22nd Image Forum Festival

The 22nd Image Forum Festival kicks off this Sunday with its usual feast of experimental films and videos both domestic and international. They have four different screening categories this year: New Forum Japan, Japan Tomorrow, New Forum International, and Dream Machine.New Forum Japan features dozens of experimental shorts made in the past year by Japanese experimental filmmakers and animators....

From Innocence to Impermanence

Last month Image Forum in Tokyo screened ten short animation films by cutting edge contemporary animators under the title:無垢から無常へアート･アニメーションの転換点Moku kara Mujou e Āto Animēshon no TenkantenAfter much contemplation, the best translation I can come up with is: “From Innocence to Impermanence: Art Animation’s Turning Point.” Moku (innocence) and Mujou (uncertainty/impermanence) are both Buddhist terms...

A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコー, 2007)

A noticeable trend at Nippon Connection this year was films that favoured atmosphere and character development over plot. Like Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest and Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコ/Tennen Kokekko) devotes a lot of attention to setting just the right tone through his careful attention to setting and community. This results...

Takashi Ishida film at Oberhausen

Takashi Ishida's latest short film, Umi no eiga (海の映画/Film of the Sea, 2007), will be competing in the international competition at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen on May 3rd. Also in Ishida's screening group is a film called Detonation by Fumiro Sato. The programme says that directors of the short films will be on hand to answer questions following screenings.While I am unfamiliar with...

Kawamoto: The Puppet Master Film Season

If you live in the U.K. be sure to check out the Kihachiro Kawamoto season as it passes through Sheffield and London. Jasper Sharp of Midnight Eye will be in Sheffield on the 25th April at 6pm to personally introduce the first of the three programmes, Demons, Poets, and Priests at the Sheffield Showroom.The following week, the programme moves to the Barbican. The final screening of The Book of the...

Kusama: Princess of Polka Dots

American experimental and documentary filmmaker Heather Lenz is currently in production with a documentary on the life and career of Yayoi Kusama (草間彌生). According to the official website for the film, the debut of the film will coincide with the retrospective planned by the Film Arts Foundation in celebration of Kusama's 80th birthday in 2009. The retrospective, Yayoi Kusama: An Odyssey will travel...

Mitsuwa's Nanahon Hinoki

Nanahon Hinoki (七本ひのき/The Seven-Branched Cypress) is a wonderful short animation with an environmentalist theme. The film was made as part of TBS’s long-running Manga Nippon Mukashi-banashi (まんが日本昔はなし/ Japanese folk tale manga) series. The word ‘manga’ in English has come to mean Japanese comic books, but it is a word with a long history in Japanese culture and refers to the centuries old tradition...

Apple Polka

In my regular trawling of the internet for video clips by up and coming animation artists, I found this cute first claymation by Michiko Sato. Out of admiration for Czech animators, she gives it a Czech title Jablko Polka - Ringo no Poruka in Japanese or Apple Polka in English. She also uses Czech in her title cards and animation style. I hope that after this test run, she will improve the consistency of her lighting and try a more ambitious project....

Neo Tokyo3

While I was in Frankfurt for Nippon Connection, I took some time out from the screenings to see the Neo Tokyo3 exhibit at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum. It is right next door to the Deutsches Filmmuseum, where I saw their corresponding exhibit Anime! High Art – Pop Culture last month.On the main floor, the Architecture Museum features some amazing photographs of German theatres that were taken before...

The Mourning Forest (殯の森, 2007)

There is an old Japanese saying (Nihon no kotowaza) that says “Iwanu ga hana” (言わぬが花) which literally means “to not speak is a flower” and is roughly equivalent to the English proverb “silence is golden.” While a few filmmakers can get away with using a lot of dialogue in their films (Woody Allen would be a rare exception), the best films are the ones the privilege the image over dialogue. The Mourning...

Kami no Shizuku (Les gouttes de Dieu)

Felicity Hughes has written up a wonderful interview she did with Tadashi Agi about their manga series Kami no Shizuku (The Drops of the Gods) in order to gauge their reaction to the manga's debut in the French language. Tadashi Agi is the pen name of the brother and sister team that writes the storyline: Shin and Yuko Kibayashi. The illustrations are done by Shu Okimoto.The manga, which has been...

The Future of Japanese Puppet Animation

Keita Funamoto of the Tokyo animation studio The Village of Marchen has posted some short puppet animations done by students taught by himself and Hifumi Shibakura. The animation class was held at Ikebukuro Community College over the course of six months. According Funamoto, the students were given armature (kinetic chains used in computer animation) kits called ArmaBenders designed by Tetsu Kawamura. They could also use cernit for the claymation....

Nippon Connection

I found a great interview with Marion Klomfass at Deutsche Welle (English version) that gives an overview of the history of the Nippon Connection film festival. It includes a lot of interesting statistics and mentions some of the highlights of the festival. I have already written about some of the films I saw at the festival including the Open Art Animation, experimental animation Salt Lake Screaming,...

Ponyo

The excitement surrounding the next Hayao Miyazaki film, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (崖の上のポニョ,) is starting to build online. Studio Ghibli's official website is slowly allowing more and more information about the film to leak onto the internet. Ghilbi World has translated much of the latest information with pictures here.The film will tell the story of a goldfish princess called Ponyo who dreams...

1000 Years of Manga

I just got the German translation of Mille ans de manga (1000 Years of Manga, Flammarion, 2008) as a present. It has also been translated into English. It's a pricey book, but it's packed with colourful illustrations that trace the history of manga back through centuries of artistic tradition. The author, Brigitte Koyama-Richard, has published several books in French on Japanese culture and is...

Salt Lake Screaming (舞いあがる塩, 2007)

I always like to check out any student films or unusual collections of short films at festivals. Although one risks sitting through some pretty dire films before finding any gems, the risk is worth it. There is nothing more exciting at a film festival than the feeling of discovery when watching a film demonstrates an originality of vision and a freshness of subject matter.Among the films on offer...

Fine, Totally Fine (全然大丈夫, 2008)

The funniest film at Nippon Connection this year was unquestionably Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine (Zenzen Daijobu, 2007). The film put such a delightful spell on its spectators that the film managed to beat out some pretty stiff competition from competing films to win the top prize at the festival.Unlike most comedies, which immerse audiences in a storyline and move from plot point to plot point,...

Open Art Animation

Last night at Nippon Connection I watched the Open Art Animation shorts from Open Art TV. Here’s a run down of what they showed. I will definitely do follow-up pieces on a couple of these films that were real stand-outs, like Sakamoto’s The Dandelion Sister (蒲公英の姉). The films were all presented via projected DVD.The Fisherman (Saku Sakamoto, 2002, 14 min.)A surreal vision in which talk, thin human...

Namakura Gatana

The National Film Center in Tokyo has digitally restored the oldest extant animation film in Japan and will be screening the film this spring as a part of a celebration of newly found or restored films in their collection. Namakura Gatana: Hanawa Hekonai Meitou no Maki was made in 1917 by Junichi Kouuchi. By many it is considered to be the second animation film made in Japan after Oten Shimokawa's...

Behind the Pink Curtain

Fab Press has just published a new book by Jasper Sharp. Along with Tom Mes, Sharp is the co-editor of the on-line journal Midnight Eye and co-author of The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (2003). Sharp's new book is the first complete history of Pink Films, or Japanese sex cinema. It includes extensive interviews with filmmakers associated with the genre. Check out the Fab Press site...