Japanese
Auteur Animation at RICA Wissembourg, Part 4: Auteurs of the 2nd
and 3rd Generations
« L'animation japonaise d'auteur »
presented by Ilan Nguyen
Auteurs of the 2nd and 3rd
Generations (1900s – 2000s)
Auteurs de la 2e à la 3e génération (des années 1980 aux années 2000)
Original Programme :
Banana (Hitoshi
Takekiyo, 1991)
A Gum Boy / くちゃお (Masaki Okuda, 2010b
Muybridge’s Strings / マイブリッジの糸 (Kōji Yamamura, 2011)
Hitogata / ひとがた (Osamu Sakai, 2011)
Scenes /情景 (Kunio Katō,
2012)
Anomalies
(Atsushi Wada, 2013)
Actual
Programme:
Banana (Hitoshi Takekiyo, 1991)
A
Gum Boy / くちゃお (Masaki Okuda, 2010
Digital / デジタル (Osamu Sakai, 2012)
Scenes /情景 (Kunio Katō,
2012)
Mechanism
of Spring /春のしくみ (Atsushi Wada, 2010)
Muybridge’s
Strings / マイブリッジの糸 (Kōji Yamamura, 2011)
There is no
question that the greatest auteur of the second generation of Japanese indie
animators is Kōji Yamamura (山村浩二, b. 1964). Not
only has he been producing top notch animation since the early 1990s, but as a
professor at Tokyo University of the Arts (aka Geidai) he is nurturing current
and future generations of animation talent.
His renown has attracted not just the cream of the crop from across
Japan, but also talented young animators from China and South Korea who want to
follow in his footsteps. Nguyen chose to
end his RICA programme with Muybridge’s
Strings, a film that Nguyen felt has been underrated compared to highly
favoured works like Mt. Head
(2002) and Franz
Kafka’s A Country Doctor (2007).
Muybridge’s Strings is a very
complex film with many layers, and its selection fit well in the overall RICA
2014 programme which featured many other NFB productions and co-productions in
both the official competition and in the special screening events.
Nguyen
pointed out that Yamamura considers himself an auteur, following in the footsteps
of animators he admires such as Jacques
Drouin, Ishu Patel, Yuri Norstein, and Priit Pärn. He is also an
advocated for animation. In addition to his teaching, he set up the collective Animations: Creators and Critics, in
order to raise awareness about independent world animation.
Nguyen also
presented the works of two animators who were mentored by Yamamura. Masaki
Okuda is a very talented young filmmaker and his award-winning film A Gum Boy (read
review) shows a strong Yamamura influence.
Atsushi Wada is a self-taught
Kansai-based animator who had already developed a recognisable individual style
(thinly drawn lines, a muted colour palette and animal motifs) before attending
the Geidai graduate programme. The
Geidai programme took his work to the next level with his acclaimed graduate
film In a
Pig’s Eye (2010). Nguyen showed
Wada’s Mechanism
of Spring, which is one of Wada’s most exuberant films to date.
The selection
opened with Banana (1991) by Hitoshi Takekiyo (竹清仁, b. 1967). A graduate of Kyushu Institute of Design,
Takekiyo founded the KOO-KI collective of designers and directors in Fukuoka in
1997 and his most recent success was the animated comic short After School Midnight (2005) which was
extended into a full-length version After School Midnighters in
2012. He parted ways with KOO-KI in 2012
and founded a new independent production company Mt.
Blanc Pictures. Takekiyo’s specialty
is computer animation. His early work Banana, which won a Special
International Jury Prize at Hiroshima 1992, is part of the MoMA
collection. It brings Chinese
characters to life through movement and sound, performing the words that they
signify. People, 人, rush
about busy streets, while hands 手 perform actions, and so on. It’s a great little film that really ought to
be shared more widely and not hidden away in an archive.
Next, Nguyen
presented the work of two graduates of Tamabi (Tama Art University). Tamabi’s animation programme, under the
guidance of the late Prof. Masahiro
Katayama and current mentor Prof. Tatsutoshi Nomura (野村辰寿, b. 1964), has produced many outstanding animators
including Akino Kondoh, Mizue Mirai, and Oscar-winning director
Kunio Katō (加藤久仁生,
b. 1977). Katō is of course most famous
for La
maison en petits cubes (2008), but Nguyen presented a series of
steam-of-consciousness short-shorts called Scenes
that Katō made for his
travelling exhibition in 2012. Read my review
here.
Osamu Sakai (坂井 治, b. 1977) is Nomura and Katō’s colleague at their company
ROBOT. Although his films regularly
screen at international festivals his work is lesser known abroad. In Japan his work has been seen on the
popular, long-running NHK programme Minna
no Uta. Nguyen had hoped to screen Hitogata, but due to availability we
were shown Digital instead. Digital
is a montage of hand drawn geometric shapes. The film made the 2013
Official Selection at Annecy. Samples
of Sakai’s work including Digital
cane be screened on his YouTube channel.
On the whole
Nguyen presented an engaging programme of films, many of which I had not had
the opportunity to see before, and posited some interesting ideas about
auteurism and animation in Japan. My
only criticism was that the programme did not feature any women animators. For the first generation of indie animators,
women tended to take a backseat to their male colleagues. To be fair, Nguyen did mention that Renzō Kinoshita was not an individual
auteur but an artist who worked in a partnership with his spouse Sayoko Kinoshita, and he also mentioned
the team effort of Tadanari Okamoto’s studio, which featured the talents of
puppet maker Sumiko Hosaka and
puppet maker / animator Fumiko Magari. However, the final programme of animators
from the 2nd and 3rd generations of indie animators did not reflect the fact that a
growing number of women have been making a name for themselves as auteurs. The Germany-based stop motion animator Maya Yonesho (learn more)
has been exporting her unique brand of animation worldwide with her Daumenreise (Thumb Travels) workshops and
although lesser known overseas, Reiko
Yokosuka’s sumi-e animation is truly
beautiful.
The most
exciting news is that the promise held by the current generation of women
animators. For example, Yoriko Mizushiri, a graduate of Joshibi
University of Art and Design, has been a festival favourite in recent years and
Akino Kondoh makes amazing animated
shorts. I also observed at Hiroshima
2014 that Geidai’s post-graduate programme in animation, where Nguyen works,
has a majority of female students. Some
auteurs in the making include Saori
Shiroki, who was in the first
cohort of graduates alongside Atsushi
Wada, as well as Yuanyuan Hu, puppet-animator
Aya Tsugehata and Maho Yoshida from the 3rd
graduating class. Yewon Kim and Yangtong Zhu are two real stand-outs from this
year’s crop of graduates. I was
delighted to discover that Kansai animator Mika
Seike, whose work I
discovered at Image Forum in 2006, has joined the Geidai animation
programme. That means we can expect two
short films from her in the next two years. Her works have a unique aesthetic
that really appeals to me.
As Nguyen
said during his presentation of animation auteurs of recent decades, there has
been a veritable explosion of talent on Japan’s indie scene since the turn of
the century. Every year brings exiting new films and interesting young
talent. Nguyen’s presentation gave a
peek at some of Japan’s hidden gems both past and present, and whetted my
appetite to see more works by many of these fascinating artists.
Catherine
Munroe Hotes 2014
