Mari Miyazawa
(宮澤真理) is unique among recent
Geidai animation graduates because in addition to being an animator she is
a food stylist. Long-time readers will
know that I love a film that features food in innovative ways – check out my
post Nami
Iijima: Food Stylist Extraordinaire for a taste – so I was immediately
drawn to Miyazawa’s work at Koji
Yamamura’s presentation of Tokyo University of the Arts at ITFS
2014.
A former graphic designer in the
computer games industry, Miyazawa uses real food and stop motion to bring a
bakery to life in her first year short for the Geidai programme. The twins in Twins in the Bakery (ツインズ イン ベーカリー, 2013) are a pair of sausage tips cope to
life, complete with jaunty little hats made of cheese. They
live in a house made of white slices of bread, waffles, and oreo cookies. The shrubs in their garden are pieces of
broccoli. The bakery is their
playground while the baker's away. The twins bounce over bread
rolls, jousting with plastic swords, one of them turns a potato chip into a
cowboy hat and plays with a lasso while the other pretends to be a DJ with
slices of ham standing in for records. Soon
the twins are “waking up” the bread rolls and other baked goods in the bakery,
with everyday treats transforming into animal shapes with the help of deli
meat, chocolate, and other common sandwich and dessert toppings.
The twins’ adventures are done as a
series of vignettes in which Miyazawa exploits the ability of animation to make
the ordinary extraordinary. On her food blog, Miyazawa specializes in
making cute figures out of everyday foods for bento boxes. With her animation, Miyazawa has brought her
wonderful creations to life. My only criticism would be that the voice-over
narration in the opening is completely unnecessary. At Pritt
Pärn’s presentation of the Estonian Academy of Arts animation programme at ITFS
2014, he said that he made it a rule that students could not dialogue or a
narrator for their films. I think this
is a wise idea, because it really gets students to think about showing rather
than telling when using visual media.
Follow her blog on food art at http://www.e-obento.com/
Follow her on twitter: @Mari_Miyazawa
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014
