Zakka Films: An interview with Seiko Ono

Rokkasho Rhapsody (Hitomi Kamanaka, 2006)

One of the biggest frustrations of fans of Japanese film is that we hear about a great documentary playing at international festivals and have to wait years before it is available on DVD.  Even then, the film is usually only released in Japan and without English subtitles – thus limiting the audience and making it difficult to use for teaching purposes.

All that changed earlier this year when the U.S-based company Zakka Films opened its Filmmakers’ Market with the aim of offering Japanese and Asian documentary filmmakers the opportunity to bring subtitled DVDs of their films fresh onto the market for consumption like fish at Tsukiji. 

Zakka Films is the brainchild of Seiko Ono, wife of respected Yale professor Aaron Gerow (author of Visions of Japanese Modernity and A Page of Madness).  After my dedicating the month of October last year to reviewing DVD releases by Zakka Films, I contacted Seiko Ono to learn more about how she came to start this exciting new DVD label.

Tell me about yourself and your background in the film industry.

In the late 1980s in Japan I started working at Studio 200 of the Seibu Department Stores. Things were about to decline, but Seibu still had lots of museums, movie theaters, performance theaters and galleries. Unlike the department stores in the US, they were trying to provide an entire life to customers: not just fashionable brands, but the arts as well. Studio 200 was one of the Seibu art spaces, and was sort of an all-purpose theater playing rare films, presenting dance performance, experimental music concerts, art exhibitions, etc. People working there, including me, coordinated many different kinds of events, and I had some wonderful opportunities to work with films which were not shown at commercial theaters such as Taiwan New Wave films. It was extremely exciting for me to work there, and in fact I learned so many things and met a lot of film people, which helped me later. Just before the 1990s, Seibu’s art spaces started closing one after another out of financial difficulties. People around me started leaving because no one wanted to be transferred to the shoe section or some other section of the Seibu Department Store. In 1990 I joined the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, which was preparing for the second festival in 1991 (the YIDFF takes place once every two years). After that, for nearly 20 years, my work involved programming and coordinating the YIDFF. I am no longer officially at the YIDFF, but I am still involved.

Zakka Films seems like a real labour of love.  What inspired you to start the company?

In 2004 my husband got a job at Yale in the US, and all of us moved to America. I still continued to work for the YIDFF from afar even though I was not a programmer anymore. I had more spare time to start thinking of doing something I had never done before, or something that could justify me living here in the US. Considering my long career at the YIDFF, it didn’t take a long time to get the idea to sell Japanese documentaries on DVD. I already had connections with many documentary productions and filmmakers. It was a quite natural idea to start thinking of working on Japanese documentaries. There were only a few Japanese documentaries that you could obtain in the US, and the few that existed tended to downplay the presence of the director, such as with Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said and Radiation: A Slow Death. The first is by Makoto Sato and the second by Hitomi Kamanaka, and both of them are pretty famous documentary filmmakers, but their names as directors were sometimes hard to find in publicity. Customers were not always even aware these were documentaries from Japan. I felt there was something not quite right with this situation. That was one impetus for starting Zakka Films. By the way, Zakka Films means 雑貨映画in Japanese. It is a made up word combination, but zakka in Japanese means miscellaneous goods, so I thought I’d deal not just with documentaries, but also with other rare films which are powerful and excite fans of good cinema. As you know, the first DVD of Zakka Films was The Roots of Japanese Anime, a collection of classic animation, not documentary. You see I had no experience in running my own business in Japan, and here in the US I was a non-English speaker, so I thought I should not try something too difficult at first. Classic animation had a broader appeal and there were already many fans of Japanese animation. Starting with this, I could learn how to produce a DVD, how to promote it, and how to sell it.

Although much of pre-war animation has been lost, many great animated films by Noburo Ofuji and Kenzo Masaoka did survive until the present day.    What criteria did you use in selecting films for The Roots of Japanese Anime: Until the End of WWII? 

If you want to access classic animation films, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is the best place to visit, but it is almost impossible for us to make a DVD from their films. Fortunately, there are some classic animation collectors in Japan. All the films on The Roots of Japanese Anime were from one collector whom I had known for a long time. At the beginning of this project, I had a longer list of films to include, but the process of working on permission and rights issues trimmed it down to eight films. For me Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (review) was the one which couldn’t be removed, since it was so historically significant. We also made a booklet that comes with the DVD which includes historical backgrounds of each film, and out customers have liked that.

Do have any plans to release more anime in the future?

Right after I released this DVD, I received requests from many customers about what they want next. Many of them were popular 1970s anime which were made for TV such as the anime of Fujio Akastuka or Go Nagai. If I won a fortune in a lottery, I might put out such DVDs, but that is a bit beyond our scale. However, if I have another chance to work on classic animation again, I would do it.

Zakka Films released four documentaries by legendary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto who passed away in 2008.  Did Tsuchimoto know of the plans for their release?

I wish he had known of this plan. Two years after his death, my husband and I visited his office, Ciné Associé, a company which was taken over by his wife and sometimes editor of his later films, Motoko Tsuchimoto. I told her about my project before the plans were even concrete, and she was very happy to hear of it, and it was her enthusiasm that helped start the project. Of course I needed to discuss the project with Siglo, the production company for Minamata: The Victims and Their World (review). Both of them were so supportive. Motoko-san provided us tapes, documents, books and whatever was helpful for Zakka.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Tsuchimoto’s documentaries about Minamata and Hiroshima seem more important than ever – particularly his focus on the victims of these manmade catastrophes and their stories.  What can today’s documentarians learn from Tsuchimoto?

Tsuchimoto’s belief was that “If there is no record, there is no truth.” When he started making documentaries about Minamata, Minamata disease was taboo: no one wanted to talk about this disease, which is why his first attempt to make a documentary about Minamata for television totally failed. So what he did was to enter their world: he and his staff started living there, and volunteered to do things like drive a car to help them. Minamata was a poor town and cars were still rare. After building closer relationships with them—a method that wasn’t unusual in the 1960s given the Sanrizuka series by Ogawa Productions—he and his staff gradually started shooting. Their office was always open so people from Minamata could make casual visits and Tsuchimoto could show them the rushes they just shot. Building trust, people who refused to be filmed at the beginning ended up turning to ask him to film them! That’s why he could shoot so many of the victims for Minamata: The Victims and Their World. 

This documentary became an important document in publicizing Minimata disease so they could be officially recognized as a victims by the government of Japan at that time. Tsuchimoto’s Minamata series is not just a document, it is a record of human dignity. For cinematic beauty, I believe some of his films should be ranked among the top films of world cinema history. You cannot find in his films the terrible images of the victims that you can find by searching YouTube with the keyword “Minamata.” He patiently waited until the patients were relaxed and tried to film their most beautiful expression. I think that’s how he in the end could create works that made you think deeply about social contradictions. After the Fukushima nuclear accident, many documentary filmmakers have been to Fukushima or Miyagi to make documentaries. I think it is fine to have many different styles and methods, and not all of them need be masterpieces. But I wonder how many filmmakers think like Tsuchimoto did about how to film such tragedies, and how their work relates to the issues. The documentaries I like to see are not those that are complete when you’re finished watching, but those that start then. Tsuchimoto’s films are like that.

On the Road: A Document (1964) is a groundbreaking film for its experimentation with the form of dramatized documentary.  Can you talk a little bit about why this was such a radical film when it was released and how it was received by audiences?

This film was originally made as traffic safety film for the Metropolitan Police, but it was shelved for nearly 40 years because Tsuchimoto did not make the film that was ordered. Tsuchimoto was working with the drivers union to expose their problems and unhealthy labor conditions, while also masterfully editing the footage like a city symphony, so when a police official finally saw the film, he called it “useless—the plaything of a cinephile.” Until recently the film was not shown openly except at some film festivals, so for a long time On the Road was a kind of phantom film. The production company went bankrupt, so the rights finally reverted to Noriaki Tsuchimoto himself, and the DVD was released in 2004 in Japan.

The name “Zakka” (miscellaneous goods) suggests that you plan to expand your catalogue to include more than just classic works of animation and documentary.  What is next for Zakka Films?  

I am going to continue working on Tsuchimoto’s works, but in the spirit of my company’s name, zakka (雑貨), I would like to extend my business and move beyond the limitations imposed by our size and finances. The project I just opened is The Filmmakers’ Market (FM). FM is a new marketplace for documentaries that tries to break down the walls separating Japanese filmmakers and foreign viewers and allows filmmakers to bring their English-subtitled works in for direct sale, kind of like a farmer’s fresh produce market. When I produce and release my own DVDs, there are countless steps such as making subtitles, designing the DVD cover, making booklets, and so on; that is a big investment in time and money, so we have to limit ourselves in what we actually release. But FM is basically Zakka helping independent filmmakers sell the DVDs they have already made to a foreign market. It opens up the possibilities to obtain rare documentaries, some of which are not even commercially released in Japan. We feature not only Japanese but also other Asian documentaries. All of the DVDs are produced by the directors and producers themselves; for some, Zakka will help make an English booklet or cover, but some may have only Japanese on the package or in the booklet (we will note as such when selling it). But and all of them will have English subtitles. Please come and look at the films brought to market!

産地直送 Filmmakers’ Market (official website)

ROKKASHO RHAPSODY  Director: Hitomi Kamanaka (read review)

In 2004 the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant was completed in Rokkasho village as a facility for reprocessing spent fuel from Japan's nuclear reactors into plutonium. The film spotlights the people of the village, who hold diverse opinions regarding this huge, nearly operational national project.

ECHOES FROM THE MIIKE   Director: Hiroko Kumagai

The story of the Miike Coal Mine, the largest mine in Japan, which ceased operations on March 30, 1997. Hiroko Kumagai interviewed over 70 individuals, men and women, including Koreans who were forcibly brought to Japan. The film looks at Miike not just to explore the past, but also to think about the future: what it means to work and to live.

BREAKING THE SILENCE  Director: Toshikuni Doi

In the spring of 2002, the Israeli army surrounded and attacked the Balata refugee camp. The camera follows residents living in at state of terror and records their lives and feelings.

ARTISTS OF WONDERLAND Director: Makoto Sato

This is a film about seven artists. It's also about seven people who are mentally handicapped. This has all the marks of a Makoto Sato film: the quirky humor and passion for everyday human life.

BINGAI  Director: Feng Yan

Bingai, a Chinese documentary by Feng Yan—a director deeply inspired by Shinsuke Ogawa—has just been added to the Filmmakers' Market at Zakka Films. Bingai won the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize (the grand prize of Asia program) at the Yamagata Film Festival.

MAPPING THE FUTURE NISHINARI  Directors: Yukio Tanaka, Tetsuo Yamada

Nishinari in Osaka is home to one of Japan's largest concentrations of day laborers, with much of the population being composed of homeless persons, buraku(a discriminated community of descendants of outcast groups), former yakuza, and Korean-Japanese. This documentary presents the people of Nishinari, not from on high, but rather from their own level.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Little Black Sambo and the Twins (ちびくろのさんぼとふたごのおとうと, 1957)

One of the highlights of the Kawamoto-Norstein event at Forum des Images in Paris was the screening of the rare Tadahito Mochinaga film Little Black Sambo and the Twins (Chibikuro Sanbo to futago no otōto, 1957).  During their lecture on the life and career of Kihachirō Kawamoto, animation experts Ilan Nguyenand Serge Éric Ségura showed the opening few minutes of Little Black Sambo(ちびくろさんぼのとらたいじ, 1956) – the film that puppet animation pioneer Mochinaga showed at the first Vancouver International Film Festival and caught the eye of Arthur Rankin, Jr.  (learn more). 

Little Black Sambo and the Twins was screened in its entirety.  It is the sequel to Little Black Sambo and was screened in its entirety (17 minutes) in a programme of short films by Kihachirō Kawamoto.  Kawamoto did not animate this film, but he did make the puppets for it.

Both Little Black Sambo and Little Black Sambo and the Twins are adaptations of books written and illustrated by Scottish children’s author Helen Bannerman (1862-1946).  The Edinburgh-born author lived for much of her life in India where her husband William worked as an officer in the Indian Medical Service.  The heroes of many of her books are south Indian and Tamil children.  The original books were meant to educate and entertain English speaking children about the indigenous Indian and Tamil cultures.  From today’s perspective Bannerman’s work depicts a colonialist view of these cultures in a similar vein as Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). 

The Story of Little Black Sambo was immensely popular in the first half of the 20^th century, but unfortunately later US editions of the story replaced Bannerman’s illustrations with racist African stereotypes.  Out of cultural and geographical ignorance, these stories retain the same settings and animals, thus promoting the false notion that tigers, etc. live in Africa.  The most notorious of these is Wizard of Oz illustrator John R. Neill’s 1908 version of Little Black Sambo, which transformed Sambo into an offensive pickaninny character.  This is believed to have contributed to the use of “sambo” as a racist slur.  The poet and social activist Langston Hughes condemned Little Black Sambo in 1935 as a "pickaninny variety" of storybook, "amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at." (source)

Frank Dobias’s illustrations of the 1927 Macmillan edition of Little Black Sambo are equally as offensive as those of Neill and they are the ones that the Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten used when they published a Japanese edition of the controversial book.  As this is the most well known version of the stories in Japan, many mistakenly believe it to be the original illustrations of the story.  Other Japanese publishers also created their own editions of the stories.  The book was discontinued in 1988 because of the racist nature of the illustrations, but was recently reprinted by a small press called Zuiunsha with Dobias’s offensive illustrations (learn more).  The quotes from the president of Zuiunsha in this Guardian article demonstrate the publishing company’s complete ignorance as to why the books are considered racist.

Knowing this background, I was somewhat trepidatious about seeing Mochinaga’s film at Forum des images.  It does indeed depict an African child in a non-African /pseudo-African setting full of animals that don’t quite fit the locale, but I was relieved that it was nowhere near as offensive as Ub Iwerks’s cringe-worthy 1935 adaptation of Little Black Sambo that portrayed the characters in “black face” complete with a Mammy caricature who uses stereotypical language such as “Now run along and play honey child, but watch out for that bad ole tiger.  That ole tiger sho’ do like dark meat!” The Iwerks version promotes terrible ignorance about black people in the name of comedy.  For example, in the opening scene, Mammy washes Sambo and it makes the water turn black.  

Ub Iwerks 1935 film poster and screencap of title card.  

Mochinaga's version of Little Black Sambo and the Twins is not without ethnic stereotyping – Sambo’s mother is a large, round woman who does fit the “Mammy” stereotype.  I am not familiar enough with African landscape and cultures to judge the authenticity of the African characters in the film, but in my estimation the approach taken towards the characters is very different from the Ub Iwerks animated short.  The Iwerks short has clearly exaggerated the black stereotypes in order to get laughs from the audience, whereas the Mochinaga film has gone for the kawaii approach to depicting the black characters.  The ethnicity of the central characters is not exaggerated for the sake of laughs, rather Sambo and his family are depicted in a loving way.  The laughs in the film are either of the pratfall variety or at the funny things that children and animals do that we recognize from our own lives.


The Kawamoto-made puppets also do not resemble the Dobias illustrations familiar to Japanese children.  The African characters do not have exaggerated lips and eyes.  At least, the eyes are not exaggerated in the tradition of the pickaninny caricature.    They are large and doe-like – the kind of Bambi eyes that we today associate with anime.  In contrast to the mother, the father is tall and slender and wears what appears to be a fez – giving him a very North African look.  This suggests that Mochinaga and Kawamoto made an effort to learn about African dress, but did not necessarily stick to one particular African culture.  The characters do have large ears, but no more so than white and Asian characters made by Mochinaga and Kawamoto in the 1950s and 1960s.  Apart from the darker skin tone and the curly hair, the children look very much like dolls and illustrations of Japanese children from the early to middle 20^thcentury.

The story of Little Black Sambo and the Twins is quite straightforward.  Sambo’s parents have to run an errand and they leave Sambo at home to babysit his twin brothers.  Sambo is a very responsible brother, but when he takes his eyes off the twins for a moment to do a chore, an oversized vulture (at least three times larger than the toddler twins - in fact, it is so big that in the opening credits when it is flying around in the background, I thought it was a dragon) kidnaps the twins and holds them captive at the top of a tall tree.  A pair of friendly monkeys offer to help Sambo find his siblings.  They are aided by a friendly tropical bird (possibly a parrot?) who leads them to the tree where the twins are being held captive.  While the vulture is away checking on his/her own children, Sambo and the monkeys climb the tree to rescue the twins.  The vulture returns before the second twin is safely on the ground and Sambo engages in a fight with the bird.  As Sambo is fighting the vulture, his parents return to find their children missing and follow the noise of the fight to come to their children’s aid.  The story ends with the family happily reunited.  They hold a celebratory feast and thank their animal friends for their assistance.

In the original story by Helen Bannerman, the twins (unfortunately named “Woof” and “Moof”) are kidnapped by evil monkeys and an eagle aids Sambo in rescuing the young boys.  I have never read the Japanese edition of this storybook so I do not know whether or not the changes in the story were written by Mochinaga and his screenwriter Haruo Mura or by the translator of the Japanese edition of the storybook.  Whatever the case, the Mochinaga puppet animation is presenting a common storyline in children’s literature: the family unit is threatened by an outside force, the members of the family join forces to combat this threat, and the story ends with the family intact again.  The anamorphic animals add interest for children, and one can imagine children who view this film re-enacting the dramatic scenes with their own toys at home.

The film is shot in black and white – which was quite common in the 1950s due to the cost of colour film stock.  It is also possible that the film was made with television in mind, and television was in black and white in those early years.  The puppets that Kawamoto made are sweet.  The faces are very expressive and the costuming and sets have been beautifully designed – simple and straightforward so as not to distract from the expression of the character movement.  It is a first rate puppet film for the 1950s – not as complex and elaborate as the works of Jiri Trnka and other Eastern European animators of the time, but certainly very well planned and executed.

Although it is clear that Little Black Sambo and the Twins was meant for preschool aged children, it is not something I would watch with young children not only because of the inaccurate portrayal of African people but also because it could instil in them an irrational fear of large birds of prey.  That being said, it is a shame that this and Mochinaga’s other puppet animation films are not more widely available for they are invaluable to the study of animation history and to the study of the portrayal of ethnic minorities in Japanese culture.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Credits:

Director: Tadahito Mochinaga (持永只仁) 

Producer: Kiichi Inamura (稲村喜一)

Original Story: Helen Bannerman (ヘレン・バンナーマン)

Screenplay: Haruo Mura (村治夫)

Music: Mitsuo Katō (加藤光男)

Cinematographer: Jirō Kishi (岸次郎)

Art director: Junji Eguchi (江口準次)

Puppets: Kihachirō Kawamoto (川本喜八郎)

The Black Cat (黒ニャゴ, 1929)

The Black Cat (黒ニャゴ/Kuro Nyago, 1929) is a record talkiefrom the silent film period.  A record talkie was a silent film played synchronously with a phonograph record.  Like today’s music videos, record talkies were designed as promotional devices for record companies and their songs.  People who enjoyed The Black Cat animation could have bought the record and played it on their own gramophone (record companies also manufactured gramophones) at home.

The children’s song The Black Cat was written by Kōka Sassa (佐々紅華, 1886-1961), husband of the popular Asakusa Opera singer Ruby Takai (高井 ルビー, 1904-unknown), with lyrics by Otowa Shigure (時雨 音羽, 1899-1980).  It was released by Victor Records and features the vocal talent of child star Hideko Hirai (平井 英子, b. 1918).  Hideko Hirai also features with Ruby Takai in the Kōka Sassa hit Chameko’s Day, which was made into an animation directed by Kiyoshi Nishikura (see review) in 1931.

On the other side of the Pacific, Walt Disney had made splash a year earlier with the release of Steamboat Willie (1928) which he co-directed with Ub Iwerks.  While not the first animated film to have a synchronous soundtrack, Steamboat Willie was certainly the most successful and marked the debut of the iconic Mickey Mouse.  Sound on film technology was much slower to come to Japan – not only because of a lack of technology but because of the tenacity of the benshi tradition.  The first animated film with a synchronous soundtrack would not be made in Japan until 1933: Kenzō Masaoka’s lost film The World of Power and Women (Chikara to Onna no Yo no Naka).  The first step towards sound films in Japan were the record talkies, and The Black Cat is believed to be the first of its kind.

The film is directed and animated by the legendary Noburo Ōfuji (大藤 信郎, 1900-61) in his signature chiyogami cutout animation style (cutouts using traditional Japanese paper).  Due to the expense and relative scarcity of celluloid in Japan in this period, cutouts were a common method for making animated films.  It was shot on 9.5mm film on a Pathé Baby.   I watched the film on the Kinokuniya DVD Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai (2010). The film was digitized by the National Film Center and synchronized with the original Victor record.  Both the soundtrack and the film show their age with much popping and scratching, but as so many films from this era have been lost we are lucky that the film survives in a relatively complete condition.

The opening shot is of chiyogami cherry blossom trees shedding a few petals.  Some boys walk along and sing of their desire to have a black cat with a red collar who dances.  A black cat appears and sings and dances for them.  The cat then introduces her brother, a tabby cat, who also sings and dances for them.  The boys also join in with the dancing and singing.  As with any successful children’s song, The Black Cat has a catchy tune and is repetitive.  It alternates between song and dialogue.  One can imagine children of the era mimicking the cat’s dance, not to mention the cry of the cat as she sings.  The bouncy rhythm of the song would also encourage clapping.  The second refrain might have inspired the children to leap like the cat’s tiger ancestors, while the third refrain might have gotten a bit wild with children pretending to throw a mouse just like the cat.

Examples of mattes being used in The Black Cat

The character movement is less complex than later Ōfuji films, but it is still very charming.  Ōfuji uses two main set-ups for the piece: a cherry tree orchard and a bamboo forest.  Some of the more complicated sequences involve spinning chiyogami paper and the “tracking” shots of characters walking.  I put “tracking” in brackets because it is not actually the camera that is moving, but the paper under the camera between shots – but this animation technique creates the illusion that the camera is moving over the scene.  As is typical for films of this era, mattes are used in lieu of close-ups.  There was no such thing as a zoom lens in the 1920s and it would have been more cost effective / time efficient to matte the image than to change the camera set-up for a close-up. All in all, it is a delightful piece of early animation history.

In addition to the DVD Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai, The Black Cat appears on the Digital Meme Box Set Japanese Anime Classic Collection.  A sample of the film with English subs can be screened on Crunchyroll.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Noburo Ofuji’s Whale (くじら, 1952)

Some of the most beautiful early anime from Japan are the silhouette animations of Noburo Ofuji (大藤 信郎, 1900-61) and Wagoro Arai (荒井和五郎, 1907-95).  Inspired by the films of Lotte Reiniger – whose pre-war films were shown extensively in Japan (Donald Richie, A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, p.247) – and drawing on the Japanese traditions of shadow plays and 19^th century utsushi-e (写し絵 / magic lantern shows), Ofuji and Arai created some of the most beautiful silhouette films of the 20^th century.

In his later years, Ofuji became interested in Buddhist and ocean themes.   The animator Kōji Yamamura  cites the themes of death, eros, and the human ego as examples (Shirarezaru Animation).  Ofuji's artistic masterpiece Kujira (くじら/ Whale, 1952) is one such film.  Like Kihachiro Kawamoto’s puppet films, which share Ofuji’s interest in Buddhist themes, Kujira features the themes of female suffering, natural phenomena that allude to Buddhist themes, and transformation.

  

Ofuji first made Kujira (鯨/Whale) in 1927 as a silent black and white film.  Inspired by the possibilities of colour film, he remade the film in the early 1950s using not only shadow puppets (silhouettes) but also cutouts of transparent coloured cellophane (影絵とセロファン切り絵).  The cutouts were assembled on a multi-plane animation table.  The backlighting of the animation table used in combination with the transparent cellophane allowed Ofuji to create highly complex layering of forms.  It is a breathtaking experience to watch and has beautifully rendered movement and transitions.

This 8 minute short opens with foreboding music that foreshadows the dark and mysterious events to unfold.  The story begins with the creak of a mast being raised on an ancient sailing ship.  Seagulls fly overhead as the ship navigates calm seas.  Aboard the vessel, men clap and guffaw and women's voices ring with laughter as geisha entertain the men with music and dancing.  

Ofuji dissolves between camera shots of varying shot compositions which, combined with the ghostly layering of transparent waves and clouds, give the film a dream-like quality.  A storm descends upon the ship.  The wooden ship creaks and groans as the sea violently tosses it about.  A giant tail of a whale emerges from the ocean and the whale seems to be following the ship as if in anticipation of the ship’s demise.  The ship’s crew struggle in vain to regain control of their vessel, but with a series of loud cracks and women’s screams, the ship sinks into the murky waters.

When the sea calms, a number of survivors float, their heads downcast, upon the wreckage.  One of the men finds the body of a woman floating in the water who appears to be dead.  Suddenly, the mysterious female form begins to move, terrifying the men.  As the woman cries out as she stretches herself into a standing position and one of the men immediately clutches her by the hair and drags her to him.  The more the woman struggles to escape, the more desperate the men become, tearing the clothes from her body and fighting each other to be the first to claim her.  The men’s fighting, as depicted by Ofuji’s shadow cutouts, begins to resemble a dance – their arms outstretched and curved move up and down like an interpretive dance depicting the waves of the ocean. 

The tension rises, stoked on by the crescendoing orchestra of the soundtrack, to a fever pitch.  At which point the black tale of the whale rises and the woman screams out in terror.  The whale, as in the ancient tale of Jonah, swallows the woman and her tormentors whole.  This leads to the most dazzling and abstract sequence in the film as the people float around the shadowy belly of the whale, desperately trying to escape.  The men are so consumed by fear that they have forgotten their desire to rape the woman.

An exterior shot of the whale shows him to be contentedly bobbing up and down in the ocean.  He blows water out of his blowhole and with it the woman and her three tormentors.  They land on the whale’s back, but it doesn’t take the men long to recover from their shock and resume their attack on the woman.  The woman resists, screams in terror, and races up and down the whale’s back in a bid to escape.  Two of the men fall off the whale and disappear and the one remaining man continues to chance the woman until his evil plan is foiled by the whale who raises his tail and flings the man to certain death in the sea.  A female narrator concludes the story, telling us that since this incident the woman has been spotted in the form of a mermaid.

Until this final narrative voice, the story has actually been told entirely through a combination of the visuals, the music of composer Setsuo Tsukahara (romanized as Tukahara in 1952), and the sound effects.  By sound effects, I mean not just creaks of the ship and the thunder but also the gasps and laughter of the human characters.   The dialogue in Kujira is also more incidental than narrative in nature.  Although the characters are clearly meant to look like ancient Japanese people the story itself seems to be influenced by a combination of Asian and European influences.  The mermaid, for example, resembles the mermaids and sirens of European mythology more than she does the hideous ningyo of Japanese folklore.  The idea of a whale swallowing people whole also has very famous precedents in Western literature.  Yet, as with the famous tales of Jonah and Moby Dick, the whale is intended to be symbolic not realistic.    I think there are many possible readings that can be drawn from Kujira.  For me, Ofuji is exploring the dark side of human nature with the woman, who is the most virtuous character in the tale, being reborn in a new form at the end of the film.

Correcting historical facts about Kujira

In 1953, Ofuji’s Kujira (on the programme as “La Baleine”) was part of the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival (under the name Noburo Ohfuji).  Kujira is reputed to have received much praise from the Jury president Jean Cocteau and festival attendee Pablo Picasso.  Although it has been reported in many publications that the film won an award at this festival, the official Cannes website does not indicate this. Many people have claimed that Kujira won “Second Prize” at Cannes – but as Cannes has no such prize this seems odd.  I have yet to find a reliable contemporary Japanese or French source that confirms the events that took place in Cannes that year – I may have to dive into the old French film periodicals in the Frankfurt Museum archives again soon.   I will update when I do.

It has also been often reported in error that Kujira appeared at Cannes in 1952.  The Japanese Movie Database and other online Japanese sources indicate that the film had its premiere in Japan in December 1952 – much too late for it to screen at Cannes in the spring of 1952.  The case for Kujira screening at Cannes in April 1953 is backed up not only by the festival’s official website, but also by the fact that Jean Cocteau was the president of the jury in 1953.  This would give more credence to the oft-mentioned anecdote about Cocteau praising the film.  The suggestion that Picasso saw the film at Cannes is also likely true, as Picasso had a studio in the nearby commune of Vallarius – as seen in this famous photograph of Brigitte Bardot visiting Picasso in his studio during Cannes 1956.

A good transfer of Kujira is available on the Kinokuniya DVD Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai.  Ofuji's original films are held in the archives of the NationalFilm Center.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Ōfuji Noburō: Kūkō no Tensai

Animated People in Photo (Takashi Namiki, 2000)

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1975 was a decisive year in the life of Takashi Namiki, the animation producer, historian and the chairman of Anido (read his profile here).  Kihachirō Kawamoto invited Namiki to go to the Annecy International Animated Film Festival with him.  It was not only his first trip abroad, but also the first time attending such a large festival dedicated to animation.  He’d attended and organized animation screenings before, but this one week at Annecy “was like a dream.”  To have so many people gathered together who shared his enthusiasm for the art of animation caused him to feel strangely elated.

At the time “manga eiga,” as animation was then known, was not held in such high esteem in Japan.  Before going to Annecy, Namiki felt that he was the only one who truly understood animation as an art.  This notion was shattered completely at Annecy.  To learn that there were so many people interested in animation as an art and to discover so many wonderful animated works at Annecy was an inspiration to Namiki.

In 2000, Namiki published a photographic chronicle of his friendship with the “animated people” of the world called Animated People in Photo.  It documents the faces of animators, directors, historians, producers, and the organizers of animation festivals that Namiki met during the 25 years since that first festival in Annecy. 

At Annecy 1975, Namiki could not speak the language and he didn’t know anybody yet, so he wandered around and took photographs.  The photograph that he is most proud of is of the great pinscreen animation pioneer Alexandre Alexeieff (1901-1982), who had shot to fame in 1931 with the film he made with his wife Claire Parker Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont Chauve).  The photograph opens the collection and is indeed one of the best photographs that Namiki shares with us in this book.  Other favourites of mine include a shot of Kawamoto chatting with legendary stop motion animator Karel Zeman at Annecy 1987, Barry Purves with chopsticks in Tokyo in 1995, Břetislav Pojar at Hiroshima 1985, a young  Hayao Miyazaki in some kind of a truck or van outside Shin-Akitsu Station in 1979, anime pioneer Kenzō Masaoka in his home (Tokyo, 1978), Les Drew at NFB Studios (Montréal, 1990), stop motion animation pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga at Hiroshima 1998, Ward Kimball doing an impression of Charlie Chaplin while holding a figurine of Chaplin (LA, 1991), legendary Chinese animator Te Wei (Tokyo, 1981), Yasuji Mori in front of his home (Tokyo, 1992), and Yasuo Otsuka in a Parisian antique shop (1999).  The photograph of the author himself at Annecy 1975 was taken by Kawamoto and is also one of the best photographs of the bunch.

Animated People can be ordered online from Anido.  The photos are not printed on glossy paper, but still look reasonably good.  This is a must-have collection for the animation aficionado – though it’s hard to beat Namiki as a collector: his private archive boasts over 5,000 films and many relics of early animation.  The afterword by Namiki is only in Japanese, as are the profiles of the people photographed, but the photographs are all labelled in English.  

Here is a complete list of the people included in the book by country:

Belgium: Raoul Servais (b. 1928), Véronique Steeno (b. 1950)

Brazil: Marcos Magalhães (b.1958)

Canada: Frédéric Back (b. Germany, 1924), Ishu Patel (b. India, 1942), Jacques Drouin (b. 1943), Les Drew, Wendy Tilby (b. 1960)

China:  Yan Ding Xian (b. 1936), Shuchen Wang (1931–1991), Te Wei (1915-2010)

Croatia: Joško Marušić (b. 1952)

Czech Republic: Břetislav Pojar (b. 1923), Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934), Jiří Barta (b. 1948), Karel Zeman (1910-89), Michaela Pavlátová (b. 1961), Pavel Procházka, Pavel Koutský (b. 1957), Vlasta Pospíšilová (b.1935)

England: Barry Purves (b. 1955), Bob Godfrey (b. 1921), Brothers Quay (b. 1947), John Halas (b. Hungary, 1912-95), Mark Baker (b. 1959), Nick Park (b. 1958)

Estonia: Borivoj Dovniković (b. 1930), Priit Pärn (b. 1946)

France: Alexandre Alexeieff (1901-82), Bernard Palacios (b. 1947), Jean-Luc Xiberras (1941-98), Jean-François Laguionie (b. 1939), Michel Ocelot (b. 1967), Nicole Salomon, Paul Grimault (1905-94)

Germany: Bärbel Neubauer (b. Austria), Marec Fritzinger

Holland: Paul Driessen (b. 1940)

Hungary: Csaba Varga (b. 1945), Edit Bleier, Eva M. Tóth, Ferenc Mikulás (b. 1940), Gizella Neuberger (b. 1953), József Gémes (b. 1939), Mária Horváth, Péter Szoboszlay, Szilágyi Varga Zoltán (b. 1951)

Israel: Edward Herscovitz (b. Egypt, 1921-2006)

Italy: Bruno Bozzetto (b. 1938), Giannalberto Bendazzi (b. 1946)

Japan: Fusako Yusaki (b. 1937, works in Italy), Hayao Miyazaki (b.1941), Isao Takahata (b. 1935), Kazuko Komatsubara (1943-2000), Takamura Mukuo (1938-92), Osamu Tezuka (1928), Kihachiro Kawamoto (1925-2010),  Yoji Kuri (b. 1928), Yoichi Kotabe (b. 1936), Yasuo Otsuka (b. 1931), Tadanari Okamoto (1932-1990), Yasuji Mori (1925-92), Norio Hikone (b. 1936), Taku Furukawa (b. 1941),  Syo Yoshimura, Ryotaro Kuwata, Goro Sugimoto (1924-87), Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-99), Shinichi Suzuki (b. 1933), Seiichi Hayashi (b. 1945), Kazuhide Tomonaga (b. 1952), Yoshinori Kanada (1952-2009), Kenzo Masaoka (1898-1988), Masao Kumagawa (1916-2008)

New Zealand: Bob Stenhouse

Poland: Aleksandra Korejwo

Russia: Aleksandr Petrov (b. 1957), Fyodor Khitruk (b. 1917), Garri Bardin (b. 1941), Igor Kovalyov (b. 1963, working in the USA), Yuri Norstein (b. 1941)

Switzerland: Bruno Edera, Georges Schwizgebel (b. 1944)

USA: Bob Kurtz, Caroline Leaf (b. 1946), Charles Solomon, Chuck Jones (1912-2002), Frank Thomas (1912-2004), Jimmy Murakami (b. 1933), Joan C. Gratz, Marc Davis (1913-2000), Myron Waldman (1908-2006), Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), Renya Onasick, Ward Kimball (1914-2002), Will Vinton (b. 1947)

Author & Editor : Takashi Namiki

All Photo by Takashi Namiki

Illustration : Masahiro Katayama

First Edition : June 2000

size: A5 (H210×W148mm) 112P/ Hardcover

94 photos are all monochrome

Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (桃太郎の海鷲, 1942)

World War II inspired many governments around the world to sponsor animated propaganda to rally support on the home front. Some, like the films of Norman McLaren in Canada, were aimed at encouraging people to support the war financially – see V for Victory (1941), Five for Four (1942) , and Dollar Dance, 1943 (NFB Overview). Disturbingly in the United States (see Ducktators), Japan, and Germany (see Der Störenfried), propagandists decided to target children for their campaigns by using characters from popular folk tales and movies. 

   

In Japan, the legend of Momotaro, the Peach Boy, was commandeered by propagandists as a patriotic hero. In the original tale, Momotaro was found by an elderly couple floating down the river in a peach. When he grew up, he became unusually strong. One day, Momotaro decides to Demon Island in order to defeat the demons that are terrorizing the people there and the elderly woman who adopted him gives him millet dumplings to take with him. Along the way, he encounters a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant and he gives them millet dumplings so that they will join him on his mission. They defeat the demons and return home with wonderful treasures. 

Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (桃太郎の海鷲/Momotarō no umiwashi, 1942) reframes this story in a manner designed to encourage people to celebrate the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor as a victory against evil forces. Unlike the original tale where Momotaro actually engages in battle with the dog, monkey, and pheasant, in Momotaro’s Sea Eagle, Momotaro assumes the role of a military leader who orders his troops of dogs, monkeys, and pheasants into battle while he follows the action from the battleship. “I, your captain,” Momotaro pronounces, “will await your return.” Momotaro towers above the animals who are quite childlike in both appearance and behaviour. 

The film sets up a number of gags to endear young audiences on the side of the Japanese forces. The ground crew are rabbits who use their floppy ears to make signals. On one of the planes, a dog and a monkey play with building blocks that are in danger of collapsing. The Japanese, the film suggests, are on the side of all that is good and natural in the world. At one point, they even befriend a baby sea eagle and his parent in a bizarre sequence that takes place on the wing of one of the aircraft – as if there would be no wind while in flight! 

The conceit is that Hawaii is Demon Island and that the inhabitants there are the demons of legend. When the attack commences, we are disturbingly shown events from the point of view of the people on the ground. The Americans are depicted in human, not animal form, but the horror of the event is subverted into slapstick comedy. The central American character resembles Bluto from the popular Fleischer Studio’s Popeye series. These films were well-known and loved by Japanese children in the 1930s and the character would have been immediately recognizable as Popeye’s nemesis. In the unlikely circumstance that a child did not recognize him as Bluto, he is clearly demarcated as “bad” because he has demon horns and a tail and is associated with heavy drinking. 

Apart from the fact that it is disquieting to see an event in which 2,402 Americans were killed and more than a thousand wounded depicted as if it were an extended slapstick comedy routine, there are a number of historical inaccuracies promoted by the film. Two of the most obvious are the suggestion that some Japanese troops were on the group and set airplanes on fire by hand (a chain of monkeys, like the S-shaped Barrel of Moneys toy game, descends from an airplane window to do this with matches) and worse, the suggestion that all the Japanese returned home safely. In actuality 55 Japanese airmen and 9 submariners were killed in action that day. 

The attack on Pearl Harbor  with Americans depicted as fat demons.

A great deal of the film is taken up with showing off Japanese military might. It takes many minutes for action to get underway because the opening scenes are so concerned with instilling a sense of awe and pride in the technology of war.  The film was billed at the time as being Japan’s first feature-length animation – which was a bit of a stretch considering that the film is only 37 minutes long. The true recipient of this title was the sequel to this film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors (Mitsuyo Seo, 1944). 

Momotaro’s Sea Eagle is the centrepiece of Zakka Films’ DVD The Roots of Japanese Anime which also includes a bonus extra of posters from the time advertising the film as “A thrilling, unparalleled naval battle that makes the red and blue demons tremble!” The posters also suggest that Momotaro’s army will not only be fighting Bluto but also Popeye and Betty Boop, declaring: “Roosevelt and the American gangster Popeye are no match. They face Momotaro’s troops and end up all wet.” Popeye and Betty Boop do not appear in the film itself.  Most disturbingly, the ads proclaim that the film is not only sponsored by the Naval Ministry but recommended by the Ministry of Education “as a living textbook for your children.” From today’s perspective it is certainly a valuable film to watch in order to teach about how propaganda is produced and disseminated. 

Apart from the troubling nature of the subject matter, the film is historically significant in terms of demonstrating how sophisticated cel animation had become in Japan by the 1940s.  It is important to note that the politics of the film do not reflect that of the director, Mitsuyo Seo (瀬尾 光世, 1911-2011), who actually had left-leaning political sympathies and was pressured into making propaganda films.  Tragically, due to historical forces beyond his control, Seo was saddled with these beautifully animated but deeply propagandistic films as his legacy to animation history.  Seo does at least have the distinction of being the first Japanese animator to use multiplane camera and his work is said to have influenced Osamu Tezuka.  It was also interesting to see puppet animation pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga listed in the credits for this film.  

The Zakka Films DVD includes informative historical information by Jasper Sharp (Midnight Eye) and Aaron Gerow (Yale U) which help contextualize the film. The Roots of Japanese Anime has optional English subtitles and comes with an informative booklet featuring an historical overview by  and film notes by  Individuals can purchase this DVD for a reasonable price from independent film distributor Film Baby. Institutions should contact Zakka Films directly for purchasing information

Film Credits:

Sponsored by the Naval Ministry 

Production Company: Art Film Production (Geijutsu Eigasha) 

Producer: Einosuke Omura 

Director and DOP: Mitsuyo Seo 

Music: Noboru Ito Animation Technique and Composition: 

Tadahito Mochinaga, Toshihiko Tanabe, 

Tamako Hashimoto, Shizuyo Tsukamoto 

Special Effects: Hajime Kimura

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Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011