Japanese
Auteur Animation at RICA Wissembourg
Part I : The Beginnings of Auteurism
« L'animation japonaise d'auteur »
presented by Ilan Nguyen
RICA (Rencontres Internationales du Cinéma
d’Animation) is an international
animation festival in Wissembourg, France.
It has been held every 2-3 years since 1995 by the local cinema
club. Located in a small Alsatian town
nestled on the border with Germany, the festival has a warm atmosphere and
spectators both young and old who share a passion for the craft of
animation.
For the 10th
edition of the RICAs, the French animation historian and interpreter Ilan Nguyen was invited to present two screenings
of Japanese Auteur Animation accompanied by a talk about the history of
independent animation production in Japan from the post-war period until the
present day.
Screening One / Programme 1ère partie 22 Nov. 2014, La Nef,
Wissembourg
An Overview of Japanese Auteur Animation
Un survol de l'animation japonaise
d'auteur
Post-War – 1970s / De l'après-guerre
aux années 1970
The Beginnings of Auteurism
Prémices à l'auteurisme
Piggyback Ghost /おんぶおばけ (Ryūichi Yokoyama, 1955)
Little Black Sambo /ちびくろさんぼのとらたいじ (Tadahito Mochinaga, 1956)
Plus 50000 Years /プラス50000年 (Ryūichi Yokoyama,
Shin’ichi Suzuki, 1961)
50,000
Insects (1 Episode) / 五万匹 (Ryūichi Yokoyama, 1962)
Nguyen began with by introducing the work
of Ryūichi Yokoyama (横山 隆一, 1909-2001),
a popular satirical cartoonist with a museum, the Yokoyama Memorial Manga Museum, dedicated to his memory. Although his cartoons, such as the Fuku-chan (1936-71) and Hyaku-baka (1968-70) series are well
known, less attention has been paid to Yokoyama’s intrinsic role in the
development of Japanese animation.
Nguyen presented a short, silent clip from Yokoyama’s 25-minute ghost
tale Piggyback Ghost (おんぶおばけ/Onbu Obake, 1955). The film title has also been variously
translated to English as Knapsack Ghost
and Ghost in a Knapsack. The story is based on a popular folk legend. From what his research, Nguyen believes that
Yokoyama was the first Japanese animator to go to Hollywood to visit the Disney
studios and study the animation methods used there.
Piggyback Ghost was believed lost until
relatively recently. The clip that
Nguyen showed was of poor quality and in desperate need of restoration. However, it was pretty clear that the film
was an exercise for Yokoyama in trying out the various cel animation techniques
he witnessed at Disney. The scene was a
chase scene and Yokoyama plays with using different perspectives to create
drama. One shot that was particularly
notable was a chase scene where the protagonist is running straight at the
camera. A bit rough around the edges, but
it certainly piqued my interest in seeing the film fully restored.
Another
notable pioneer in post-war Japanese animation was the puppet animator Tadahito Mochinaga (持永只仁,
1919-99). Mochinaga and Yokoyama had a
connection because one of Mochinaga’s animated film was an adaptation of
Yokoyama’s Fuku-chan cartoon – the 1944 film Fuku-chan’s Submarine (フクちゃんの潜水艦 / Fuku-chan no Sensuikan).
Mochinaga
played a crucial role in the founding of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in China, and upon his return to
Japan would end up producing the puppet animation for America’s much-beloved Rankin/Bass
Christmas specials such as Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
and The Little Drummer Boy (1968). Little
Black Sambo (ちびくろさんぼのとらたいじ, 1956) was the film that
brought Mochinaga to Arthur Rankin, Jr.
and Jules Bass’s attention at the
Vancouver International Animation Festival in 1958, where it won Best
Children’s Film. As there were many
young people in the audience, Nguyen was careful to give the background of the
racist history of the story that Little
Black Sambo is based upon. I will
write about this more fully in my forthcoming review the film, but in the meantime, you
can learn more from my review about Mochinaga’s sequel Little Black Sambo and the Twins
(1975).
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| Ilan Nguyen being introduced by Edmond Grandgeorge |
Next, Nguyen
introduced the animator Shin’ichi Suzuki
(鈴木 伸一,
b.1933), who worked at Yokoyama’s studios Otogi
Pro at the time, before going on to co-found Studio Zero in 1963.
Yokoyama and Suzuki co-directed Plus
50,000 Years (プラス50000年, 1961), a comic animation short which speculates about how
humankind will evolve in the next 50,000 years. He also screened one short episode from Otogi
Pro’s series 50,000 Insects (五万匹, 1962). The episode was comic in nature and told the
story of a boar’s encounter with a sika deer.
The mean-spirited boar knocks the deer off a log into a ravine then goes
on his merry way until a lump in the shape of the deer appears on his
nose. This forces the boar to reconsider
his actions and he returns to the scene of the incident in the hopes of
rescuing the deer. Otogi Pro films and
television series are not easy to come by, so this was a particularly special
treat.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014
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