Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto (1999)

Takashi Namiki(なみきたかし, b. 1952) of Anido has been documenting the world of animation both at home and abroad since the 1970s through his writings, photographs, and by collecting materials for his private archive.  Last fall, I wrote about his book Animated People in Photo, which is a photo essay of his encounters with animators and animation festivals over the years.  His 1999 documentary film Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto (人形と生きる〜川本喜八郎の世界) screened on Day 3 of the Kawamoto-Norsteinevent at Forum des Images in Paris.  It was introduced by Ilan Nguyen (Tokyo University of the Arts), who said that he believed that it was the first time for the film to screen outside of Japan.

The subject of the documentary is not Kawamoto the puppet animator, but Kawamoto the puppet maker and puppet theatre director.  Starting in 1972, Kawamoto joined forces with his good friend Tadanari Okamoto to host a number of puppet animation festivals known as the Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows.  As they did not produce enough animated shorts to fill a full programme, Kawamoto came up with the idea of including live puppet theatre performances.  Not only would this lengthen the programme, but live shows could also incorporate the humorous aspects of puppet performances.  Apart from his first independent animation The Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (1968), Kawamoto’s animated works tend to be more serious and contemplative.  Yet everyone who knew Kawamoto personally speaks of his warm sense of humour.  The live puppet shows demonstrate this other side to his personality.

The Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows ceased in 1980, and with Okamoto passing away in 1990, a revival of the event seemed unlikely.  However, 27 years after the first Kawamoto + Okamoto event, Kawamoto decided to put on the puppet show one more time.  Namiki’s film documents the event from the cramped rehearsals in Kawamoto’s tiny Sendagaya studio to the one night only performance at the Mitsukoshi Theatre in September 1999.  The show featured a parade of the puppets from the NHK drama Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国志/Sangokushi) as well as performances of four original theatrical works written by Kawamoto:

Hito mo Migakite no Chi ni Koso (人も磨き手後にこそ)

This puppet play was performed at the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972.  It features an old, tattooed man in a sentō (communal bath house).  When bathing in Japan, one first squats with a shower or water in a basin.  One must wash oneself thoroughly before entering the communal hot bath.  The tattooed man sits with the wash basin blocking the view of his penis from the theatre audience.  This is a wordless drama in which the comedy comes from the fact that the man’s movements are in time with the accompanying classical music.  As the tempo increases, so too do his movements with dramatic pauses being made comical by him tipping the wash basin towards his private parts.  At one point, the increase in tempo and volume results in him quite vigorously scrubbing his penis which caused a great deal of laughter.  Another uproarious moment occurs when he stretches out his arm and plays it like a fiddle – in the style of an air guitar performance. 

There is also the humour of familiarity in this piece, as public bathing is an important cultural tradition with etiquette that all of the audience members would recognize.  Thus another funny sequence involves the old man trying to get from the wash basin to the hot bath in a dignified manner by trying to hold the small white towel over his private parts.   He then sticks his toe into the bath and jumps back in shock at how hot the water is, before easing himself in.

If I had seen this puppet play before hearing Ilan Nguyen and Serge Éric Ségura’s lecture on the life and career of Kawamoto, I would have presumed that the old man was a yakuza because of his ornately tattooed body.  Nguyen and Ségura revealed that Kawamoto himself had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms that he acquired in the late 1950s / early 1960s in order to mark himself as an individual.  With this in mind, it is likely that there is an element of autobiography to this amusing piece.

Kurui toki no Kami da no mi (くるしいときのカミだのみ)

This puppet play was performed at the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972.  Like

Hito mo Migakite no Chi ni Koso, this puppet play is a wordless physical comedy set to music.  It features a salaryman going to the toilet – quite literally “toilet humour”!  The title suggests that the struggle that one sometimes has on the toilet can be a religious experience.

                                                                                                                                  

Good Night, I said!  (おやすみなさいったら！/Oyasumi-nasaittara!)

This comic puppet play was performed at the first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1972.  It is also set to music.  All parents struggle with getting their kids to bed at night.  In this puppet drama the struggle is multiplied as a mother tries to convince four babies to go to sleep.  The piece is performed to the German lullaby “Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, schlaf’ ein” by Mozart.  The mother dozes off herself while waiting for her little ones to sleep and the babies crawl around under the blankets.  The large bed is vertical on the stage and leaning slightly backward so as to accommodate both the spectators watching the action and the puppeteers.

Scheming World from Inside and Out (世間胸算用近頃腹裏表/ Seken Munazanyou Chikagoro to Tatemae)

This puppet play was performed at the fifth Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show in 1976 and was also a part of the reprise event in 1979.  In an  introductory interview Kawamoto explains that audiences found the subject matter of this play quite shocking when it was first performed.  Times have changed in the ensuing quarter century and he thinks that the audience in 1999 will find it fairly tame.

This puppet play does have dialogue and concerns the inner workings of a Japanese home.  Traditionally in a Japanese family, when the eldest son marries he becomes the head of the family.  This usually means that three generations of a family will live together under one roof.  Unsurprisingly, this often results in the new wife and her mother-in-law butting heads on the way in which the household is run.  Mother-in-laws tend to have very fixed ideas about how to manage the home having been in charge of their own homes for at least two decades.  The young wife may bring modern ways or even different ways of doing things learned from her own mother into the home.  No matter what one's cultural background, we can all recognize that this is a recipe for trouble.

This puppet play reenacts the strife that results from his scenario with the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law being sweet to each other’s faces but saying things to each other that are either sarcastic or have a double-meaning.  Behind each other’s backs they complain about each other and take out their frustrations with having to live together on the chores.  The mother-in-law takes out her frustration on the laundry.  She even goes so far as to spit on her daughter-in-law’s shirt before ironing it.  Her main complaint is that she things her daughter-in-law is lazy and unskilled in housework. 

The daughter-in-law is mainly upset at the restrictions her mother-in-law imposes on her life.  On this day,  her mother-in-law has chosen not to go out, and this means that the daughter-in-law must also stay at home at do chores when she would rather be gossiping with her friends.  She cannot allow the mother-in-law does not do all the chores and take all the credit for the housekeeping.  The daughter-in-law takes out her frustration on preparing supper.  She attacks the fish with all her pent up rage.  At the end of the play, the mother-in-law pretends to enjoy the food her daughter-in-law has prepared and the daughter-in-law feigns delight with her neatly shirt.  The masks of domestic harmony are back up again and the women continue in their struggle to live together for the sake of the family.

One only gets a taste of these puppet plays for the original theatrical performance lasted 3 hours and the documentary is a comfortable 40 minutes.  The puppeteers, in the tradition of Bunraku, perform entirely in black with the faces also masked in black.  It was hard to tell if they were also using 3 puppeteers for each puppet as I was so wrapped up in the performance that I forgot to pay attention.  The puppets were large and did have a minimum of 2 puppeteers – as you can see in the screencaps of the performances. 

Kawamoto wrote, directed, produced, and performed in the puppet dramas.  He talks at some length about the craft of the puppet theatre and the challenge of preparing the puppeteers for the performance – they were quite young and many were new to puppeteering.  Most of Kawamoto’s original collaborators had either passed away or had moved on to other things in their lives since the 1970s.  He mentioned one puppet master in particular named Koga who had passed away and whom he greatly missed.  They spent two months rehearsing for the performance.  In order to bring the puppet convincing to life, Kawamoto explained that the performers need to have mutual respect for each other and work towards being in harmony with one another.  Although they made a few errors during the live show, Kawamoto seemed content with the final result.

The documentary is a very low resolution video with amateur English subtitles.  However, the singularity of the subject matter makes the film must-see viewing for fans of Kawamoto and scholars of Japanese puppet theatre.  It reveals a very different side of Kawamoto as not only a puppet designer and creator, but also a comic writer, theatrical director, and media personality.  It is impossible to recreate the Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows of the 70s now that the key figures have passed away, but this documentary gives us a glimpse of what the theatrical portion of these shows must have been like.  There is also footage from a TV talk show that shows Kawamoto having a comical exchange with his good friend the actress and TV personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  She teases him about how tiny his studio is and wonders how he could possibly work in such a cramped space.  Kuroyanagi did voice acting for several Kawamoto puppet animations: The Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (1968), Rennyo and his Mother (1981), and The Book of the Dead (2005).

Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto is available for loan from Anido.  Click here for more information.

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)

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

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

Saturday, March 24, 2012

At 19:00, Ilan Nguyen led a conversation with Yuri Norstein about his longstanding and complex relationship with Japan.  In addition to having been a friend to his fellow animator Kihachirō Kawamoto, whom he still affectionately calls “Chiro” just as he did when Kawamoto was alive, Norstein is revered as a master of animation in Japan and has visited the country on many occasions.

Norstein discovered Japanese culture at a young age.  In his mid-teens, he found a small book of haiku poetry by Bashō in the library.  The book featured one poem per page – a clever editing choice which emphasized the minimalism of the three stark lines of poetry on the plain page.  One of the poems that he recalls being in the book is the famous one about the frog:

furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

 mizu no oto

an ancient pond

a frog jumps in

the splash of water

(Bashō, 1686)

This book of haiku made a very strong impression on Norstein.  He had learned in school that poems had rhythm and rhyme yet these poems had neither.  He was moved to buy himself a copy of the book and each time he looked at the poems, he was surprised anew by them.  “Can one say that this is poetry?” he would ask himself. 

Many years later he came across a book of Japanese woodcut prints at a friend’s house and he was again surprised.  The images had a different sense of perspective and volume than what he was used to seeing in Russia.  For Norstein, it was a revelation to realize that there was another way of seeing the world and these two incidents marked the beginning of his love for Japan. 

He got to know Russian translators of Japanese and began to learn more about the importance of gesture and movement in Japanese culture.  One thing that he learned from Japanese culture was that a subject that is very simple can express something very great.  He explained that he finds the same thing in the fiction of Marcel Proust.  In À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-27), Proust’s simple observations of everyday life take on great meaning.  Norstein also remarked that this was also true of Homer’s The Iliad.

While listening to Norstein talk, it occurred to me that his interest in Japanese poetry, and particularly way in which time is expressed in Japanese poetry has much in common which his fellow compatriots Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, who were both also greatly influenced by haiku poetry and Japanese aesthetics.  The influence of Eisenstein's writings on Norstein has been written about by animation scholar Nobuaki Doi (see his ASIFA profile).  The conversation with Norstein was accompanied by a slide show by Ilan Nguyen and among the many photographs and items that were shown there was a photograph of Norstein visiting the Eisenstein Cine-club in Tokyo. 

I had presumed that Norstein and Kawamoto became friends during Kawamoto’s tour of Eastern Europe in 1963-64.  Although a photograph apparently does exist of Kawamoto with another Russian animator (it was not in the slideshow) in which Norstein can be seen working on something in the background, Norstein apparently does not recall Kawamoto’s visit at that time.  Their friendship began at the World Animation Festival Varna in Bulgaria in 1985 where they met and talked up a storm.  Their friendship developed over the coming years at animation festivals such as the second animation festival in Hiroshima in 1987 where Norstein was on jury alongside Te Wei, Paul Driessen, Nicole Salomon, Bruno Bozzetto, and Osamu Tezuka.  This festival was really a star-studded affair with Karel Zeman acting as the International  Honorary President and John Halas being the special guest.  This event is also notable as being Norstein’s first visit to Japan.

Norstein shared many amusing anecdotes.  Some of my favourites:

• the photo from Hiroshima 1987 prompted Norstein to say  that he did not know Tezuka very well but that he thought his skill as an artist was amazing
• there was a wonderful photograph of Norstein sitting at the foot of the Laputa robot on the rooftop of the Studio Ghibli museum.  Norstein laughed with delight at this photograph and it inspired him to even burst into a song from his childhood
•  when discussing the Laputa International Animation Festival, Norstein talked about the fact that he was criticized for always picking the same guy for the Yuri Norstein Award (he didn’t say the name, but it was clear he was referring to Kunio Katō who won twice: in 2001 for The Apple Incident and in 2004 for The Diary of Tortov Roddle).   His response to this criticism was: “well, I don’t know this guy personally, but his stuff is great!”
• he was quite modest when Nguyen pointed out that his films ranked #1 and #2 on the Laputa 150
• if he had had to make Tale of Tales with the interference of producers, it would never have been made
• “the most simple techniques in animation can result in something really spectacular”

On Winter Days:

• Kawamoto loved Chiro’s spirit (Kawamoto): he hated things that were false and his friendship with Kawamoto was the only reason Norstein agreed to do Winter Days
• Norstein wanted to have accurate details in his contribution but he didn’t want it to be too Japanese
• in order to get the details right, he paid a lot of attention to how a Japanese person would move, carry a bag, wear their hat, and other gestures.
• the Japanese loved his contribution to Winter Days, but he is critical of himself
• the most difficult part was getting the colour palette right.  Once they (he and his wife, along with consultation with “Chiro”) got the right colours (gold, maroon, some blue and a touch of grey), everything else fell into place
• re: Bashō meeting Chikusai: “In animation the real and the mythological can meet.”
• ““Chiro” could make everyone laugh.  He had such a wonderful laugh.  He laughed all the time.”

The evening concluded with a screening of The Book of the Dead on 35mm.  As with Winter Days, I noticed many details about the puppets and the scenery that were not as noticeable when watching a digitized version on a TV.  The details were so vivid: the lines on the puppets’ faces indicating age or weariness, the weave of kimono and other fabrics, each thread of hair carefully placed on the puppets heads, and so on.  As I mentioned in my guest stint on Vcinema in 2010, The Book of the Deadis a film that requires multiple viewings in order to fully understand all the nuances of meaning.  One thing that never ceases to amaze me when watching The Book of the Dead is the movement of the kimonos in the wind.  It looks so effortless, but the time and energy that went into painstakingly animating those sequences frame-by-frame boggles the mind.

Order JP edition:

Shisha no Sho

So ends Day 2 – I became acquainted with a number of interesting people between screenings.  Most notably,  animator Florentine Grelier (official website) and animation expert Giannalberto Bendazzi , author of Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation.  Flroentine has posted some lovely images in pixels that she made of Norstein - check it out.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

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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)

A Wonderful Medicine (ふしぎなくすり, 1965)

This 15-minute stop motion animation is an important landmark in Japanese animation history.  A Wonderful Medicine (ふしぎなくすり, 1965) is the first independent film by Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成, 1932-90) after he founded his own studio Echo Productions (Echo Kabushiki-gaisha) in 1964.  It is also the first stop motion / puppet animation to win the Noburo Ofuji Award, which for 1965 was jointly awarded to Okamoto and experimental animation pioneer Yōji Kuri.  Okamoto was to go on to win this prestigious award more times than any other animator.

A Wonderful Medicine is an adaptation of the short-short story Nusunda Shorui (盗んだ書類) by novelist Shinichi Hoshi (1926-1997), acclaimed for his “short-short” science fiction stories – many of which were illustrated by another Ofuji award-winning animator Makoto Wada and one of Kuri’s fellow Animation Sannin no Kai members Hiroshi Manabe.  Short-short stories belong to the genre flash fiction, and as such tend to be not only short but also boast fresh, innovative storylines and unexpected endings. 

The evil genius imagines the medicine giving him powers of defying gravity / the winding road leading up to the scientist's lab

In an opening reminiscent of To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), an open top convertible winds its way up a coastal hill to a lookout point.  But instead of Cary Gant and Grace Kelly, the car holds a tall, skinny, evil genius with a Poirot moustache and his short, checked-cap-wearing lackey.  The two men are targeting a moustachioed elderly scientist who quirkily has a boy assistant and a talking crow. 

Posing as a potential customer, the evil genius spies on the scientist and overhears him making a new discovery.  Believing this new “wonderful medicine” to be something useful for his plans for world domination, the evil genius and his lackey plan a bold mission to steal the “wonderful medicine.”  Comical at every turn, they are almost foiled by the alarm systems and the talking crow, but in the end their cunning allows them make off with their prize.  In a hilarious twist at the end (spoiler alert), the lackey – who is coerced into being the guinea pig – takes some of the “wonderful medicine” which turns out to be a cure for turning a wicked heart into a good and wholesome heart.  Overcome by his new-found sense of morally upstanding principles, the lackey confesses his crime to the scientist, who is delighted to learn that his new medicine works as intended.

Examples of special effects

Compared to Okamoto’s graduate work Mirror (1960), one can see an improvement in the fluidity of character movement and general expressiveness of the characters – skills which Okamoto acquired during his period working under Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Productions.  In an amusing touch, the scientist and the evil genius, whose mouths cannot be seen, both talk via their moustaches going up and down.  The establishing shots, both exterior and interior, set the scene beautifully.  The most innovative sequences occur when the crow tries desperately to prevent the thieves from taking the medicine.  Scribbles and even foam have been overlaid on top of the scene in order to depict the chaos of the fight in a dynamic fashion – I am guessing that as with Eastern European puppet films of this period (hugely influential on Okamoto throughout his career), and indeed as with Kihachirō Kawamoto’s early puppet films, this film was shot on the horizontal surface of an animation table with the camera looking down from above.  This would have allowed Okamoto to add depth and special effects on plates of glasses placed at different camera distances above the puppets.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

A Wonderful Medicine appears on the first DVD of the Collected Works of Tadanari Okamoto (JP only), which I reviewed for Midnight Eye.  This review belongs to my series on the Noburo Ofuji Award.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Puppet Maker Sumiko Hosaka's Animation Top 20

Sumiko Hosaka  (保坂純子, b. 1930) has worked as a puppet artist since 1953.  Throughout her career she has made puppets for live theatre, TV, and commercials, but is perhaps best known for the puppets she made for the stop motion animation of Tadanari Okamoto.  She has also made puppets for the films of Fumiko Magari and the Noburo Ofuji Award winning team N&G Production.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.3

Order from cdjapan

Her first experience making puppets for stop motion animaton came in the early 60s when she was part of the original staff at Tadahito Mochinaga’s MOM Productions.  She was on one of the puppet-making  teams that worked on MOM Pro's first project for Rankin/Bass The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1960-61).  Starting in the late 1960s, she began working for Okamoto, her former colleague at MOM Pro, after he had set up his own independent studio Echo Productions.   She made puppets for many of his most significant stop motion works from The Mochi Mochi Tree (1972) to The Magic Ballad(1982).  She also occasionally worked for Kihachirō Kawamoto – including his greatest work Book of the Dead (2005).

Sumiko Hosaka currently teaches puppet making techniques at Laputa Art Animation School.  Examples of her freelance work can be seen in her profile at Puppet House.

Selected Filmography

The New Adventures of Pinocchio (Rankin Bass, 1960-61)

Back When Grandpa Was a Pirate (Tadanari Okamoto, 1968)

Home My Home (Tadanari Okamoto, 1970)

The Flower and the Mole (Tadanari Okamoto, 1970)

The Monkey and the Crab(Tadanari Okamoto, 1972)

The Mochi Mochi Tree (Tadanari Okamoto, 1972)

Praise Be to Small Ills (Tadanari Okamoto, 1973)

Five Small Stories (Tadanari Okamoto, 1974)

Are wa dare? (Tadanari Okamoto, 1976)

The Magic Ballad (Tadanari Okamoto, 1982)

The Little Bear Oof (Fumiko Magari, 1983)

The Fourth of the Narcissus Month (Suisengetsu no Yokka, Nozomi Nagasaki , N&G Production, 1990)

Home Alone (Rusuban, Nozomi Nagasaki, N&G Production, 1996) – won Noburo Ofuji Award

Book of the Dead (Kihachiro Kawamoto, 2005)

Hosaka’s picks for the Laputa 150poll in 2003 speak for themselves: a cross-section of some the greatest films in world animation.  Reflecting her interest in puppets, the list is heavy with examples of stop motion animation by Jiri Trnka, Karel Zeman, Roman Kachanov, Jan Svankmajer, and, of course, Okamoto and Kawamoto.  At #1, Hosaka placed the Soyuzmultfilm classic The Little Grey Neck (1948).  In Japan, it was released on DVD together with Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s The Humpbacked Horse (1947/75) as part of The Ghibli Museum Library.  It is also available to buy as a download here.

Konyok-gorbunok & Seraya Sheika

Order from cdjapan

1.   The Little Grey Neck (灰色くびの野鴨, Vladimir Polkovnikov/Leonid Amalrik, USSR, 1948)

2.   The Emperor's Nightingale (支那の皇帝の鴬, Jiri Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1948)

3.   Prince Bayaya (バヤヤ王子, Jiri Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1950)

4.   The Hand (手, Jiri Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1965)

5.   Inspiration (水玉の幻想, Karel Zeman, 1948)

6.   The Fantastic World of Jules Verne (悪魔の発明, Karel Zeman, 1958)

7.   Tale of Tales (話の話, Yuri Norstein, Russia/USSR, 1979)

8.   Hedgehog in the Fog (霧につつまれたハリネズミ, Yuri Norstein, Russia/USSR, 1975)

9.   Cheburashka (チェブラーシカ, Roman Kachanov, Russia/USSR, 1971)

10. Dimensions of Dialogue (対話の可能性, Jan Svankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1982)

11. Faust (ファウスト, Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic, 1994)

12. The Fall ( 落下, Aurel Klimt/Derek Shea, Czech Republic, 1999)

13. The Cowboy’s Flute (牧笛, Tei Wei/Qian Jianjun, China, 1963

14. The Demon (鬼, Kihachirō Kawamoto, Japan, 1972)

15. The Magic Ballad (おこんじょうるり, Tadanari Okamoto, Japan, 1982)

16. Creature Comforts (快適な生活, Nick Park, UK, 1989)

17. Nausicaä of the Valley of theWind (風の谷のナウシカ, Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 1984)

18. The Man Who Planted Trees/L'homme qui plantait des arbres 

      (木を植えた男, Frédéric Back, Canada,1987)

19. Otesánek (オテサーネ, Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic, 2001)

20. A Christmas Dream (おもちゃの反乱, Karel and Borivoj Zeman, Czechoslovakia, 1946)