new level both visually and in the narrative. From East Asian folklore, Okushita takes the symbol of the red string of fate. There are many variations of this ancient tale, but the main idea is that the gods tie men and women together who are destined as each other’s soul mates together with a red thread.

An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet,

regardless of time, place, or circumstance.

The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.

- ancient Chinese belief

This image of interconnection can be seen in the image that Okushita’s college (Kanagawa College of Art ) is using for the homepage for their department of Visual Communication Design is currently featuring art from The Red Thread, demonstrating the development of the subtle narrative line in the film from childhood to falling in love and having a child.

The music accompanying the animation builds with the story coming to a climax when the couple argue and the thread, in defiance of the original myth, breaks. However, the thread reforms itself and the story eventually ties itself up nicely (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun) by ending as it began with the image of a child. This short animation is a great success because of its combination of a brilliant design concept with a universal storyline. While the red thread idea is specific to East Asian folklore, threads (esp. weaving with threads) are quite a common metaphor internationally for the ties that bind us all to one another. 

A brilliant little film. Can’t wait to see what this young artist does next. On his Twitter profile, he calls himself a Live Painter.

la Linea

Original Soundtrack (Music by Franco Goddi)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010