Tomoyasu Murata's White Road (白の路, 2003)

Winter solitude in a world of one colourthe sound of the windMatsuo Basho (Trans. Robert Hass)This haiku by Basho neatly sums up the mood and themes of Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰)'s 2003 puppet animation White Road (白の路/Shiro no Michi). The second of five planned short films exploring the psyche of a melancholy pianist, White Road has an elegiac and nostalgic tone.Like all of Murata’s puppet animations,...

Kojiro Shishido (宍戸小次郎)

One of the biggest challenges in CG animation is how to create a unique vision using a medium that encourages uniformity. The work of Kojirō Shishido (b. 1983) stands out for me because of the way he has used a wide variety of CG techniques in order create images that directly relate to the themes of his short films.Browsing through the online examples of the work of Kojiro Shishido, aka Hosozao (his user name is a type of shamisen), it becomes apparent...

Bob Kuwahara and Hashimoto-san

While continuing my research into the career of Ryohei Yanagihara of the Animation Sannin no Kai yesterday, I was watching contemporary American animator Ernie Pintoff’s short film Flebus (1959) on youtube when I spotted an animation entitled House of Hashimoto in the sidebar.Hashimoto-san is a Japanese mouse and to me at first it seemed like the usual stereotypical depiction of Japanese characters, complete with the phony accent and the squinty...

Shohei Imamura on A Man Vanishes

CineandStuff has posted a marvelous interview with Shohei Imamura about his rare film A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu / 人間蒸発, ,1967). The interviewer is Imamura's son Daisuke Tengan (né Daisuke Imamura). Tengan is a screenwriter and occasional director. Tengan is perhaps best known for his collaborations with his father (The Eel ,1998 and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, 2001) and Takashi Miike (Audition,...

Kurosawa's Suntory Commercials

While searching for Ryohei Yanagihara's animated television spots for Suntory Whiskey from the 1950s &1960s, I happened across this video of Suntory commercials directed by Akira Kurosawa. He made them during the filming of Kagemusha (1980). Francis Ford Coppola, who was one of the co-producers on the film, also appears in some of the commercials drinking Suntory with Kurosawa while conferring over the script of Kagemusha. These commercials...