Spirou in Tokio

I made this great discovery this holiday season. The most recent edition of the Franco-Belgian comic book series Spirou + Fantasio, currently written by Jean-David Morvan and illustrated by José-Luis Munera, uses Tokyo (past and present) as its setting. In Germany it is book 47 of this comic that has been running since 1938, but for some reason in the original French series is is book 49. I am...

Furo

I made a great find on Youtube this week. In March 2006, Japanese artist Tabaimo joined forces with choreographer Ohad Naharin and the Batshava Dance Company to put on a dance-video installation at the Jewish Theatre in Stockholm. Tabaimo employed parts of her earlier animation Parts of a Japanese Bathhouse and projected them on three screens and the dancers interact with the video art.I have been...

Paradise Kiss (パラダイス・キス, 2005)

This 12 episode anime is adapted from Ai Yazawa’s 5 volume shōjo manga Paradise Kiss (パラダイス・キス), known to fans as ParaKiss (パラキス). The manga was first published in serialized form in Zipper fashion magazine.There has been much grumbling on blogs about the adaptation of Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss manga into an anime. The main complaints have been about the unusual animation style, in contrast to other...

Nana 2

Last year’s hotly anticipated sequel, Nana 2 (Kentaro Otani, 2006) fell flat at the box office and was widely panned by critics and fans alike. These reasons explain why I kept putting off seeing it until very recently. To my relief, watching the film wasn’t a total waste of time. In fact, the film wasn’t nearly as bad as I had anticipated.Let me start off by pointing out the flaws so that I can end...

Coconoe Jyot (ここのえジィョオト, 2001)

Here's a colourful animation, shot originally on 16mm, that I came across on Youtube. The animators, Kazunobu Akifusa (秋房和伸) and Asuka Hamano translate the title as '9 Jyot', but I am not sure what 'Jyot' means. Nevertheless, it makes for interesting viewing. Akifusa also does art installation and is a musici...

A Memory (オモヒデ, 2001)

A Memory (オモヒデ, 2001) is my favourite short film on Tomoyasu Murata's DVD of his early work entitled My Road (俺の路). It is much more polished than his first attempts at stop motion animation TUG TUG (1998) and An Introduction of Human Zoology (1998). These two early films have a film school feel about them with their inconsistent lighting and experimental use of editing between stop motion and cel...

The Old Crocodile (年をとった鰐, 2005)

Koji Yamamura's The Old Crocodile (年をとった鰐/Toshi wo totta Wani, 2005) has long been a troublesome film for me. I love the minimalistic pen and ink animation on yellowed paper aesthetic but it is my least favourite of Yamamura’s films from the perspective of story and narration.It is an adaptation of a rather antiquated fable by French author and illustrator Leopold Chauveau (1870-1940) called “Histoire...

Fusako Yusaki (湯崎夫沙子)

I have been doing background research into the artists featured on the collaborative film Winter Days (Fuyu no hi, 2005), most of whom have rarely been written about in English (let alone in Japanese!). In my scouring of the internet for information about this diverse group of animators, I found two videos of Fusako Yusaki demonstrating how she creates figures out of clay for an Italian children's...

Briar Rose or The Sleeping Beauty (いばら姫またはねむり姫, 1990)

Briar Rose or The Sleeping Beauty (いばら姫または ねむり姫, 1990, 22 min.)Kihachiro Kawamoto’s account of the well-known fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty will come as a real shock to anyone raised on the Disney version…. or even on the traditional, and slightly disturbing, Perrault or Grimm versions.Kawamoto lulls us into a true fairy tale setting beginning with the camera moving from a ring of hazy cherry blossoms...

Papa to Rusuban (パパとるすばん)

パパとるすばん (Indigo Blue, 2007)I found this great little short animated film on Youtube yesterday. Unfortunately, it has already been taken down due to violation of copyright. The person who posted Papa to Rusuban had posted dozens of shorts from the Minna no uta (Everyone's Song) NHK series.This particular short features a song sung by the little girl about having a day at home with her father while...

Man and Whale (校長先生とクジラ, 2007)

Koji Yamamura (山村浩二) has two new films out this year. Man and Whale, which I while talk about in a moment, and Franz Kafka’s Ein Landarzt (カフカ田舎医者/Kafuka Inaka Isha/A Country Doctor) which is currently doing the animation festival circuit. I am hoping to find a way to catch it at the Fantoche 2007 in Switzerland in September if I can swing it. Not one to take a break for too long, Yamamura has a third...

Nostalgia (睡蓮の人, 2000)

This early claymation film by Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰) has an English title and a Japanese title. “Nostalgia” is a theme in most of Murata’s artwork. Sometimes the nostalgia is evoked by the old-fashioned settings of the films, particularly the stop motion work. At other times, the nostalgia is more of a longing for a happier time gone by, before times of trouble, sorrow, and loss.The Japanese title...

Studio Ghibli Shorts

Everyone knows the blockbuster movies for which Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are famous – My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001) – just to name a few. What you may not know is that under the guidance of Ghibli producer and president Toshio Suzuki (鈴木敏夫), Ghibli pays the bills between the big movies...

The Uchoten Hotel (The 有頂天ホーテル , 2006)

I find it surprising that The Uchōten Hotel (2006) has not yet been snapped up by distributors in North America and Europe. Perhaps they were unable to see past the bad English pun in the full original title: The 有頂天ホーテル (Suite Dreams). The producers must have thought it would be cool to have three kinds of script (romanji, kanji, and katakana) in the title. Translating the title directly into English...

Thinking and Drawing (シンキング・アンド・ドローイング, 2005)

The walls of video rental shops in Japan are lined with hundreds upon hundreds of animation DVDs, but experimental and art animation on DVD are rare. To remedy this situation, Image Forum put together this showcase of the work of contemporary avant-garde animators trained in Kyoto and Tokyo. Image Forum has been the centre for the creation, exhibition, and distribution of alternative film in Tokyo...