Ever since reading about Tadanari Okamoto
and Kihachiro Kawamoto’s joint Puppet Anime-Shows (川本+ 岡本パペットアニメーショウ) on Anipages, I have wanted
to learn more about them. Had the two Japanese
masters of puppet animation met working on puppets for stop motion pioneer Tadahito
Mochinaga’s MOM Productions – the studio that famously did the puppet animation
for Rankin/Bass’s beloved children’s classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) – or had they met earlier?
How did the idea for the Puppet Anime-Shows develop? What was screened at the events?
According to Kawamoto's account in Kihachiro Kawamoto: Animation and Puppet Master (Kadakawa Shoten, 1994), Kawamoto and Okamoto met for the
first time at the farewell party Mochinaga hosted for Kawamoto when he departed
for Prague to study under Jiri Trnka in 1962.
Okamoto’s enthusiasm for the future of puppet animation in Japan made
quite an impression on Kawamoto and became the basis for their friendship.
Shortly after Kawamoto’s return to Japan,
Okamoto quit MOM Productions and founded his own animation studio in 1964 which
he named Echo Productions. Okamoto’s
first independent film A Wonderful Medicine (ふしぎなくすり, 1965) impressed Kawamoto with its fresh style and subject
matter. However, from the very beginning
it was clear that the two men had very different approaches to puppet
animation. Okamoto was able to produce
many more films than Kawamoto because he took advantage of the need for
educational films for schools. This
meant that Okamoto had a steady source of income for producing animated puppet
films and employed a studio system of animating. He employed a team of
talented artists including Sumiko Hosaka, Fumiko Magari, and Hirokazu Minegishi to assist with the construction of puppets and assisting with the animation.
In contrast, Kawamoto worked as an
independent artist in the 1970, making the dolls himself, making their
costumes, constructing the sets, and doing the animation with very little money
for staff to assist him. Much of
Kawamoto’s work was funded by making puppets for NHK’s children’s programming
such as Okaasan to Issho (1966), Cinderella (1973), and Yan Yan Mū-kun
(1973-75).
In the early days of their independent
work, Kawamoto and Okamoto began to spent a lot of their free time together,
not only to talk about their work but also going on ski trips and other
excursions together. It was on one such
outing that Okamoto, who had already hosted a solo show of his own work, suggested putting together a joint puppet animation show.
In hosting their Puppet Anime-Shows,
Okamoto and Kawamoto faced two major obstacles: finding enough material to
screen and funding the event. Because
puppet animation is a time consuming process, Kawamoto could only complete a
new work every couple of years. Even
Okamoto, with his larger staff, could only produce two to four short films a
year. With only a handful of new works,
they needed something to fill out the programme to make it a proper event. 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.
Hosting these Puppet Anime-Shows in addition to their usual puppet
animation production schedules was hard going for Kawamoto, Okamoto, and their
staff. The positive reaction of the audience to
the screenings and performances outweighed any hardships that they experienced
and made it all worthwhile for them.
Kawamoto has said that if it were not for Okamoto and the Puppet
Anime-Shows his work would never have amounted to much. The period during which they held the Puppet
Anime-Shows was the time that Kawamoto felt that he truly became an
artist. Ten years after the curtain
closed on the final Puppet-Anime Show, Kawamoto was able to pay a final tribute
to his friend and puppet show collaborator by completing The Restaurant of Many
Orders (注文の多い料理店, 1991), the film that Okamoto
left unfinished when he died suddenly of liver cancer at the age of 62.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011
What puppet films were screened at the Puppet Anime-Shows? Read Part II to find out.
To learn more read:
- Kihachiro Kawamoto: Animation and Puppet Master (Kadakawa Shoten, 1994)
- Tadanari Okamoto: The Heart of Animation (Benjamin Ettinger, Anipages, 2005)
- Kawamoto Kihachirō: Ningyō – kono inochi aru mono (Heibonsha, 2007)
- Midnight Eye Interview: Kihachiro Kawamoto (Jasper Sharp, Midnight Eye, 2004)
AVAILABLE ON DVD:
