Nishikata Film Review: The Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows (1972-1980), Part II

22 November 2011

The Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows (1972-1980), Part II

I remember that once in an English Literature class we were asked: “If you could travel back in time to be in the audience for any performance in history, what would you like to see?” My answer at the time was to see Fred and Adele Astaire dance on Broadway. Today, I think my answer would be to attend the Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Shows.

The first Kawamoto + Okamoto Puppet Anime-Show (川本+ 岡本パペットアニメーショウ) was in October 1972, one year after Tadanari Okamoto had held a retrospective of his own work. As mentioned in Part I, Okamoto had been the one to suggest a joint event with his friend Kihachiro Kawamoto. Even with the work of two animators, they still did not have enough to fill a programme, so Kawamoto came up with the idea of including live puppet theatre. Many of the live puppet performances were written and directed by Kawamoto himself.

The events allowed not only these two acknowledged masters of puppet animation to shine, but also gave the staff who worked for them an opportunity to show off their own individual talents. At the fourth show in 1975, for example, Hirokazu Minegishi presented his own short film The Daughter of Osaka (Ōsaka no ojyōsan). Minegishi worked for both Okamoto and Kurosawa throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and now does puppet animation under director Tsuneo Goda for Dwarf (Domo-kun, Komaneko, etc.)

According to Kihachiro Kawamoto: Animation and Puppet Master (Kadakawa Shoten, 1994), these are the animation screening programmes for the Anime-Shows (KK=Kawamoto, TO=Okamoto):