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

Winter solitude
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind

Matsuo Basho (Trans. Robert Hass)

This haiku by Basho neatly sums up the mood and themes of Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰)'s 2003 puppet animation White Road (白の路/Shiro no Michi). The second of five planned short films exploring the psyche of a melancholy pianist, White Road has an elegiac and nostalgic tone.

Like all of Murata’s puppet animations, White Road has no dialogue or narration. The story is told through image and sound. The melancholy mood is created through character expression, the sentimental music of composer Fumikazu Sakamaki (逆巻文和), who also did the music for Murata’s films オモヒデ and Scarlet Road), sound (wind, crunching of snow), silence, and colour. As the title suggests, the predominant colour in the film is the white blanket of snow but this colour is complemented by the use of blue light which adds to the general feeling of sadness. As ever, Murata’s attention to detail is flawless and the film is quite moving to watch.

White Road shows the nameless pianist returning to his rural childhood home in the winter. He is haunted by the memories of the young girl who had been his playmate and the puppy that they loved but died, possibly due to their unwitting neglect. The pianist’s memories are evoked through flashbacks that sometimes involve him sharing the screen with his younger self. Particularly poignant is the scene when he mourns the puppy and an adult ghost of the dog looks on as if forgiving him for his childhood mistake. We are also invited to share in the pianist’s grief for his lost childhood friend, who moved away with her family. Murata introduced his latest installment of the series Lemon Road (檸檬の路) this year and I do hope that the more cheerful colour will allow for a more uplifting side to the pianist character to be revealed.

White Road brought Murata’s work to a wider audience in Asia because it was re-edited and used as a music video for popular J-Pop band Mr. Children’s 2004 song Hero. Images from other animated films by Murata were projected onto screens during Mr. Children’s 2004 Shufuku no Oto tour.

The DVD includes a short documentary Hitori-Goto (Speaking to Oneself) which follows Murata as he heads from Prague to the 2003 Anifest animation festival in Trěboň where Scarlet Road is being screened. As with the documentary/‘making of’ extras on his other DVDs, the low quality of the footage is surprising. The handheld camerawork is sloppy, but occasionally punctuated by nicely framed scenes. Particularly surprising is the poor quality of the sound because Murata pays such particular attention to sound in his animation. He also doesn’t impart much in the way of information during the journey… though there is a teasing glimpse of him at work filming White Road at the very beginning. The documentary is worth watching however for the occasional slideshows of photography. There is also a great sequence towards the end of the film in which he records a female voice making an announcement over the public address system to the empty streets of a neighbourhood. This makes a wonderful connection between small town Czech Republic and small town Japan, where one also hears such public reminders over the P.A.

I have the limited edition DVD box set which includes postcards of pastel illustrations inspired by White Road (3) and Scarlet Road (3) and a picture book of White Road illustrated with pastel artwork based on the film. The box set is available at yesasia.com (link below) as well as Murata's webshop.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Kojiro Shishido (宍戸小次郎)

One of the biggest challenges in CG animation is how to create a unique vision using a medium that encourages uniformity. The work of Kojirō Shishido (b. 1983) stands out for me because of the way he has used a wide variety of CG techniques in order create images that directly relate to the themes of his short films.

Browsing through the online examples of the work of Kojiro Shishido, aka Hosozao (his user name is a type of shamisen), it becomes apparent that he has experimented with the capacities of his software (Bauhaus Software Mirage 1.5, Corel PainterX, Adobe AfterEffects CS3, Photoshop CS3) in a variety of amusing shorts such as Deep Sea Tentacle, Drawing!!, Wakame Buildings, Collapse Zen, and Superfluid, in a manner reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s early experiments with animation on film at the NFB. Using these playful, engaging films to explore the possibilities of his tools, Shishido applies what he has learned in his more introspective films such as Doutei Kawaiya (Sweet, Sweet Virgin, 2003), Kagami no Genon (sound/phantasma/mirror aka Mirror’s Fundamental Tone, 2004) and his most recent film Naked Youth (2006).

In Doutei Kawaiya, Kagami no Genon and Naked Youth Shishido takes us on a journey through the uncertainty and excitement of young love and homoerotic love. These gentle films quiver with sexual tension, which is linked to the natural world: trees reflecting on the surface of a pond, butterflies fluttering in the breeze. Of the three films, Doutei Kawaiya is least concerned with the outside world, focusing instead on the claustrophobic world of young people discovering their sexuality. Although their faces and bodies take centre stage, nature is represented by images of flowers, a brief shot of the sky, and a striking painting of trees.

Shishido clearly enjoys the possibilities of light and shade in his films. Not only does he experiment with intensity of light, but he also plays with the patterns made by light when it encounters different objects. Moments like the graphic play of the light passing through window blinds as they flutter around in Kagami no Genon or the mesmerizing quality of the light of the summer sun pushing through dense trees demonstrate Shishido’s sensitivity to small details that create ambience.

One major theme in Shishido’s work is reflections. He shows us beautiful reflections not only in surfaces like water, mirrors, but also polished floors. Shishido renders his realistic backdrops images slightly blurry, endowing them with the hazy quality of memories or dreams. The characters are set apart from the backgrounds with their sketch-like quality that makes them seem more like cel animation than the more obviously CG settings. You can see for yourself how Shishido creates his images in stages in his ‘Making of Naked Youth’ clips: clip 1, clip 2, clip 3.

It is a delight to watch these three films in the order in which they were made because you can see Shishido’s growth as a visual storyteller with Naked Youth bringing together the best elements of his earlier films. I particularly like how he layers his images using real architecture and interiors as his inspiration. He also composes his own music for his films. Shishido uses music in a minimalist way to add to the emotional impact of the images. For a young filmmaker, he has already learned that sound effects (cicadas, hiyodori, running water, etc.) and silence are equally as important for creating ambience. I do hope that Shishido continues to make independent films so that we can see the full blossoming of his potential as an artist.

Filmography

• Undercurrent (2001)

• Doutei Kawaiya (Sweet, Sweet Virgin, 2003)

• Kagami no Genon (sound/phantasma/mirror, 2004)

• Deep Sea Tentacle

• Drawing!!

• Wakame Buildings

• Collapse

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Bob Kuwahara and Hashimoto-san

While continuing my research into the career of Ryohei Yanagihara of the Animation Sannin no Kai yesterday, I was watching contemporary American animator Ernie Pintoff’s short film Flebus (1959) on youtube when I spotted an animation entitled House of Hashimoto in the sidebar.

Hashimoto-san is a Japanese mouse and to me at first it seemed like the usual stereotypical depiction of Japanese characters, complete with the phony accent and the squinty eyes. The story begins with Hashimoto-san’s old American friend, G.I. Joe, coming to visit looking for stories to write for his newspaper. Hashimoto-san tells him the story of a giant cat whose attack on a mouse village was foiled by an invisible mouse.

The story is told in the tightly edited, humorous style one expects from a Terrytoon cartoon, but my ears pricked up during Hashimoto-san’s tale when I realized that the mice in the story he narrated were actually speaking in Japanese… albeit with heavy American intonation. Curious, I looked up the film and discovered that it is credited by many animation websites as being the first Asian character in an American-made cartoon with a positive, non-stereotyped image.

I would not go so far as to call Hashimoto-san ‘non-stereotyped’, but he does present a positive image of the Japanese in contrast to the propagandistic cartoons of the war effort. What stuck me about Hashimoto-san is that his character has been carefully shaped to be stereotypically ‘Japanese’ enough for American audiences to identify his ethnicity, but with authentic Japanese touches such as costume, scenery, and cultural motifs (Mount Fuji, futons, shamisen, etc.) Judging from the titles of latter Hashimoto-san shorts, it looks as though an attempt has been made to educate American audiences about Japanese cultural traditions such as Hinamatsuri and Hanami.

This awareness of both American and Japanese culture comes from the director Bob Kuwahara (1901-1964) who was born Rokuro Kuwahara in Tokyo and moved to California with his family when he was nine years old. Kuwahara began his career as a commercial artist

in New York City, but moved back to California after the stock market crash. He got his start in animation working as animator and storywriter for Walt Disney and is credited as having worked on such films as The Flying Mouse (1934), Who Killed Cock Robin (1935), Thru the Mirror (1936), and Snow White (1937).

In 1937, Kuwahara moved to MGM but his career in animation was interrupted by the war. Like other Japanese-Americans, Kuwahara and his family were locked up in internment camps for the duration of the war. He then moved his family to New York where he tried his hand at drawing comic strips. In 1950 he was hired by Terrytoons and stayed with the company up until his death in 1964.

Kuwahara is best known for the Hashimoto-san series. Originally released theatrically, further shorts in the series were featured on The Hector Heathcote Show. Apart from the Hashimoto-san series, Kuwahara is also known for his work on The Deputy Dawg Show and The Astronut Show.

Hashimoto-san Filmography

• Hashimoto-san (1959)
• House of Hashimoto (1960)
• Doll Festival (1961)
• Night Life in Tokyo (1961)
• So Sorry, Pussycat (1961)
• Son of Hashimoto (1961)
• Strange Companion (1961)
• Honorable Cat Story (1961)
• Honorable Family Problem (1962)
• Loyal Royalty (1962)
• Honorable Pain in the Neck (1962)
• Pearl Crazy (1963)
• Cherry Blossom Festival (1963)
• Spooky-Yaki (1963)
• Tea House Mouse (1963)

For plot summaries, go to The Big Cartoon Database. For more on Hashimoto-san, check out Don Markstein's Toonopedia.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Shohei Imamura on A Man Vanishes

CineandStuff has posted a marvelous interview with Shohei Imamura about his rare film A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu / 人間蒸発, ,1967). The interviewer is Imamura's son Daisuke Tengan (né Daisuke Imamura). Tengan is a screenwriter and occasional director. Tengan is perhaps best known for his collaborations with his father (The Eel ,1998 and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, 2001) and Takashi Miike (Audition, 1999 and ).

A Man Vanishes is a powerful documentary that explores the boundaries of objectivity and subjectivity in the medium - a line that is crossed when the wife of the missing man of the title begins to fall in love with the film director. This interview is particularly insightful about how Imamura came to make the film, and some of his editorial choices about what to show and what to leave out. It is a travesty that this film is not yet available on DVD in the English speaking world or in Europe. For a wee glimpse, here is the trailer:

Ningen Johatsu

Japanese Movie

Kurosawa's Suntory Commercials

While searching for Ryohei Yanagihara's animated television spots for Suntory Whiskey from the 1950s &1960s, I happened across this video of Suntory commercials directed by Akira Kurosawa. He made them during the filming of Kagemusha (1980). Francis Ford Coppola, who was one of the co-producers on the film, also appears in some of the commercials drinking Suntory with Kurosawa while conferring over the script of Kagemusha. These commercials are believed to have served as part of the inspiration behind the Bill Murray Suntory commercial scene in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

Waiting on the Weather

Yoji Yamada’s adaptation of Teruyo Nogami （野上照代）’s memoir Kaabee – Our Mother made a splash at the Berlinale earlier this year. It is wonderful that Nogami has distinguished herself as more than just an assistant to Kurosawa with her recent autobiographical writing. Many Japanese women have worked diligently behind the scenes in the Japanese filmmaking industry, but few of Nogami’s generation have received public recognition for their talents. Nogami’s Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa was published by Stone Bridge Press in 2006 and it is truly a delight to read.

Waiting on the Weather was originally published as a series of essays in Kinema Kurabu and other publications during the 1990s. It was collected and published as a book in Japanese in 2001 under the title Tenki Machi: Kantoku Kurosawa Akira totomo ni (天気待ち―監督・黒澤明とともに). As the essays were written over a period of at least six years, during which time many of Nogami’s closest friends and colleagues including Kurosawa himself passed away, there is some repetition and a lack of fluidity between chapters. However, this is more than remedied by Nogami’s warm and humorous narrative style.

In the first few chapters, Nogami tries to hide behind a polite veil of modesty claiming that it was a matter of chance that she found work as a script girl (what is now known as a script supervisor or continuity editor) first at Daiei Kyoto Studios and later at Toho Studios in Tokyo. She even goes so far as to share with her readership some of her most embarrassing continuity errors, which she fortunately caught before the final edit. Donald Richie counters Nogami’s modesty in his introduction by emphasizing what a vital member of Akira Kurosawa’s production team she was from Rashomon through to the end of his career. She even worked on Takashi Koizumi’s adaptation of Kurosawa’s screenplay Ame agaru (After the Rain, 1999). Kurosawa was notoriously difficult to work with, but as Richie points out, he “came to rely greatly on Nogami: on her care, her memory, her quickness, her probity.”

The anecdotal style of narration is reflected in the title of the book, which refers to the time film crews and cast spent waiting for the perfect weather conditions in order to shoot scenes. In the days before green screens, filmmakers had little choice but to wait on the weather. Nogami remembers these periods of waiting fondly; for these were the moments that the crew could get to know each other and indulge in gossip.

Juliet Winter Carpenter has done an admirable job of translating Nogami’s witty prose into English. Nogami has also illustrated her stories with pen and ink drawings that capture her humourous anecdotes in vivid detail. This reminded me of Agnes Newton Keith’s autobiographical writing, such as her famous memoir Three Came Home about her time as a Japanese prisoner-of-war in Northern Borneo. Newton Keith’s work was well-known in Japan before and after the war so it is possible Nogami may have emulated her style.

My favourite part about this book was the revelation that Nogami’s first contact with the Japanese filmmaking community was through the great director Mansaku Itami. As a teenager, Nogami wrote Itami a fan letter in response to his comic samurai film Akanishi Kakita (Capricious Young Man, 1936). Itami wrote back to her and they continued a correspondence throughout his illness with tuberculosis until his early death at age 46. Her connection to Itami led her not only into the film industry, but it also led to her close relationship with his family after his death. She even shared her small apartment in Kyoto with Itami’s teenaged son Yoshihiro, who would grow up to become acclaimed director Juzo Itami (Tampopo, 1985).

The Itami family anecdotes were an unexpected bonus to the wide variety of stories about making movies with Akira Kurosawa. From his legendary rages to his after-hours drinking sessions with the crew, Nogami’s memoir serves as an elegy to a remarkable time in Japanese filmmaking history.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Maya Yonesho

The work of animation artist Maya Yonesho (米正万也) jumped out at me when I first watched the collaborative film Winter Days because her unique style of combining types of handmade animation (stop motion of a book and watercolour animation on the pages of the book) reminded me of the experimental films of Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger. In a recent e-mail exchange with me, Yonesho added the names of Taku Furukawa, Kihachiro Kawamoto and Clive Walley to the list of filmmakers whose work has inspired her. Like McLaren, Fischinger and Walley, Yonesho’s work is abstract and she likes to synchronize her animation with music and sounds. Her work is identifiable by her use of cheerful watercolours and her mixing of media. Wiener Wuast, for instance features a hand holding up a card of paper against various outdoor Viennese locations with watercolour animation dancing across the paper synchronized to music by Norbert Trummer.

Many contemporary animation artists come to Europe in order to immerse themselves in unique animation traditions such as the Czech school, the Estonian school, the Aardman school in the UK, among many others. Kihachiro Kawamoto was the forerunner of this trend when he studied under Jiri Trnka in Prague in the 1960s. Fusako Yusaki, whom I wrote about last September, has been a central figure in the Italian animation community since the success of her Fernet Branca commercials in the 1970s. The relationship between European and Japanese animators has strengthened in recent decades through artists sharing work at animation festivals in Utrecht, Oberhausen, Hiroshima, and elsewhere.

Maya Yonesho has an MA in Conceptual and Media Arts from Kyoto City University of Arts. She has also studied in England and did a research project in Estonia in 2002. Yonesho then found herself invited to be a member of the jury at the Tricky Women International Animation Festival [note: the ‘Tricky’ in the festival name is a play on words involving the German for animation: der Trickfilm or der Zeichentrickfilm] in 2003. This has led to a long creative relationship with the city of Vienna. Yonesho currently divides her time mainly between Vienna and Kyoto. In Vienna, she teaches workshops, makes films, and does exhibitions of her art. In the autumn term she lectures at Kyoto Seika University.

Thanks to modern technology, Yonesho finds that she is quite flexible to be able to work anywhere in the world using a scanner, laptop, and he International Express Mail service to send her short animation work to the NHK (the Japanese public broadcaster). She recently completed a series of 6 one-minute films for the NHK very young children called “Dance of Circles, Triangles and Squares” and her current project “Colours of the Seasons” will have four installments, one for each of the seasons.

In describing her method of filmmaking, Yonesho says “When I create an animation, I first decide on a theme, then edit the sound, and finally I draw the images to match the sound. The theme always develops from something that has been on my mind, but rather than create a story and address the theme explicitly, I prefer to express abstractly, through sound and music, a mood or atmosphere that cannot be expressed in words. Naturally, it pleases me when a viewer can perceive and empathize with the idea I had in mind when I created the piece, but I like for each viewer to interpret it in her or his own way. One of the aspects of animation I love is simply the fact that it moves. In my work I emphasize this aspect of movement and also rhythm, so I try to keep the shapes as simple as possible, and have them move to the rhythm in pleasing ways. The reason I often make the sound before I make the image is because I see sound as an extremely important element, when I use a person's voice, I try to analyze it and make the image complement the mood of the voice” (Source: Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan)

In Yonesho’s work, one finds a desire to use images as a form of international communication. Her first abstract animated short was synchronized with theme “we can understand each other without understanding each language” (Source). This idealitic vision is reminiscent of the ending to Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952). I was also reminded of an interview I once read with Sayako Kinoshita, who founded the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in the 1980s with her husband Renzo Kinoshita. The Kinoshitas, after enjoying a positive reception at animation festivals abroad in the 1970s decided to start a similar festival in Japan with the ideal of striving towards world peace through visual communication. Hence the decision to host the event in Hiroshima.

Yonesho’s recent film Wiener Wuast plays with notions of the tourist observing the city of Vienna. I found an interesting critical discussion of a recent screening of the film at the MASC Foundatation on Paul Sakoilsky’s blog. He also provides several high resolution stills from the film and a link to a tiny video of the film. The title translates as Vienna Mix and since 2006 Yonesho has also produced other workshop films in a simalar style including Taiwan Mix, Norway Mix, Croatia Mix, and Israel Mix.

Update: Maya Yonesho's work can now be purchased on DVD from Anido.

Filmography

• One Lonely Cactus (6’35”, Super 8, paint on cel, 1985)

• Kitsune no mado (5’, Super 9, paster & ink on paper, 1986)

• dance・ing (collaboration, 12'40", mixed media, 1992)

• Cactus Boy (Saboten-kun, 3'36", claymation/stop motion, 1993)

• Mindsaver (10’30”, mixed media, 1994)

• Mindsaver 1995 (7’, mixed media, 1995)

• Momoiro no Kirin (6’, puppet, 1995)

• Good Morning News (6 TV spots, 3’ each, claymation/stop motion, 1995)

• Chocolate Talk 1&2 (4’50”, stop motion, 1996)

• Bisco Dance 1&2 (22” & 1’09”, stop motion, 1996)

• a dream about cherry (1’25”, ink on paper/stop motion, 1996)

• Kikyo no Yume: Visionary (4’09”, betacam, pencil and pastel on paper, 1996)

• Don’t you wish you were here? (4’, betacam, ink on paper/stop motion, 1997)

• Mindsaver 1997 (7’44”, DVD, mixed media, 1997)

• introspection (1’30”, 16mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 1998)

• believe in it (3’20”, DVD, ink on paper/stop motion, 1998)

• learn to love (3’, DVD, ink on paper/stop motion, 1999)

• Countdown (1’20”, DVD, ink on postcards, 2001)

• Winter Days (collaboration, 1’30”, 35mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 2002)

• Üks Uks (7’, 35mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 2003)

• Wiener Wuast (Vienna Mix, 4’48", DVD, mixed media, 2006)

• Niao Shan Tao (Taiwan Mix, 2’49”, DVD, mixed media, 2006)

• Troll i Ord (Norway Mix, 3’37”, DVD, mixed media, 2007)

• Hrvatska Gibanica (Croatia Mix, 4’23”, DVD, mixed media, 2007)

• Dances of Circles and Squares (6 NHK TV spots, 1’ each, HiVision, 2007)

• Tsiruf Mikrim (Israel Mix, 4’23”, DVD, mixed media, 2008)

• Colours of Seasons (work in progress, 4 short films, 2008)

My thanks to Maya Yonesho for her correspondence with me about her work. Check out her website for more photographs of her work and her CV.

Renku Animation "Fuyu no Hi"

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008