onedotzero: j-star 11

onedotzero is a London-based moving image and digital arts organisation which commissions, showcases and promotes innovation across all aspects of moving image, digital and interactive arts.  Founded in 1996, onedotzero has gained a reputation for representing a diverse array of artistic endeavour via the annual onedotzero: adventures in motionfestival and its associated touring. Suppported by the BFI and the Arts Council England, it has a cross media and collaborative approach attuned to technological advances and fast paced change within digital arts and the contemporary culture landscape.

The Japanese portion of the festival selection j-star 11 screened at Nippon Connection 2012.  It’s an eclectic mixture of music videos, innovative commercials, and short films.  Thank You World from the Sapporo Short Fest 2011 and Blind by Yukihiro Shoda were made as a direct response to the 3/11 disaster.  I had not heard of Construction by Mirai Mizue, but it turned out to be a low res excerpt of Tatamp(2011) featuring twoth.  Some of the highlights for me were Toshiaki Hanzaki’s animated music video for Mr. Children – a popular band who have a long history of supporting alternative animation – tangefilms’ phenakistoscope inspired animated music video for Hitomi Azuma, the surreal geometric play of Shinya Sato’s video for Chateau Marmont, and Yasuda Takahiro’s two tone approach to the primal scream of Kaisoku Tokyo’s Copy.  For those of you who missed this event, a number of the films are featured on Vimeo.

cmmhotes 2012

Thank You World by Seiichi HISHIKAWA, J 2011, HDcam, 2’59 Min.

Christmas / Amazarashi by YKBX, J 2011, HDcam, 6’24 Min.

Blind by Yukihiro SHODA, J 2011, HDcam, 5’17 Min.

Construction by Mirai MIZUE, J 2011, HDcam, 3’15 Min.

Tsuchinoko / Gaka by Yuto NAKAMURA, Ayahiko SATO [rakudasan], J 2011, HDcam, 5’37 Min.

Nnet Station Op by Fantasista UTAMARO, J 2011, HDcam, 0’24 Min.

The Smell Of The Flowers / Mr. Children by Toshiaki HANZAKI, J 2009, HDcam, 5’23 Min.

Senkyou / Mergrim by Makoto YABUKI, J 2011, HDcam, 3’09 Min.

Xylophone by Seiichi HISHIKAWA, J 2011, HDcam, 3’05 Min.

Polygon Graffiti: An Uguisu Morph by QNQ/AUJIK, J 2011, HDcam, 4’32 Min.

Kira Kira / Azuma Hitomi by TANGEFILMS, J 2011, HDcam, 3’09 Min.

Assimilation by Takuya HOSOGANE, J 2011, HDcam, 1’29 Min.

Anomie / Amazarashi by YKBX, J 2011, HDcam, 4’37 Min.

Electropia / Joyz / Uk + by Noriko OKAKU, J 2011, HDcam, 4’39 Min.

One Hundred Realities / Chateau Marmont by Shinya SATO, J 2010, HDcam, 3’25 Min.

Kyu by Yyu FUJII, J 2011, HDcam, 1’29 Min.

Copy / Kaisoku Tokyo by Yasuda TAKAHIRO, J 2011, HDcam, 1’33 Min.

Damn What Ringtone / Hifana by Takashi OHASHI, J 2011, HDcam, 0’53 Min.

The TV Show / Takayuiki Manabe by Kousuke SUGIMOTO, J 2009, HDcam, 3’28 Min.

Henshin Gattai! by Shota SAKAMOTO, J 2011, HDcam, 1’33 Min.

Tourism Hokkaido “City” (TOURISM HOKKAIDO「街」, 2010)

I guess the idiom “if pigs could fly” must have a different meaning in Chinese and Japanese.  A Chinese student Shu Yi is enjoying her last day in Sapporo, Hokkaido.  While touring the sites of the city (Odori Park, the TV tower, the Clock Tower) she ends up in the famed Tanuki Koji shopping arcade.  There she encounters a young Chinese man named Guo Fu who has just begun his studies at Hokkaido University.   He is bowled over by Shu Yi’s charm and gives her a present of a figurine of a pig with wings, telling her that the pig is a symbol of good luck and the wings symbolize freedom.  Shu Yi finds this charming and insists that Shu Yi join her in her final tour of Sapporo.

At the end of what must have been an exhausting day (they trek everywhere from Sapporo Factory to Maruyama Park), the two part ways, with Shu Yi being coy about them ever seeing each other again.  Guo Fu invites her to come and meet him on the banks of the canal in the neighbouring city of Otaru, so that he can show her the town where he lives.  One day, Shu Yi does show up and they have a whirlwind tour of the sights of Otaru from the Otaru Taisho Glass Palace to the Asahi Observatory.  It seems like an idealistic whirlwind romance, but maybe Guo Fu should have investigated the English meaning of a pig with wings.

Yosuke Yamaguchi’s Tourism Hokkaido “City”(2010) won the Best Short Award at the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia.  The film was a part of the “Let’s Travel! Project” supported by the Japan Tourism Agency.  This contest encouraged filmmakers to submit short films that show off the rich and diverse cultural attractions that Japan has to offer tourists.  Unlike Heaven’s Island (2010), which showed off Taketomi Island in Okinawa without feeling like a promotional film, Tourism Hokkaido “City” is pretty cheesy and spends much more time acting as a postcard for Sapporo and Otaru than it does on developing the characters of Shu Yi and Guo Fu.  I only enjoyed the film because it was a natsukashii experience for me as I have a soft spot for Sapporo and environs because of the good times I have had there.

You can watch the trailer for this film here.

This film screened at Japan Week, Frankfurt am Main on November 5, 2011.

The event was sponsored by Nippon Connection:

Heaven’s Island (青春マンダラー, 2010)

In 2009, the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2010 and the Japan Tourism Agency sponsored a competition called “Let’s Travel Project” which encouraged filmmakers to submit short films that show off the rich and diverse cultural attractions that Japan has to offer tourists. The 14 minute film Heaven’s Island(青春マンダラー/Seishun Mandala, 2010) directed by Naoko Shimada was one of 13 films selected from 71 entries.  The film features Taketomi Island in Okinawa.

Cousins Satoshi (Shuji Kashiwabara) and Miki (Rina Chinen) are heading back to Taketomi Island for the Mandala celebration in honour of their grandmother’s 97^thbirthday.  Upon their arrival, they learn that their grandmother has died suddenly, throwing the plans for the Mandala festival into chaos.  At the memorial service, a recording of the late woman is played in which she embarrasses Satoshi and Miki by reacing out from beyond the grave to  play interfering matchmaker with the two of them.

After the funeral, Miki discovers her grandmother’s diary and reading it is shocked to learn that the elderly woman was carrying on an affair with someone who had left the island and was due to return to for the Mandala celebration.  Miki and Satoshi are determined to find out the man's identity.  They narrow down their search to three possible candidates: Mr. Shigemori, Mr. Tomori, and Mr. Kinjo.  Once the detective work begins, hilarity ensues.

Heaven’s Island is a rip-roaring romantic comedy with a dash of detective story thrown in for good measure.  Naoko Shimada is a very able director who sets a fast tempo for the comedy through her editing and use of engaging, and often amusing, camera angles.  The film does successfully show off Taketomi as an appealing destination for travel, and does so without seeming like a commercial.  The characters are endearing and the story amusing - the premise would be equally suitable material for a feature-length film.  Check out the trailer here.

This film screened at Japan Week, Frankfurt am Main on November 5, 2011.

The event was sponsored by Nippon Connection:

Jeff Chiba Stearns wins Webby Award for Best Branded Entertainment

I was delighted to learn this evening that Yonsei Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns and his company Meditating Bunny Studio has won the Webby Award for Best Branded Entertainment for 2011.

His film Ode to a Post-It Note (for 3M Canada - click on the title to watch it on youtube) beat out some pretty stiff competition from Funny or Die for their video Snoop Dogg vs LL Cool J: The Ulitmate Halo Smack Down, Digitas’s Arcade Fire UNSTAGED Pre-Show, Pererira & O’Dell’s LEGO CLICK: A Short Film, and agencytwofifteen for XBox Halo Reach - Deliver Hope.

While his competition may have had star power and strong brand recognition on their side, I believe that Jeff’s piece won because of his innovative use of stop motion animation in a way that was relevant to the product itself. I reviewed his documentary One Big Hapa Family (2010) last December, and was impressed by his combination of found materials, documentary footage, and animation.

Congratulations Jeff and I can’t wait to see your next animation/documentary project!!

One Big Hapa Family is available for international purchase on Region-Free DVD via the Official Website. It includes both the 85’ Director’s Cut and the 48’ Broadcast version. Bonus materials: One Big Hapa Family CD featuring the soundtrack by Genevieve Vincent.

Jeff Chiba Stearns Filmography
(click on links to watch the films/trailers)

2000 Kip and Kyle

2001 The Horror of Kindergarten

2005 What Are You Anyways?

2007 Yellow Sticky Notes

2010 One Big Hapa Family

2010 Ode to a Post-It Note

To learn more about the film check out:

A talk by Jeff Chiba Stearns after the premiere in Calgary

and

An Interview with Jeff Chiba Stearns

Kihachiro Kawamoto's Puppets of Chopin and George Sand

In Japan earlier this year, the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), saw the re-release of Géza von Bolváry’s German-language film Abschiedswalzer: Zwei Frauen um Chopin (Farewell Waltz /別れの曲, 1934). The film stars Wolfgang Liebeneiner as Chopin and Sybille Schmitz as George Sand. Schmidt is perhaps best known today for having starred in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) and for being the inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1984).

This film is rarely screened today – in fact it’s not even available on DVD here in Germany. However, the film is actually important in Japanese film history.  According to Masao Yokota’s writings on the early life of Kihachiro Kawamoto in Kawamoto Kihachirō: Ningyō – kono inochi aru mono (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007), Kawamoto was so impressed by the film Farewell Waltz that he designed puppets in the likenesses of Chopin and George Sand.

Glamour shot of Danielle Darrieux

Today Kawamoto’s name may be synonymous with animation that celebrates Japanese traditional and modern literature and theatre, but in his youth he was actually a huge fan of foreign films. In his teens and early twenties, he was much more likely to be watching Hollywood or French films than Japanese fare. Yokota writes that Kawamoto also made dolls modeled on Greta Garbo and the French star Danielle Darrieux. I do not know if these dolls survive, but the Iida City Kawamoto Kihachiro Puppet Museum is clearly aware of this history because I found reference to a screening of a 1953 Danielle Darrieux film (Madame de…, Max Ophüls) at the museum in an entry on their website from last year.

Check out the Japanese trailer for Farewell Waltz here:

While the book Kawamoto Kihachirō: Ningyō – kono inochi aru mono does not have any photos of these early dolls (that I have found yet - but it is an astonishing treasure trove of photographs of Kawamoto's entire career), the influence of Western culture on Kawamoto can be seen in the Asahi Cider ads of the late 1950s and early 1960s featuring The Three Little Indian Kids:

These puppets were designed by Shigeru Hijikata and made by Kawamoto and have appeared on a wide variety of media:

Further posts on Kawamoto:

Kihachiro Kawamoto Self Portrait (1988)
The Passing of a Puppet Master: Kihachiro Kawamoto 1925-2010
Winter Days

Must haves for your DVD collection:

Shisha no Sho

Book of the Dead (Puppet Animation)

Kihachiro Kawamoto Sakuhin shu

(Short Film Collection)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Nagi Noda (野田 凪, 1973-2008)

Today marks the second anniversary of the death of Nagi Noda (野田 凪, 1973-2008), the brilliant pop artist and fashion icon. Not only did she make weird and wonderful videos (short films, music videos, and commercials), but she also had her own line of stuffed animals called HanPanda, designed unusual hair art called Hair Hats, and designed her own fashion line called Broken Label in collaboration with Mark Ryden. She won many awards for her work including the prestigious Bronze Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2006 for her Coca-Cola commercial “What Goes Around Comes Around”. Although her life was tragically cut short by injuries she sustained after a traffic accident, her vibrant creative vision lives on to inspire younger artists.

In her memory, I have assembled as complete a videography as I could find. For more information, videos, and slideshows, visit her official homepage. For an extra special treat, check out the making of Nagi Noda's video for Scissor Sisters:



Videography

2000 Short Film  “46 Wrinkles”

2002 Short Film  “Small Square Stories”

2002 Commercial  Laforet “Butterfly Ribbons”

2002 Commercial  Laforet “Autumn of appetite” / “Preparation is troublesome”

2002 Commercial  Laforet “It is Christmas Soon” / “Make-up is troublesome”

2003 Short Film  “Wedding Dress, Mourning Dress, Party Dress”

2003 Short Film  “Small Love Stories”

2003 Music Video  Yuki “Sentimental Journey”



2003 Short Film  "A Small Love Story About Alex and Juliet"



2003 Commercial  Laforet “I get married smooooothly”

2003 Commercial  Laforet “Imaginary pregnancy”

2003 Commercial  Laforet “They become large in a hurry for Christmas (grow up)”

2003 Commercial  Laforet “They become large in a hurry for Christmas (kiss)”

2003 Commercial  GEKKEIKAN “GEKKEIKAN”



2003 Commercial  Suntory “Latte Latte”

2003 Commercial  Suntory “Hot Latte Latte”

2003 Commercial  Suntory “Oolong Cha”



2004 Short Film  “Mariko Takahashi’s Fitness Video for Being Appraised as an ‘Ex-Fat Girl’”

• A surreal parody of Susan Powter’s first work out video.

2004 Commericial  Laforet “Cat Walk with Shadows”



2004 Commercial  Laforet “Animal Girl”



2005 Animation – Opening Credits  "Honey and Clover"



2005 Music Video  OGIYAHAGI “Must Be”



2005 Music Video  OGIYAHAGI “I love your face”



2006 Commercial  Coca Cola “What Goes Around Comes Around”

• Music by Jack White

2006 Commercial  MONOPRIX “Vegetables”


Monoprix Vegetables (Nagi Noda) from Cosmo Sapiens on Vimeo.

2006 Commercial  MONOPRIX “Mascara”


Monoprix Mascara (by Nagi Noda) from Cosmo Sapiens on Vimeo.

2006 Commercial  MONOPRIX “Jungle”


Monoprix Jungle (Nagi Noda) from Cosmo Sapiens on Vimeo.

2006 TV Ecocolo

2006 Music Video  TIGA “Far From Home”



2007 Commercial  “b+ab spring summer 2008”



2007 Music Video  Scissor Sisters “She’s My Man”


Scissor Sisters - She's My Man
Hochgeladen von G4briHell. - Entdecke weitere Musik Videos. 

2008  Commercial LG Stream Power

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

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 are believed to have served as part of the inspiration behind the Bill Murray Suntory commercial scene in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

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 program. Yusaki lives and works in Milan where she runs workshops for aspiring animators, such as Muyuko Tazumi. I have also found some of the Fernet Branca commercials that she did in the 1970s.

No complete filmography seems to exist for Fusako Yusaki on the web, but one source that I have found claims that her complete works are included in the collection of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Other bits and pieces of information I have been able to collect on her:

- worked on the famous Fernet Branca commercials (1968-1980)
Anagli: Animali (1991)
Peo Gallery - Katsushika Hokusai (2006)
Peo Gallery II (2006)
- has been on the jury of many international animation festivals

Here she is on Italian television:

Judging from the style, I believe that this is one of her Fernet Branca ads from the 1970s:

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2007