In
September, the Tokyo
International Film Festival unveiled digitally restored versions of 3
masterpieces by early anime pioneers Kenzō
Masaoka and Noburō Ōfuji: The Spider and the Tulip (1943), Whale (1952), and The Phantom Ship (幽霊船 / Yuureisen,
1956). They also screened a newly
discovered animated short by Ōfuji: Noroma
na jiji (のろまな爺, 1924) – there is not an official English title yet,
but I would suggest Foolish Old Man based
upon plot descriptions I have read – and a test version of his incomplete final
film Princess Kayuga (竹取物語/Taketori Monogatari, 1961). In 1924 Ōfuji (大藤 信郎, 1900–1961) had joined
Sumikazu Film Studios (スミカズ映画創作社) where he was being mentored by Kōuchi Junichi (幸内純一, 1886-1970). Noroma na jiji was Ōfuji’s first attempt
at animation at Sumikazu. The film was
restored by IMAGICA West who transferred the film to black and white film stock
in order to do the restoration, then tinted the film to match the original film
(Source: Kobe-eiga). The films were introduced by Kōji Yamamura, who discussed the restoration
process at the event.
I am looking
forward to seeing these restored and rediscovered classics – particularly Whale and The Phantom Ship. I have
both of these film on the terrific DVD Animation
Pioneers: Noburō Ōfuji Lofty Genius (アニメーションの先駆者 大藤信郎 孤高の天才,
2010). Although the transfer from film to DVD is well done, the film image had
darkened with age and both films have the usual scratches and flecks that 35mm
develop over time. The films are
silhouette animations which use coloured cellophane to add layers and visual
interest. With digital restoration, I
imagine that the improved clarity of the coloured cellophane would look
stunning. Lotte Reiniger’s The
Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926), which
was a huge influence on Ōfuji, was digitally restored and released
on Blu-ray/ DVD in the UK this past August.
Although this film is tinted rather than using coloured cellophane, the
colours and detail in the digital restoration are simply spectacular.
The Phantom Ship (幽霊船 / Yuureisen,
1956), a film both directed and written by Ōfuji, opens with tantalising
glimpse at the master at work: Ōfuji’s hands cutting waves out of coloured
cellophane. The opening title sequence
is written in English, which suggests that he made the film with his
international audience in mind. His
films Taeisei Shakuson (大聖釈尊, 1948) and Whale
screened at Cannes in 1952 and 1953 respectively in the official selection for
short films. Ōfuji’s name is Romanised as “Ohfuji”
in the opening credits. The renowned
composer and professor of music Kōzaburō
Hirai (平井康三郎, 1910-2002) composed the soundtrack. There is no dialogue or narration in The Phantom Ship; instead, the story is
told purely through visuals and music (choir, strings instruments, percussion).
During the
opening credits, the camera rotates over a map of East Asia coming to stop over
the Yellow Sea – the northern part of the East China Sea which lies between
mainland China and the Korean Peninsula.
After a closer shot of the Yellow Sea, suggesting that this is where the
story takes place, the opening sequence fades to black and opens with the
parting of two wavelike silhouettes. We
see a rugged seascape which, combined with the low vocalising of the
choir creates a feeling of unease. Then,
the shadow of a phantom ship appears.
The ship is a ruin, with its brightly coloured sails in tatters. It is a ghastly scene. One crew member hangs from his feet from the
ship’s bow. Another man stands impaled
to the mast by a sword. A pirate symbol
seems to have been scrawled upon one of the tattered sails. After a montage of the corpses, the camera
returns to the pirate symbol. The wordless
chorus increases in volume and pitch as the boat magically comes back to life.
The sails mend themselves and the crew of noblemen, armed with swords, also
magically return to their formal selves.
They thrash their swords and look ready for a fight.
The scene
shifts to a more peaceful ship filled with elegant figures. Women dance around a smiling figure of a Buddha.
Some of the dancing scenes are set against a kaleidoscope of whirling colours. A sentry walks the deck alert to any
trouble. Just as a pair of lovers look
as though they are about to embrace, the phantom ship appears and interrupts
their peace. The trouble begins with the shot of a cannon and soon the phantom
pirates are invading the peaceful ship attacking both men and women
indiscriminately. Although the peaceful
ship seems overwhelmed, they put up a valiant fight, with even the elegantly
dressed ladies picking up swords and duelling with the invaders. The pirates toss people overboard and set the
ship alight. The phantom pirate ship then quietly sails away.
In the next
scene snow is falling, then a short montage suggests a shift in time from
winter into the spring. A white phantom
ship approaches the pirate phantom ship.
The pirates shoot at it in vain, then shake with fear as the white
phantom sailor approaches, his rapier brandished high. Behind him sits a white lady. It is the ghosts of the pirates’ noble
victims. The white phantoms now seek
their revenge, in a marvelous sequence that uses an experimental technique of
overlaying animated swirling lines and other shapes. There are also overlaid images of white feet
stomping on the pirates and hand prints slapping at them. It is a nightmare sequence complete with
images resembling dripping blood. Even
the waves seem determined to grab the pirates and dash them into the sea. The white phantoms do not rest until the
magic is undone and the pirates return to their original state as corpses on a
ruin of a pirate ship.
It is truly
a spectacular film, and one of the top animated shorts of 1957. At the time, there were no established
international film festivals for animation – the oldest such festival, Annecy,
would get off the ground in 1960. The
Oscars at this time were giving awards to “cartoons” – i.e. it was
mainly a competition between Disney, Warner Bros., MGM, and UPA – Norman
McLaren famously won an Oscar for Neighbours
(1952) in 1953, but it was for Best Documentary Short because pixilation/stop
motion techniques did not qualify as “cartoon” (i.e. drawn) animation. Thus other animation techniques at
international festivals like Berlin and Cannes were lumped into vague
categories such as “Culture Films and Documentary”.
Many books
and articles claim that The Phantom Ship
won the “Grand Prix” at the 17th Venice Film Festival in 1956 which
I have always found suspicious because of its wording. To begin with, the Venice Film Festival’s grand prix is not called “Grand Prix”,
but the Golden Lion. Secondly, no Golden Lion was awarded in 1956. Jury members
were divided in opinion between Kon
Ichikawa’s Harp of Burma and Juan Antonio Bardem’s Calle Mayor and so in the end did not
give the award to anyone. The jury president that year was John Grierson (UK) with jury members including André Bazin (France), G.B.
Cavallaro (Italy), Friedrich Ermler
(USSR), James Quinn (UK), Kiyohiko Ushihara (Japan), and Luchino Visconti (Italy). This was reported in English by Fred Roos in his article “Venice Film
Festival, 1956.” [The Quarterly of Film
Radio and Television, 11.3 (Spring 1957)]
The Special Jury Prize and Silver Lion were also not awarded in
1956. But then, these aforementioned prizes are also intended for feature films. In
the 1950s, short films received less press than they do today for the prizes
that they receive so it is difficult to dig up spectator's impressions of the films. Even in the QFRV, Roos
only mentions that 14 prizes were awarded to documentary and children films,
but he does not give their titles. He
praises the Chinese and the Czechs as being “particularly outstanding in their
use of puppets and animation” (253), but he does not mention Noburō Ōfuji at
all. Digging through French film
journals in the
library of the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt, I have also been unable
to find information about reaction to The
Phantom Ship at Venice in 1956.
So I dug
deeper and found that according to the Venice Film Festival’s digital archives,
The Phantom Ship was awarded an Honorable
Mention for Experimental Film (Menzione
per i film sperimentali). This is
not the grand prix, but a runner-up
to Peter Foldes’s animated short
film, A Short Vision, which won the
award for Best
Experimental Film (Premio per il
miglior film sperimentale). Foldes’s
anti-Atom bomb film, which the BFI calls
“one of the most influential British animated films ever made, had caused a huge
sensation when it screened on May 27, 1956 on the popular variety show The Ed Sullivan Show in the US.
I think that
the mistaken attribution of a grand prix
at Venice to Ōfuji likely came from an error of translation somewhere along the
line, and the difficulty of checking the name of the award without access to
physical archives. The Biennale’s online
digital archive only became available in recent years and is currently only
available in Italian, so it was difficult to check without going to an
archive. Also, the multiple spellings of
Ōfuji’s name in the Latin alphabet (Ofuji, Ohfuji, Oofuji, etc.) make searches of online databases
challenging. In the trailer released by the
NFC in September for the screening event at TIFF (Tokyo), the award Ōfuji
received as Tokubetsushō (特別賞) – lit.
special award – which matches the Italian well.
The Phantom Ship is indisputably a special
film – one of the best animated shorts to come out of Japan in the 1950s, and
when one takes into account Ōfuji’s other silhouette animations, he ranks as
one of the top silhouette animators of all time alongside Lotte Reiniger, Bruno J. Böttge, and Michel Ocelot. While pouring through old journals in the
library, I discovered a forgotten nugget of information: The Phantom Ship was screened in the UK in 1957. According to Bernard Orna, writing in the now
defunct journal Films and Filming, The Phantom Ship was one of the films
that at the First International Animated
Film Festival, nicknamed the “Festival of Cartoons”, at the National Film
Theatre (now BFI Southbank) in London.
He describes Ōfuji’s “open[ing] the door on an exciting variant of a
kind of film known to us otherwise through the work of Lotte Reiniger.” (3.7
April 1957, p.33). The door has indeed been opened, and I do hope that more young animators – like Aki Kono in her film Promises
Catherine
Munroe Hotes 2013
