Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund, Part III

Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund
Dortmunder U, September 11, 2011

Read  Part I: Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund

and Part II: Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund

Part III: Masaaki Yuasa on Kaiba and working for Madhouse

As we had watched the first three episodes of Kaiba (カイバ, 2008) just before the film talk began with Masaaki Yuasa, host Stefan Riekeles brought it up in conversation before Mind Game (マインド・ゲーム, 2003). Kaiba is one of several projects including Kemonozume (ケモノヅメ, 2006) and Tatami Galaxy (四畳半神話大系, 2010) that Yuasa has done in collaboration with Madhouse.

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Masao Maruyama, the main producer and studio head at Madhouse, was the one to make contact with Yuasa and suggest that he direct something for them. Yuasa could hardly even believe it when Maruyama called him personally. Despite his respect and admiration for Maruyama, Yuasa didn’t just jump on board with the ideas Maruyama initially brought to him. The audience at Dortmunder U laughed when Yuasa described saying “No… no… no, that’s boring…” to one after another of Maruyama’s suggestions. I did not have the impression that Yuasa was being arrogant; rather, I think he has a very firm idea of who he is as an artist (more on that later) and that he only wants to work on projects that he really cares about.

Yuasa found Maruyama very tolerant of his quirks. In fact, he was very surprised that once they had decided on a project that Maruyama was willing to give Yuasa free reign to do what he wanted with it. The same could be said of Eiko Tanaaka at Studio 4°C (where he did Mind Game) who also gave him lots of freedom as a director. Yuasa had heard stories that Maruyama could be very strict with directors but that was not his own personal experience.

On Kaiba, Yuasa got to wear a lot of different hats: not only did he come up with the concept for the series and act as the series director but he wrote screenplays, did storyboards, and directed. Because it was for television, the deadlines were a lot stricter than they are with feature films like Mind Game. Yuasa was given only one year to complete Kaiba. He personally directed episodes 1, 10, and 11 and allowed others to take the reins on the other episodes. Because time management what of the utmost importance, Yuasa said that it was necessary to delegate the work load to other directors.

Yuasa mentioned in particular Akitoshi Yokoyama who directed episodes 2-3, 7, and 9. Speaking specifically of episodes 2 and 3, which we had just screened, Yuasa explained that he had allowed Yokoyama to incorporate his own ideas into the screenplay and storyboards for those episodes. Yokoyama was given a great amount of freedom in this respect because episodes 2-4 did not really affect the main story-line of the series too much. Thus the themes of the mother-child dynamic, the idea of the mother passing away and asking her sister to care for her daughter, and the piano as a metaphor were all ideas that Yokoyama came up with.

As Yuasa freelances at a lot of different studios, he has noticed that they each seem to have their own language. At some studios they understand what he is trying to communicate to them as a director and at other ones they don’t. When he starts at a new studio it can sometimes take a while to understand the “language” that they speak.  He did not specifically talk about which studios he had problems communicating with though, he only generally inferred that he sometimes encounters problems when working with people unfamiliar with his style and methods.  

Later in the evening, during the question and answer time, an elderly gentleman whose viewing of Kaiba was his first contact with Yuasa’s work said that he found the landscapes in Kaiba depressing and wanted to know what kind of message Yuasa intended to relay with the setting. Yuasa responded that he always tries to keep a glimmer of hope in his work – even when depicting something that is difficult; he likes to keep hope alive. Yuasa described himself as a person with doubts, and he finds that the older he gets, the more misgivings he seems to have about the world. The one place where he sees hope is in children. He knows that viewers want to see something cheerful when they watch TV anime, but he wants to show them something deeper with his work.

Another question relating to Kaiba came from an audience member who recognized the familiar anime theme in Kaiba of a futuristic world in which humanity is threatened, but it was the first time he had encountered the idea of a person’s inner psyche being bought and sold like material goods. He wondered if Yuasa had come up with the concept on his own or if he had borrowed it from somewhere.

Yuasa responded by mentioning a title of some kind which I am afraid I didn’t quite catch and I believe he mentioned that the author/director was called Oshima. If any of my readers know what work he might have been referring to, do let me know in the comments. He went on the explain that he had been fascinated with the way in which the brain sends signals to the body via neurons that transmit information via electrical and chemical signalling. He wondered what if there are only such signals instead of a soul, but this notion did not appeal to him. It was certainly a possibility, but it couldn’t be everything.

Yuasa also said that he had been thinking about mortality and fear of death and he wondered when a person was considered dead. People from past centuries no longer live, but many of them have left pieces of themselves behind for us to enjoy – via legacies of music, writing, and so on – ensuring that in spirit they are in a certain sense still alive and with us. He is also interested in how so many people’s experiences of life are so different from one another yet also have points of similarity. These were some of the ideas Yuasa had been grappling with when planning Kaiba.

Part IV: Morimoto, Mind Game and more

To see photos from this event, see my Google Plus profile or the Nishikata Eiga Facebook page.

Order works by Masaaki Yuasa:

MIND GAME (English Subtitles)

Kaiba 1 [DVD+CD]

The Tatami Galaxy Vol.1

Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund, Part II

Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund
Dortmunder U, September 11, 2011

Read  Part I: Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund

Part II: Masaaka Yuasa’s Early Career in Animation

Immediately upon graduation, Masaaki Yuasa sought a job drawing for Asia-dō (亜細亜堂) in Saitama because he was a great admirer of their work. In the 1980s, Asia-dō worked on a number of great series including Doraemon and Manga Nippon Mukashi-Banashi. He was not paid an hourly rate but by the drawing and was expected to complete about 20 drawings a day. Freelance animators just starting out get paid rather poorly for long hours of tedious work and his parents were concerned about his low income. Yuasa was undeterred however, and he moved up the ranks at Asia-dō fairly quickly and he felt that they treated him rather well.

During the talk, Yuasa heaped praise upon Mitsuru Hongo, director of the Crayon Shin-chan TV series – the second series that Yuasa worked on after Chibi Maruko-chan – for his generosity in allowing Yuasa to draw want he wanted. Yuasa spoke very critically of his own work during these early years. He just never felt that his work was good enough. The speed at which he was expected to work meant that did not have the time to produce his best quality work. He found it very stressful at times and wished that he had more time at his disposal in order to produce higher quality work.

At some point, Hongo asked Yuasa if he wanted to try his hand at drawing backgrounds. This gave Yuasa a great deal more satisfaction with his work. He enjoyed researching the landscapes and architecture needed for each scene. This work allowed him to experiment with different techniques and he found that his education in oil painting helped him a lot in designing the backgrounds.

When Hongo gave him the opportunity to do storyboards, Yuasa had a real “a-ha moment”. During this part of the interview with Stefan Riekeles, Yuasa became very animated when he described the pleasure he got from drawing storyboards. His excitement and passion for his craft was really palpable and he talked about how “sugoku tanoshii” (super-fun) the experience of drawing storyboards was for him. For the first time as an animator, he was really enjoying himself and others were sharing in his enthusiasm. He got to do storyboards for episodes of Crayon Shin-chan. In addition, he started drawing designs and storyboards in his spare time, but this was just for his own fun and not really with the intention of becoming a director himself.

Yuasa often mentioned in the discussion how lucky he had been in his career to have people like Hongo as his mentors.  Hongo gave him the unique opportunity to try out many hats in their animation studios. Traditionally in the Japanese anime industry people stay in one role – as a background designer, key animator, inbetweener, etc. – for a really long time or throughout the entirety of their career. Not all studios were willing to let freelancers do storyboards, but as he was not tied down to any one studio, Yuasa could pick and choose work and he began to seek out jobs where the studio would let him do storyboards.

Eventually he was allowed to make shorts and storyboards for a pilot project. In making the designs he would have to make much more than was really necessary in order to try out new ideas. Eventually, Masao Maruyama of Madhouse approached him about directing a project and that was the moment that started him on the path to directing Mind Game and a part of Genius Party for Studio 4°C and Kemonozume, Kaiba, and Tatami Galaxy for Madhouse.

Next read: Part III: Masaaki Yuasa on Kaiba and working at Madhouse

To see more photos from this event, see my Google Plus profile or the Nishikata Eiga Facebook page.

Order works by Masaaki Yuasa:

MIND GAME (English Subtitles)

Kaiba 1 [DVD+CD]

The Tatami Galaxy Vol.1

Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund, Part I

Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund
Dortmunder U, September 11, 2011

Introduction

On Sunday, September 11th, I took the train up to Dortmund to see the Proto Anime Cut and Japan Media Arts Festival exhibitions at the Dortmunder U. The Proto Anime Cut: Spaces and Visions in Japanese Animation exhibition is sponsored by the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) and features the original artwork of Hideaki Anno, Hiromasa Ogura, Takashi Watanabe, Koji Morimoto, Haruhiko Higami, and Mamoru Oshii. I will write up a review of this exhibition and the accompanying bilingual (DE/EN) publication in the near future. The exhibition runs until October 9th.

The Japan Media Arts Festival exhibition, also sponsored by HMKV runs until October 2nd. You can read more about the programme in my earlier post. I will also be writing reviews of some of the exhibitions and short films later this month. 

The highlight of the festival was Sunday’s Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa. It followed a screening of the first three episodes of Kaiba (2008) and was followed by a screening of Mind Game (2004). The festival will also be showing all 11 episodes of Tatami Galaxy (2010) on Sunday, September 18th. Tatami Galaxy won the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival 2010 as did Mind Game in 2004. Kaiba received an Excellence Prize in 2008.

The film talk with Masaaki Yuasa was conducted by the event curator Stefan Riekeles with simultaneous translation through headphones by two translators in a booth. It reminded me of watching a session of the Canadian parliament. I found it all a bit awkward and prefer the more personable style of translation done at Nippon Connection. The Germans have a very strong dubbing culture and I often find English documentaries that have been dubbed on TV impossible to understand because the English track is usually left so loud that it competes with the German overdub and becomes an unintelligible jumble to me. At times during Sunday's film talk hearing German and Japanese simultaneously became overwhelming, so I may have missed out on some  of the nuances and details of the conversation. The following is my impression of the proceedings – with additional information (ie. full titles, years of release, full names, etc.) and observations.

Part I: How did Yuasa get started in animation?

Masaaki Yuasa (湯浅 政明, b. 1965) loved anime as a child. He was so wild about one particular TV series that he drew pictures of it and put them up all over the house. I did not hear him name the particular TV anime series he was referring to, but I know from past interviews with Yuasa that he was a fan of Doraemon, Obake no Q-Taro and Hana no Pyun-Pyun Maru as a child. Yuasa noticed pretty early on that drawing was his forte, but when he reached his teenage years he apparently thought that he would have to give up watching anime for more grown-up pursuits. This all changed when Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト, Leiji Matsumoto, 1977) came to the cinemas and he noticed that adults were standing in line to see the film. This was the moment – Yuasa would have been aged 14 at the time – that he realized that anime could be for grown-ups too.

For those of you who don’t know, Space Battleship Yamato (aka Space Cruiser Yamato) was a feature film that was made by condensing Leiji Matsumoto’s 26 episode run of Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト, Leiji Matsumoto, 1974-75) on Yomiuri TV to feature film length. The film was more successful than the TV series and in fact even beat Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) at the Japanese box office.

In his teens, Yuasa started watching more and more anime at the cinema instead of just on TV. This got him interested in pursuing a career in the animation industry. Although I did not hear him mention it on Sunday, Yuasa has in the past often cited Hayao Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (ルパン三世 カリオストロの城, 1979) and the TV series Golden Warrior Gold Lightan (黄金戦士ゴールド・ライタン, Koichi Mashimo, 1981-82). In particular, the work that Takashi Nakamura did on Gold Lightan – which was also to influence the work of Kōji Morimoto – was hugely impactful on Yuasa in his teenage years.

Despite his obvious interest in anime, Yuasa’s parents put pressure on him to do a university degree. In order to appease them, he took a degree in oil painting in the Department of Fine Arts of the Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka. Immediately upon graduation, he sought a job drawing for Asia-dō (亜細亜堂) in Saitama because he was a great admirer of their work. In the 1980s, Asia-dō worked on a number of great series including Doraemon and Manga Nippon Mukashi-Banashi.

Part II: Masaaka Yuasa’s Early Career in Animation

To see more photos from this event, see my Google Plus profile or the Nishikata Eiga Facebook page.

Order works by Masaaki Yuasa:

MIND GAME (English Subtitles)

Kaiba 1 [DVD+CD]

The Tatami Galaxy Vol.1

Pieces (おまけ, 2003)

Like his predecessor Tadanari Okamoto, Kōji Yamamura (山村浩二, b. 1964) is an animator who constantly experiments with new methods and ideas. Pieces (おまけ/Omake, 2003) is one of Yamamura’s lesser known films but one of his most fun. This animated short really expresses Yamamura’s love of exploring the possibilities that animation has to offer an artist interested in pushing the boundaries of his medium as a form of expression.

Pieces is not a story but a playful series of nine vignettes that incorporates visual gags, 19th century animation technology, and surrealist humour. Yamamura’s clever use of repetition and variation makes the film as a whole very dynamic.

Vignettes #1, #5, and #9 feature a typical Yamamura character with a comically oversized head and a carrot nose accompanied by his tiny dog. These three vignettes have the same kind of humour and absurdity as the great French master Jacques Tati. Each vignette becomes more and more absurd. The first employs toilet humour, the fifth sees it raining under rather than on the man’s umbrella, and the final one plays with perspective and has a surprising ending which sees the man almost consuming his dog.

Vignettes #1-9, in order of left to right, up to down

Vignette #3 plays with shapes with a sequence of images in which a bird dives into the sea to catch fish is inverted into the surprising shape of a man in a bowler hat. #7 is a delightfully surreal vignette in which a headless man screws what appears to me an empty bowl onto his head, but it turns out to be a light bulb.

Vignette’s #2, #4, #6 and #8 are interpretations of the phenakistoscope – an early animation device that used the principle of the persistence of vision to create an illusion of motion. The phenakistoscope uses a spinning disc attached to a handle. I give a more detailed explanation of the device in my review of Taku Furukawa’s Phenakistoscope (驚き盤/Odorokiban, 1975) – a brilliant animated tribute to the device which won Furukawa the Special Jury Prize at Annecy in 1975. Although briefer than Furukawa’s film, Yamamura’s short phenakistoscope sequences are dazzling in their attention to detail. He used an image from vignette #6 as the front cover of his book Welcome to the World of Animation (アニメーションの世界へようこそ, 2006).  All in all, Pieces is a short and sweet visual treat fans of indie animation shouldn't miss out on. 

If you are in the Tokyo area, be sure to check out Yamamura's latest work in the Muybridge's Strings Road Show (until October 7th at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

To see Pieces for yourself and to support this indie artist order: 

Atamayama - Koji Yamamura Sakuhinshu

from Japan (JP/EN) or from the States:

Shigeru Tamura’s Top Animated Films

The fantastic world of Shigeru Tamura’s illustrations and animations is a curious combination of science fiction landscapes with 19th and early 20th century characters that look more European than Japanese. When I looked up Tamura’s response to the Laputa 150 poll, I half expected the list to include a lot of Eastern European animation because the young boy in URSA minor BLUE is called Yuri. While the list does include Yuri Norstein’s celebrated classic The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), Tamura’s list actually reveals his fascination with a wide spectrum of animation styles.

Tamura lists 15 animation favourites in no particular order. He clearly loves early animation such as Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the early Felix the Cat series, and Betty Boop’s comical outing as Snow White (1933). He also displays a fondness for classic animation series such as Mickey Mouse when he was at his best in the 1930s and the Tex Avery classics (Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, et al.).

As Tamura works mainly with hand drawn and computer animation, I was surprised to see such a variety of stop motion animation on his list. From the pioneering stop motion work in the original King Kong movie to the surreal worlds of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988), the Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles (1986) and the bolexbrothers’ The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993), Tamura clearly has an admiration for innovative filmmakers. It’s particularly interesting to note his choice of Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out (amusingly called “Cheese Holiday” in Japanese) as a favourite rather than Nick Park’s more polished later Wallace and Gromit films. A Grand Day Out is pleasingly rough around the edges and has a more outlandish plot than the others.

What distinguishes Tamura’s own work for me has always been his bold use of colours and his fantastic imaginary worlds. I can see how the psychedelic colours of Yellow Submarine (1968), the imaginative worlds of Fantastic Planet (1973) and Laputa: Castle in Sky (1986), and the poetic splendour of Night of Bald Mountain (1933) would appeal to Tamura’s poetic sensibilities. If you haven’t seen the films and series on Tamura’s list, I highly recommend seeking them out.

Gertie the Dinosaur

(恐竜ガーティ, Winsor McCay, 1914)

Felix in Hollywood (1923)

Early episodes of the classic Felix the Cat series

(１９２０年代頃の猫のフィリックス, produced by Pat Sullivan, c.1920s)

The classic series ran from 1919-36

Paramount Pictures (1919-1921)

Margaret J. Winkler (1922-1925)

Educational Pictures (1925-1928)

The Band Concert (Wilfred Hand, 1935)

Mickey Mouse Series 1935-1939

(１９３５年-１９３９年頃のミッキーマウスシリーズ, Wilfred Jackson/David Hand/Walt Disney)

Snow White (Betty Boop Series)

(ベティの白雪姫, Dave Fleischer, 1933)

Night on Bald Mountain

(禿山の一夜, Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve, Alexandre Alexeieff/Claire Parker, 1933)

Happy Go Nutty (1944)

The works of Tex Avery

(テックス・アヴェリーの一連作品, 1942-1958)

Hedgehog in the Fog

(霧につつまれたハリネズミ, Yuri Norstein, 1975)

Street of Crocodiles

(ストリート・オブ・クロコダイル, Brothers Quay, 1986)

Alice

(アリス, Jan Švankmajer, 1988)

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

(天空の城ラピュタ, Hayao Miyazaki, 1986)

Fantastic Planet

(ファンタスティック・プラネット, La Planète sauvage, René Laloux, 1973)

Yellow Submarine

(イエロー・サブマリン, George Dunning, 1968)

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out

(ウォレスとグルミット チーズホリデー, Nick Park, 1989)

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

(親指トムの奇妙な冒険, Dave Borthwick, 1993)

King Kong

(キングコング, Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

To support this independent artist you can order his work at cdjapan:

Ginga no Sakana - URSA minor BLUE (JP only)

URSA minor BLUE (soundtrack on CD)

URSA minor BLUE (銀河の魚, 1993)

Shigeru Tamura’s animated short URSA minor BLUE (銀河の魚/Ginga no Sakana, 1993) begins with a simple scene that could be right out of an Ernest Hemingway novel: a grandfather fishing with his grandson. The grandson, Yuri, is quite able with the hand-thrown harpoon and he soon catches an impressive fish for their supper.  As they return home with their catch, Teshikai Utollo’s otherworldly music hints that all in this world may not be the same as in ours. The grandfather sends Yuri to find tomatoes for dinner and we discover that they have an indoor rain forest complete with a lemur-like creature whose eyes shine like headlights. The tomatoes that Yuri picks seem to pulsate with a strange light.

While the grandfather comically burns their dinner, Yuri ascends to the observatory above their home. Looking through an unusual telescope he discovers that the constellation of Ursa Minor appears to be missing a star. The pair set off in their rowboat again to try to find out what is going on. They pass through a talking forest and a rocky area with mythical flying beasts. Along the way, a walking and talking building approaches them and voices his concern that stars seem to be missing from the Milky Way. They reassure him that they are going to investigate and return the Milky Way to its original state.

As they head out over what appears to be open sea, Tamura (たむら しげる, b. 1949) shifts to an overhead perspective and we then realize that Yuri and his grandfather do not live in our world but rather above it. The sea that they are rowing across is the atmosphere and they are able to look down at a world that resembles ours. As they journey out into the universe, they witness a giant fish unlike any they have ever seen.  They come to a place where giants who seem hewn from rock appear to be forging stars on giant anvils and are greeted by the wizard who lives there. They soon learn that a giant fish has been eating the stars and the wizard presents Yuri with a magic harpoon and sends him on a mission to try to catch the fish in order to return the Milky Way to its normal state. Hence the Japanese title Ginga no Sakana, or Fish of the Milky Way.

The grandfather also refers to the Milky Way by its colloquial name Ama no gawa (天の川), or River of the Heavens, which suggested to me that Tamura was influenced by mythology in his creation of his fabulous world. In East Asian mythology it is said that the Milky Way resembles a kind of silvery river and mythological stories developed around this impression. The most famous is that of the stars Vega and Altair, who were said to be lovers (named Orihime and Hikoboshi in Japanese) separated by the Milky Way who could only meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month – a day celebrated in many parts of Japan as Tanabata (七夕/the evening of the seventh). The mythology surrounding the Milky Way has inspired much great literature – most famously Kenji Miyazawa’s Night of the Milky Way Railroad, which Tamura references by having a train pass under Yuri and his grandfather as they row across the sky. 

(Learn more about Anime Adaptations of Kenji Miyazawa)

As the English title suggests, colour is an important element of Tamura’s work. The predominant colour in this film is blue, but there are also wonderful scenes of green and orange when they visit the wizard. This style of filling the screen with bold colours is characteristic of Tamura’s aesthetic. His manner of completely filling the screen with colour reminded me of two younger animators: Tomoyoshi Joko – who also made a wonderful little film involving anthropomorphic buildings called simply Buildings (2008) – and Oscar winner Kunio Katō.  .  .  although Katō uses a more muted palette to fill the screen than the cheerful colours of Shigeru Tamura.

URSA minor BLUE won the Noburo Ofuji Award in 1993 and is available on DVD. The DVD extras include a music section where Teshiaki Utollo explains the motivations behind his expressive soundtrack, an illustration gallery, storyboards, layouts, interviews about the production with Tamura, Utollo, and producer Mitsuo Shionaga, and trailers for Tamura’s other animated works a piece of PHANTASMAGORIA (1995) and Glassy Ocean (1998). The soundtrack for URSA minor BLUE can also be purchased separately.  Check out more of Tamura's illustrations on his official homepage.  

Ginga no Sakana - URSA minor BLUE (JP only)

URSA minor BLUE (soundtrack on CD)

This review is part of Nishikata Film Review’s  Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

text © Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

JANE EYRE (2011)

You would rather drive me to madness than break some mere human law?

In the context of a literary education dominated by Jane Austen (English all-girls prep school - rolls eyes), Jane Eyre felt radical - a proto-feminist tract in the form of a gothic-romantic novel. Charlotte Bronte presented us with a mid-nineteenth century heroine that was plain and poor, rather than pretty and middle-class. A heroine with a strong morality but who rejects both the piety of Mr Brocklehurst and the Christian "cheek-turning" martyrdom of Helen Burns. A heroine that attracted her lover, Edward Rochester, with moral and intellectual strength rather than sparkling wit. A heroine that rejected that same brooding Byronic hero to protect her moral autonomy and sense of self. A heroine who, even in the very depths of desperation and poverty, was never a "damsel in distress" to be rescued by her cousin, St John Rivers. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is morally and intellectual tough, but never a prig (in the way that Austen's Fanny Price can be), and her happiness resides in finding a man who with whom she can be herself - who gives her permission to be herself - the ultimate philosophical emancipation. And whereas so many romantic novels end abruptly with a marriage, Jane Eyre ends with a resolute declaration and the readers belief that, yes, this really is a marriage of equals that will last. 

Despite my great respect for the novel, I feel that it lends itself less easily to screen adaptation that the sparkling novels of Austen. Gothic tales, if mis-handled, can seem melodramatic and ridiculous. And then there are those few episodes which stretch credulity on the page, and look absurd on screen. How should a modern audience react to the sight of Edward Rochester dressing up as a gypsy woman to read Jane's fortune? How will they react to the absurd coincidence that St John Rivers is Jane's cousin? And how far will Hollywood have the courage to cast a hero and heroine that really are plain and Byronically ugly respectively? To my mind, the most successful adaptations have been the 1944 JANE EYRE with a truly frightening and Bryonic Orson Welles as Rochester, and a script by John Houseman and Aldous Huxley. The only negative was the altogether too pretty and insipid Joan Fontaine as Jane. After that, I very much liked the 1996 Franco Zefirelli JANE EYRE starring a good-looking but suitably old and menacing William Hurt as Rochester and the absolutely perfect Jane in the jolie-laide Charlotte Gainsbourg. Both of these adaptations retained the gothic, dark atmosphere of the novel and showed the struggle between passion and morality. Both are memorable and definitive in their own way.

The new adaptation of JANE EYRE from director Cary Fukunage (SIN NOMBRE) and screenwriter Moira Buffini (TAMARA DREWE) has its moments but must, overall, be judged a failure. And for that, I blame the writer and director. Buffini's screenplay is admirably concise; uses an effective flashback structure; and thankfully omits all episodes that force a willing suspension of disbelief that strains the modern viewer. (No gypsy and the Rivers aren't cousins). But, Buffini also compresses Jane's early years so radically that we do not get a sense of how she came to be the remarkably self-possessed, morally upright woman that Rochester falls in love with. The Red Room is shorn of its Gothic visions; the death of Helen Burns is dealt with in a matter of minutes; and most importantly, the good example of Miss Temple, the kind teacher who forms so much of Jane's character, is omitted entirely. And so, after a few short episodes, we go to Thornfield and see, almost as quickly as we rush through Jane's childhood, Rochester and Jane falling in love. Admittedly, once we get to that point, the love story plays out beautifully, because Buffini finally gives the story room to breathe, and Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender (though both far too beautiful) finally get the chance to show what fine actors they are. 

But as the story develops into its dramatic climax, the movie and the script absolutely fails. For Buffini and Fukunaga have taken the decision to focus on the romance, the intellectual and emotional inter-play, at the expense of the Gothic. There is no "woman at the foot of the bed", no "tearing of the veil"...It's as though they are embarrassed by it, or unwilling to keep faith with Eyre's vision. Indeed, they are so embarrassed by the generally brooding and serious tone of the novel, that they feel it necessary to make Judi Dench's Mrs Fairfax comic relief - pathetic. And so we are left with a very beautifully acted and wonderfully photographed (DP Adriano Goldman) love story yes - and with no little power - the scene where Rochester begs Jane to stay is quite wonderful. But this is not Jane Eyre, not really. The proto-feminism is there - the Victorian romance is there - but the Gothic is cruelly, disastrously under-played.

JANE EYRE was released earlier this year in the US, Estonia, Latvia, Taiwan, Portugal, South Korea, Iceland, South Africa, Singapore, Israel, Kuwait and the Czech Republic. It is currently on release in Hong Kong and Russia. It opens on September 9th in Belgium, France, Ireland and the UK. It opens on September 16th in Sweden; on September 22nd in the Netherlands; on December 1st in Germany; on December 9th in Turkey and on February 23rd 2012 in Denmark.