Help Jeff Chiba Stearns complete his documentary Mixed Match

The Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the inventive documentary One Big Hapa Family (see my review) is raising funds on IndieGoGo to complete his latest film Mixed Match - a documentary designed to raise awareness about the need for more mixed race bone marrow and cord blood donors.  The sooner this documentary can get the message out to the wider community, the more lives will be saved.  The IndieGoGo campaign ends in 33 hours and your help is desperately needed.  Go to IndieGoGo to learn more and DONATE NOW!!

If you cannot donate money, you can help by getting the word out.  I also recommend putting yourself on the national bone marrow registry so that you can help save lives.  See the bottom of this post for information on how to do this for Canadians and Americans.

In the words of the filmmakers:

The Story

Mixed Match is an inspirational, emotional, and evocative feature-length documentary that explores the need to find mixed ethnicity bone marrow and cord blood donors to donate to multiethnic patients suffering from life threatening blood diseases such as leukemia.  This live action and animated film is a dramatic journey focusing on the main characters’ struggles to survive against incredible odds. 

The documentary will lead the viewer through the lives of young patients and families struggling to overcome life-threatening blood diseases.  While presenting medical concerns, Mixed Match will be a character-driven documentary that will highlight a number of exceptional, courageous, and inspiring participants. The film will follow recently diagnosed multiethnic patients in search of donors, some of whom must struggle to hold on to hope through countless rounds of excruciating chemotherapy as they spend months searching for a match.  A patient who is in remission after a successful stem cell/marrow donation will also be documented.  Another patient’s story is told through his surviving family members, as he was not able to find a suitable marrow match and, as a result, ultimately succumbed to his illness.  Lastly, the documentary will feature a joyous and heartfelt reunion between a donor and patient after a successful transplant, as the two meet for the very first time.  

Mixed Match is an important human story told from the perspective of youth who are forced to discover their identities through their deadly illnesses and how their mixed backgrounds threaten their chance at survival, thus highlighting why in this day and age, knowing our history and cultural heritage still matters.

The film is being produced by Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. (www.meditatingbunny.com), working very closely with Mixed Marrow (www.mixedmarrow.org).

The Impact

Race and ethnicity play a critical role in finding a marrow match for those suffering from fatal blood diseases. It is a lesser-known fact that in order for a marrow or stem cell match to occur between a patient and a donor, genetic markers on cells must line up.  Because these markers are inherited from parents, their children are a blend both of their parents’ markers.  Thus, for mixed patients, their mono-racial parents and relatives will not likely be a match, and their siblings only hold about a 1 in 4 chance of being a match. Many markers on the cells are specific to certain ethnic groups so multiethnic people have a difficult time when their tissue typing has unusual or uncommon combinations.  To put this in perspective, if your background is Egyptian, Japanese, and Russian, there is a likely chance that only another person with a similar ethnic blend could be a possible donor if you are diagnosed with leukemia.

Mixed Match addresses the fact that every year over 30,000 people in North America are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Currently, in the US, of the 7 million registered bone marrow donors and 100,000 cord blood donors, less than 3% are multiethnic.  This statistic, although proportionate to the population of mixed people in the country, poses a substantial challenge to a mixed patient given the endless variety of possible genetic combinations in the registry.  Finding a multiethnic marrow match in the public registry has been compared at times to “finding a needle in a haystack” or “winning the lottery.”  Therefore, this is a very timely and important issue. 

According to the 2010 US Census, the number of people who associate with having more than one ethnic background has increased by almost 50% since 2000.  Despite the rapid growth of the multiracial population in almost all reaches of the world, many people do not realize the risks that lie ahead for mixed people with blood diseases, and the hardship that comes with an almost endless search for a donor match.  

In Canada, there are only 1,694 searchable registrants identifying as multiethnic out of the over 277,000 that are currently on Canada's stem cell Network according to OneMatch.  We need to increase this number to help save lives. 

With this film, we are setting out to achieve two goals:

Spread awareness of the challenges and complexities faced by mixed people with blood diseases.

Encourage all people from all backgrounds to join the bone marrow registry and donate core blood to increase the likelihood of finding multiethnic marrow matches.  There are some rare cases where mixed people find matches from monoracial or people of different mixes so it's important to have everyone's support!

Other Ways You Can Help

Another great way to help us complete this movie would be to spread the word about this fundraising to your friends and acquaintances, as well as visiting the Mixed Match page (www.facebook.com/mixedmatch) and clicking the like button so we can keep you updated on our progress.  Of course we encourage you to join your national bone marrow registry and hopefully help save a life.  Please check out www.blood.ca (OneMatch) in Canada andwww.marrow.org (Be The Match) in the US for more info on how to register.  

Check out a CBC radio interview where Jeff, the director, talks about the importance of making Mixed Match at this link: http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/featured-guests/2012/03/29/jeff-chiba-stearns-documentary-mixed-match/ 

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Sunday, March 25, 2012

On this day I rose early and went for a stroll around the Eiffel Tower and along the Seine with Sakadachi-kun (see tumblr). I then hopped on the Métro Line 6 and headed to the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy.  There was a long queue to get into the Tim Burton Exposition – the one that first appeared at the MOMA in 2009.  Even though they only allowed so many people in per hour, the exhibition was still overcrowded and hot.  I was surprised at the number of parents who had brought very young children to the exhibition.  I witnessed one young girl’s innocent childhood being blemished with nightmarish imagery as she stared as if transfixed at a figure of an infant with nails in it.  It was worth putting up with the crowds to see Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) costume, as well as a long row of Jack Skellington heads from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in a lit display box.  Each head had a slightly different expression on it to give spectators an idea of the process of stop motion.

The regular museum of the Cinémathèque Française had free admission on this day.  It was smaller than I had expected, knowing what treasures are in the archives of the Cinémathèque Française, but there were indeed many delightful things on display.  Martin Scorcese has already donated some set pieces from Hugo (2011), but I was much more impressed to see the original magician’s coat from Georges Méliès’  A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1920) in full colour and with hand-embroidered shapes on it.    Some of my favourite things on display at the museum:  a self portrait of Asta Nelson  (here it is on flickr, but it not as vibrantly coloured or as textured in postcard form), Mrs. Bates' head donated by Alfred Hitchcockshortly after the release of Psycho(1960), Mae West’s serpent turban from Leo Macarey’s Belle of the Nineties (1934), original poster art from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and Nikolai Cherkasov’s costume from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-6).

For fans of animation, there are many wonderful things to discover in the Cinémathèque Française.  On the walls just before one goes upstairs there is original art from Hans Richter’s Rythmus 23 (1923) and Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale(1924).  The Cinémathèque also hold the collection of the pinscreen animation pioneers Alexandre Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker.  On the upper level of the museum there are two pinscreens on display.  A tableau from 1930 – presumably the one used for the groundbreaking film Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont chauve, 1933)  and a larger screen from 1943.  The large screen holds approximately 1,140,000 pins and was restored for the Cinémathèque by NFB pinscreen animator Jacques Drouin.  The smaller tableau had the image of Bébé Nicolas on it – a character invented by Alexeieff to amuse his daughter when she was young.

There was great excitement at the Forum des images on Day 3, for Raoul Servais (official website) had come from Belgium to see his old friend Yuri Norstein.  I was drinking coffee in the Forum’s café when he entered and witnessed the warm embrace between the two men.  Norstein was delighted to see Servais and introduced him to the audience at the screening of Norstein’s early works and collaborations.  It was wonderful seeing Roman Kachanov’s enchanting The Mitten (1967) on 35mm.  Many of the films in this programme did not have subtitles, but this did not bother me because I had seen the ones with dialogue before.  The highlights of this programme were Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Norstein’s The Battle of Kerzhenets (1971) The Seasons(1969) on 35mm in their full widescreen glory.  They were truly a wonder to behold.

In the evening, Ilan Nguyen  and Serge Éric Ségura did a long presentation on the career of Kihachirō Kawamoto.  This included many rare photographs and video clips of Kawamoto and projects that he worked on throughout his career.  Nguyen teaches animation at Tokyo University of the Arts and is a well known animation expert in France.  He very kindly gave me programmes from the Nouvelles Images du Japon festivals that he assisted in organizing at the Forum des images in past years which have included showcase of the works of Osamu Tezuka, Yōji Kuri, Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Kōji Yamamura, and many others.  The French premiere of Kawamoto’s Winter Days occurred at the 2003 festival.  According to his profileon the website of the French periodical éclipses (revue de cinéma), Ségura is working on two books: one about the career of Servais and one about Kawamoto. 

The presentation opened with a clip of Kawamoto singing a Russian song on Japanese TV – which thoroughly delighted Norstein.  The main thrust of the presentation was to demonstrate the way in which Kawamoto had to wear many different hats during his life in order to make a living.  It is very difficult for independent animators to make a living on animation alone. 

There were photographs from Kawamoto’s early childhood – many of which were not in the two Japanese books profiling his life such as those of his mother Fuku(1891-1940) and his father Kinzaburō.  Kawamoto was born and raised in Sendagaya – the neighbourhood in which he was to live for the rest of his life.  His family dealt in porcelain.  There was a photograph of Kawamoto’s paternal grandmother Suzu Kawamoto(1861-1937) who was a major influence on the path his life was to take: teaching him how to make dolls and taking him to the theatre with her.

In the chapter I wrote on Kawamoto for Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 (ed. John Berra, 2012), I mention the fact that Kawamoto was a big fan of Hollywood and European film of  the 1930s – even making dolls of Greta Garbo and Danielle Darrieux.  Nguyen and Ségura presented a pastel that Kawamoto had made of Swedish film star Zarah Leander next to the original photograph that he had used for inspiration as well as dolls he made of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.

For me the highlights of the presentation were photographs I had never seen before such as Kawamoto on the  set of productions at Toho including Senkichi Taniguchi’s Escape at Dawn (1950) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Actress (1947).  We saw clips of a Horoniga (character with a beer stein for a head used in advertisements for Asahi Beer in the 1940s and 50s) animated short directed by either Tadasu Iizawa (1909-94) or Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-99), as well as the first few minutes of Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo (1956) – which I would have loved to have seen in its entirety.

They also had on hand first editions of the Toppan storybooks, which Shiba Pro later published internationally – such as the Golden Press Living Storybooks series.  I have written about my copy of The Little Tin Soldier (1968) – click here.  There were also clips from other animation Kawamoto had done for the NHK such as the opening credit sequence of Okaasan Ishō and Boo Foo Woo (1960-7).  There was a series of Asahi Beer commercials with the slogan “Watashi no biru” (My beer) which were hilarious send-ups of westerns – Kawamoto had apparently been a huge fan of westerns as a teen, particularly John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). 

There was one bit of information that took me totally by surprise: I leaned that Kawamoto had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms.  Today in the west it has become quite commonplace for people to have tattoos, but in Japan such tattoos are associated with the yakuza.  Many sentō (public bath) have signs declaring that people with tattoos are not welcome to bathe there.  Kawamoto had his tattoos done between 1956 and 1963 apparently as a kind of act of rebellion; a way of marking himself as an individual.  Ségura and Nguyen even showed us a photograph of Kawamoto’s tattoos taken from the rear with him only wearing a fundoshi (traditional male underwear).  This was followed by a series of photographs from Kawamoto’s trip to Eastern Europe.  I looked at the famous photograph of Kawamoto with Jiří Trnka (1912-69) with new eyes.  Kawamoto looks very conservative in his suit: a small, unassuming man in contrast to the hulking form of Trnka.  To think that under that smart suit, Kawamoto was hiding an elaborate work of tattoo art!

One of the questions that had been niggling at me for some time was the mystery of Kawamoto’s first feature film: Rennyo and his Mother (1981).  This 93 min. puppet animation never plays at retrospectives of Kawamoto’s career and has never been made available on video or DVD.  They showed a clip from the film and it looks absolutely stunning.   After the presentation, I asked Nguyen about the availability of the film and he said that it also screens rarely in Japan as the rights are held by the religious organization who commissioned it.  The scenario for the film was written by Kaneto Shindō (Kuroneko, Onibaba) and it features voice acting by Kyōko Kishida and Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  Although it was not a personal project of Kawamoto's, rather a commissioned work to order, I still feel the work is significant and would love to see it some day.

During the overview of the latter half of Kawamoto’s career there were photographs of him at festivals and other events around the world.  Notable photographs included one of him with Yuri Norstein at 1985 animation festival in Varna – which is the occasion on which the two of them became friends, with Jim Henson in 1986, with Břetislav Pojar at Annecy in 1987, in Shangai in 1987 signing the contact to make To Shoot Without Shooting (1988), and with Karel Zeman and Nicole Saloman at Hiroshima in 1987.  The presentation concluded with footage from the Kawamoto memorial service in 2010 which featured a very moving march of the large puppets from his NHK special series Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

The presentation was followed by Takashi Namiki’s documentary Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto(1999) – read my review here.  The weekend concluded with a screening of Kawamoto shorts including a rare screening of Tadahito Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo and the Twins(1957), for which Kawamoto had crafted puppets.  Read about this film here.  I slipped out of the final screening event after this film, for I had seen all the other films many times before.

 

with the illustrious Alexis Hunot

I had a chance on the final day of the Kawamoto-Norstein event to get to know animation expert Alexis Hunot a bit better.  I am a longtime fan of his blog Zewebanim and was pleased to find that he is also a fan of this blog.  It turns out that the review that I wrote about Takashi Namiki’s book Animated People in Photo, struck a personal chord with Alexis because his uncle Jean-Luc Xiberras (April 1, 1941- December 26, 1998) is featured in the book.  My blog post apparently triggered Alexis to track down a copy of the photograph for his mother.  Xiberras was the director of Annecy from 1982 until his passing in December 1998.  It was under Xiberras’ direction that Annecy moved from being a biennale to an annual event in 1998.  There is an interview with Xiberras from 1997 on AWN as well as a touching homage to him from 1999 in Englishand Frenchwith tributes written by Frédéric Back, Bruno Edera, and many others. 

Alexis Hunot did his studies in cinema, but his love of animation began when he discovered the works of Back, Norstein, and Jan Švankmajer at Annecy 1987 where he worked as an assistant.  He teaches at Gobelins  and has a monthly radio programme with Florentine Grelier about animation with called Bulles de rêves.   You can see a video of him giving a lecture here, and here is the interview he did with Yuri Norstein.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

PREVIOUSLY: Kawamoto-Norstein @Forum des Images, Day 2 (Part II)

FIRST ENTRY IN THIS SERIES: Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1

On Friday, March 23rd, I took the ICE train from Frankfurt to Paris to attend the event Kawamoto-Norstein: The Puppet Master and the Painter Animator at Forum des Images.  The opening event was an exciting affair for not only was the legendary Russian animator Yuri Norstein there as a guest, but the Canadian pinscreen animator Jacques Drouin and one half of the Brothers Quay were also in the audience.  Drouin was one of the 35 animators who contributed a stanza to Winter Days (read review), and this was a rare opportunity to see the film on 35mm. 

The event was hosted by Isabelle Vanini (Forum des Images programmer) and Ilan Nguyen (Tokyo University of the Arts).  Kihachirō Kawamoto, in whose memory this event was dedicated, had been to Forum des Images on three occasions.  On one of these occasions, he presented Winter Days.   This 2003 event was captured on video and we got to watch footage of Kawamoto introducing the film.  This was followed by Kawamoto’s Self Portrait (read review) and as part of the introduction to Winter Days, Norstein shared some of his memories and impressions of Kawamoto. 

Norstein spoke of the great pleasure that Kawamoto took in making films with friends, and he joked that he had once seen a photo of Kawamoto at aged 3 and that it struck him that Kawamoto had never aged.  He still looked exactly the same.  Norstein felt that Kawamoto never grew up.  He retained his sense of childlike joy, and this could be heard in his infectious laugh. 

As Norstein spoke, a photograph of the two men together holding a puppet from Winter Days was projected on the screen behind him.  Kawamoto apparently gave this puppet to Norstein as a gift.  The last time that Norstein and Kawamoto spoke together, Kawamoto expressed an interested in making a film about the life of the Chinese poet Li Po.  I found this interesting because Kawamoto had made a short short animation for an Absolute Vodka internet campaign in 1997 (read review) in which the poet drinks vodka under flowering cherry blossoms. 

Kawamoto came up with the idea of adapting the renku poem Winter Days after a discussion with Norstein in which Norstein expressed a wish to someday adapt the haiku poems of Bashō into animation.  This is why Norstein was honoured with the task of adapting the first stanza of Winter Days.  It was Norstein’s own idea to introduce an encounter between Chikusai and Basho in his interpretation of the first stanza.  Read more about this at Anipages.  Kawamoto was delighted with the idea, and Norstein said that his contribution was well received by Japanese audiences though he himself was not fully convinced because he is a perfectionist and always thinks he can do better.

I have watched Winter Days on DVD many times but this was my first time watching it on 35mm.  It’s a very different experience watching it on 35mm – the colours are so different, the luminosity of the image is different, my awareness of depth of frame was heightened, and I noticed many interesting textures in some of the films that I had not before. The screening was followed by the “Making Of” documentary that appears on the DVD and this was in turn followed by questions from the general public.  During the discussions, a slideshow of rare images of Kawamoto screened. 

One audience member was struck by the music that was used in Winter Days.  The composition masterfully acts not only as an accompaniment to the action of each stanza, but also aids in creating a sense of continuity between each short short.  Norstein was unable to answer this question, but Nguyen was able to identify to composer as Shinichirō Ikebe, who also did the soundtrack to Kawamoto’s short film Tabi (1973).  Ikebe is, of course, well known to fans of Japanese cinema for his work composing the soundtracks to many Akira Kurosawafilms (Kagemusha, Madadayo, Dreams, etc.).  He has also worked on several Shōhei Imamura films such as Vengeance is Mine (1979), The Battle of Narayama (1983), The Eel (1997), and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001).  Hayao Miyazaki’s anime TV series Future Boy Conan (1978) was also scored by Ikebe.

Renku Animation "Fuyu no Hi" Kanzen Ban Box

One audience member seemed disgruntled that Winter Days appeared to only have had men work on it.  This false impression was given by the Making Of documentary, which only features male animators.  There was footage taken of the female animators at work among the extras on the Japanese DVD, but this didn’t make it into the edited Making Of doc which due to time constraints only included 17 animators.  There is an expensive box set edition of Winter Daysavailable in Japan, and I have heard that it contains extended interviews with all participants.

Okuyama working on Winter Days

Several notable female animators worked on Winter Days:

Noriko Morita does a lot of collaborative dance performances, often bringing together animation, music, and dance in innovative video installation performances.  See her profile at Monstra this year.

Reiko Okuyamaand her husband Yoichi Kotabecollaborated on one stanza using Okuyama’s distinctive copperplate engraving technique.  Okuyama, who sadly passed away in 2007, worked on many classic Toei Doga animated films and series.  (read more about her).

Maya Yonesho, a stop motion animator who divides her time between Europe and Japan (read more about her).

Uruma Delvi, a husband and wife team specializing in flash animation.  Check out their official website.

Azuru Ishiiki, who in addition to working as an animator is known as a Shimai dancer (see image of her dancing, see her JAA profile)

Reiko Yokosuka makes beautiful black on white brush animations (see interview)

Yuko Asano is an amazing puppet animator (see her website)

I.K.I.F. (half of which is female animator Sonoko Ishida).  I.K.I.F. have done special effects on loads of anime films from Pat Labor to Doraemon.

Stop motion animation pioneer Fusako Yusaki, who has lived and worked in Italy since the 1960s. (read more about her)

I should also mention that many male animators have women (often their partners/spouses or former students) working as assistants on their films.  Most notably, Yuri Norstein’s wife Francheska Yarbusovaand Kōji Yamamura’s wife Sanae Yamamura – both of whom are very talented artists in their own rights.

Someone asked Norstein about how he overcame the language barrier in order to communicate with Kawamoto.  He explained that he had a translator, but he also joked that after drinking sake, one understands everything.  I was impressed by how spry Norstein was for someone of his age.  He became especially animated when talking about Kawamoto, and I really felt that a lot of the complements that he paid to Kawamoto (eternally youthful, full of good humour and joie de vivre) could also be applied to Norstein himself.  He deflected an impertinent question about his ongoing adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat with a joke. My French is a bit rusty, but it was something about how he is only the pilot of the plane.  The implication being, I suppose, that the pilot is not in control of the weather and turbulence he might encounter along the way.

All in all, it was a very pleasant and informative evening – followed by a wine and cheese where I got to chat a little bit with Alexis Hunot of Zewebanim and met some of his students.   I also met Marc Aguesse of  Catsuka.  More on my animation weekend in Paris in coming instalments.

by Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

NEXT: Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum desImages, Day 2 (Part I)

Three Came Home (三人の帰宅, 1950)

In 2001, I was writing a paper on Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), and decided to find out if any American films had tried, as I feel Oshima did, to understand the horror of Pacific War from both the Japanese and the Allied perspectives.  Among the predictable John Wayne war films like They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945) and Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytyk, 1945), I discovered the remarkable 1950 film Three Came Home (Jean Negulesco, 1950).

The story is an adaptation of Agnes Newton Keith’s memoir Three Came Home (1948) about her experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II in North Borneo (today called Sabah) and Sarawak.  An American writer married to British forester Harry Keith, Agnes made a name for herself shortly before the war with her bestselling memoir Land Below Wind (1939) which painted a idyllic portrait of her early married life, the land and the people of Sandakan – then the capital of British North Borneo.

The film begins with the growing unease of the British inhabitants of Sandakan as they hear radio reports about the escalating war.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore, many husbands begin sending their wives and children back home.  Agnes; however,  refuses to leave her husband’s side.  When the Japanese invade British North Borneo, Agnes, Harry, and their young son George become prisoners-of-war. 

Agnes and George are separated from Harry and imprisoned first on Berhala Island and then they are shipped to the Bau Lintang camp near Kuching.  The women and children do not receive any special treatment and are forced to live on the edge of starvation in primitive conditions.  A Hollywood film of that era could not really capture the horror of the living conditions in the camp (lack of clothes and diapers, lack of hygiene and clean water, widespread disease) as Agnes does so movingly in her book, but the film does not sugar coat the situation either.  It is a rare look at the Pacific War from the perspective of an American mother.  The film was also shot on location as much as possible which gives it an air of authenticity. 

Husbands and wives separated by a trench.

Although Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay embellishes some parts of the story (a massacre of horny Australians, the stereotyping of the brutal Nekata as a hulking oaf) and leaves out some important aspects (the complexity of Anges’ relationship with Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuji Suga, how she made toys for her son, how she buried notes that she dug up later in order to keep a record of her ordeal), on the whole the film captures the essence of Agnes Newton Keith’s wartime experience.  She went through hell on earth in that prisoner-of-war camp, but emerged from the war with a surprising lack of bitterness.  Somehow, despite having had a miscarriage brought on by the stress of detainment and witnessing/experiencing torture and other cruel behaviour from the Japanese soldiers, Agnes did not learn to hate the Japanese.  She learned to hate war and what war does to humanity.  The film retains her sense of balance by showing the small gestures of good will made by some Japanese soldiers (such as the doctor secretly giving Agnes medicine)  in contrast to the cruelty and inhumanity of others (Nekata, the anonymous soldier who assaults her).

The casting of Three Came Home was really key to making this work for Jean Negulesco.  Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night, The Gilded Lily) plays Agnes – ideal casting because the women were about the same age and Colbert had a great range as an actress.  Colbert was nearing the end of her peak as an actress as there were (and still are) few good roles written for older women in Hollywood.  She unfortunately was injured during the Three Came Home shoot and lost out on the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) – a role which Mankiewicz had written with her in mind.

Col. Suga weeps - a man broken by the horror of war

The real success of the film hinges on the casting of Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat, The Bridge on the River Kwai) as Col. Suga.  Hayakawa had been a major Hollywood star during the silent era, but his star had waned with the coming of sound and he was stuck in France for the duration of the war under the German Occupation having gone there to star in French films directed by Max Ophüls, Marcel L'Herbier, and others.  Humphrey Bogart’s production company tracked him down to have him star as Baron Kimura in Tokyo Joe(1949).  As a seasoned actor, Hayakawa brings sense of humanity to the role of Suga – without giving this depth of character to the enemy, Negulesco would not have been able to really capture the core message of Agnes’ memoir:   

“If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling.  If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of ‘the next war’.  If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations.  If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive and sane.” (Three Came Home, p.9)

Maya Yonesho’s Top 20 Animated Films

Ever since I got my hands on a copy of the published version of  Laputa’s Top 150 Japanese and World Animation (2003) in autumn 2010, I have been writing off and on about individual animators responses to the 2003 survey.  There were quite a range of responses, all of which tell us a great deal about the animators themselves.  The first generation of postwar "anime" animators - like Yoichi Kotabe, Reiko Okuyama, Eiichi Yamamoto, and Takashi Yanase, were influenced by a wide range of both domestic and foreign animation both popular and artistic.  Animators who followed in the footsteps of this first wave of anime like Keiichi Hara, tend to be strongly influenced by domestic anime of the 70s and 80s.

Independent animators (ie. Keiichi Tanaami, Masahiro Katayama, Shigeru Tamura) who practice what some in Japan call "art animation" tend to be influenced by both Japanese artistic traditions and the best of world animation.  The stop motion animator Maya Yonesho has one foot firmly planted in Japan and the other in Europe and her lyrically beautiful films explore the idea of animation as a universal language, as you can read in my 2008 profile of her as an artist.  In the 2003 survey, Yonesho lists a wide range of animation from around the world whose animation techniques are as varied as their cultural origins. Yonesho's selection could easily make up the course contents of an introduction to world animation.  If you haven't seen the films in her list, you have really been missing out on some pretty remarkable art.

Almost all of the animation on Yonesho's list falls under the vague category of independent or alternative animation. The biggest exception is Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940).  This is an interesting choice because the most animators tend to choose Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Fantasia (1940) as their nod to the influence of Disney animators  Animation fans who only recall seeing Pinocchio as a child should get a hold of a copy and take another look, for it is a fascinating film in terms of its use of animation technique.  In a addition to using the novel technique of rotoscoping stop motion animation miniatures (a technique invented by Disney's competition, the Fleischer Brothers), Disney even had Oskar Fischinger contribute to the sparkle effect of the blue fairy's wand.  I think Fischinger's influence is quite obvious in the screen-cap I have chosen below.  Fischinger, of course, famously worked on the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" animation sequence for Fantasia - which was released nine months after Pinocchio, and had a massive row with Disney over stylistic choices.


You can support Maya Yonesho by ordering a DVD of her Abstract AnimationWorks from Anido today.

Learn more about her by visiting her official website.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Here is Yonesho's unranked list:

Crac!

(クラック！, Frédéric Back, 1981)

Swamp

(スワンプ, Gil Alkabetz, 1991)

 Divertimenti

(ディヴェルティメント, Clive Walley, 6 shorts, 1991-94)

Frank Film

(フランク・フィルム, Frank Mouris, 1973)

 The Magic Ballad

(おこんじょうるり, Tadanari Okamoto, 1982)

Briar Rose or the Sleeping Beauty

(いばら姫、またはねむり姫, Kihachiro Kawamoto, 1990)

Words, words, words

(コトバ、コトバ、コトバ, Michaela Pavlatova, 1999)

The Mitten

(手袋, Roman Kachanov, 1967)

Kirikou and the Sorceress

(キリクと魔女, Michel Ochelot, 1998)

The Fantastic Planet

(ファンタスティック・プラネット, René Laloux, 1973)

Hotel E

(ホテルE, Priit Pärn, 1992)

Study No. 7

(スタディNo.7, Oskar Fischinger, 1932)

Begone Dull Care/Caprice en couleurs

(色彩幻想, Evelyn Lambart/Norman McLaren, 1949)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

(真夏の夜の夢, Jiří Trnka, 1959)

Black Dog

(ブラック・ドッグ, Alison de Vere, 1987)

Linear Dreams

(Richard Reeves, 1998)

The Cowboy’s Flute

(牧笛, Te Wei, 1963)

Pinocchio

(ピノキオ, Ben Sharpsteen et al., 1940)

Hedgehog in the Fog

(霧につつまれたハリネズミ, Yuri Norstein, 1975)

Nightangel / L'heure des anges

(ナイト・エンジェル, Jacques Drouin/Břetislav Pojar, 1986)


Source: Laputa Top 150 World and Japanese Animation

On DVD in Japan:

Mitten [Regular Edition]

Puppet Animation

Frederic Back Collection

Shanghai bijutsu denei sakuhin shu Vol.1

Japan in Germany 7: Oshima (大島, 2010)

“This story makes no sense,” a frustrated German police officer says at the beginning of Lars Henning’s dark tale Oshima (大島, 2010), and asks the Japanese language interpreter to have the haggard and bruised-looking salaryman before him to repeat his story one more time from the beginning.  The man introduces himself as Taburo Oshima and says that he just arrived from Tokyo on business.

The opening credits are positioned over the clouds and a girl’s voice tells us that this is the story of her father, who in October 2002 came to Germany on business with plans of continuing on to the United States.   The tale that he told to the police is the last official record of his existence.  He disappeared without a trace.  The girl mysteriously goes on to explain that while her mother never told her what happened that night, she nevertheless knows what happened that night.

Oshima, played by Japan-born/Germany-raised actor Yuki Iwamoto, arrives in Germany in a haze.  In addition to jet lag, Oshima may be experiencing extreme side effects from the depression medication Opipramol that he consumes on the flight.  He passes out upon arrival at the airport, and is looked after by an airport employee (Hakan Orbeyi).  He somewhat recovers and stumbles out of the baggage retrieval area into the arms of an eager-to-curry-favour German businessman, Herr Kleinschmidt (Devid Striesow), and his interpreter, Frau Izumi (Nina Fog). 

Oshima’s wooziness continues in the car journey to the hotel and over the course of this half hour dramatic short, he passes in and out of consciousness due to a mixture of over-medication, alcohol consumption, and just plain exhaustion.  Oshima seems disinterested in his business dealings with Herr Kleinschmidt and barely even aware of his surroundings for most of the film.  In an off-hand comment to Frau Izumi, which she curiously does not translate to her boss, Oshima reveals that he has lost his entire family in an accident.   Izumi is drawn to him, but at the same time suspicious that this man may not be who he says he is.   Are we witnessing the mental collapse of a salaryman or is there something more going on here?  Oshima’s vision of a white unicorn on the darkened streets of this anonymous German city suggest deeper layers to this man’s story which the viewer must unravel for him/herself. 

The ambiguity of the storyline could have been disastrous if not for the sensitive and subtle acting performances of Iwamoto and Fog.  Their faces are very expressive and hint at a deeper emotional story than is implicit in the dialogue and narration.  Lars Henning (b. 1976, Hamburg) is the director of the much acclaimed short Security (2006) which won prizes at the Avanca Film Festival and Lübeck Nordic Film Days.  He pursued a postgraduate degree in television and film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln) between 2006 and 2010.  This is his fourth short film.  It is a melancholic tale with beautifully executed transitions.  The cinematographer, Carol Burandt von Kameke, and crew have done a remarkable job of lighting these very dark night scenes with great skill.  Many scenes have a masterful chiaroscuro look. With most young filmmakers today opting to go digital for budgetary reasons, it is a real delight to discover a short film shot beautifully on 35mm funded by cultural institutions.  Oshima is a rare gem that showed on arte before Christmas and at Japan Week in Frankfurt in November.  Looking forward to seeing more work by this director.  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Credits

director: Lars Henning

screenwriter: Lars Henning

cinematographer: Carol Burandt von Kameke

production company:  Radical Movies  / Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln

producer:  Ulrich Otto

34 minutes / 35mm

shot on location in North Rhine Westphalia

Cast

Yuki Iwamoto                    Taburo Oshima

Nina Fog                            Frau Izumi, the Interpreter

Devid Striesow                    Herr Kleinschmidt, the Businessman

Karolina Porcari                 Laika, exotic Dancer

Hakan Orbeyi                     Momo, man in airport

Jens Wachholz                    Police Officer 1

Markus Haase                    Police Officer 2

Remo Hofer                        Night Porter

Tanja Desen                       Airline Staff

Rosa Bergmann                  Girl with Wings / Naoko / voice over narration

Melanie Kühn                     Exotic Dancer

Pia Passion                         Exotic Dancer

Marie Iguchi                       voice over

Lars Henning Filmography

2005   Koslowski (15‘)

2006   Security (13‘)

2009   Driving Elodie (19‘)

2010   Oshima (35mm, 34‘)