A Poet’s Life (詩人の生涯/ Shijin no Shōgai, 1974) is the only
non-puppet animation of Kihachirō
Kawamoto to win the Noburo
Ofuji Award. Apart from his Self Portrait (1988), Kawamoto’s
adaptation of modern tales tended to be done using cut-outs or drawn animation
styles such as Farce Anthropo-cynique
(1970) based on the short story by experimental modernist Riichi Yokomitsu (横光 利一,
1898-1947) or Kawamoto’s original screenplay Travel (旅 / Tabi, 1973). In
interviews, Kawamoto usually explained that he was a firm believer in finding
the right animation materials for telling the story.
This
animated short is an adaptation of a story of the same name by the great modernist
writer Kōbō Abe (安部 公房, 1924-1993), who is known for his surreal stories that
explore the modern angst of individuals in society. Unlike the colourful world of Kawamoto’s
puppet films, A Poet’s Life is drawn
in morose shades of grey and brown. The
flatness of the cut-out aesthetic mirrors the one-dimensionality of the dreary
life of the factory workers in this modern tale of inequality. The male main protagonist loses his job when
he dares to complain to his boss about the terrible conditions that he and his
fellow factory must endure.
The man lies
passed out on the floor of his home while his aged mother works diligently away
on her squeaky spinning wheel. The
dialogue is related through the use of title cards, and we learn that the old
woman feels as worn out and limp as a thread of cotton. The cotton flies from her hands and as she
reaches for it, she finds herself being terrifyingly turned into thread as
well.
The son
awakes to find his mother has disappeared.
All that remains of her is the clothes that were on her back, but he is
too exhausted to do anything about it. A
neighbour arrives and takes the newly spun yarn and knits it into a
sweater. But no one will buy the
sweater, not only because they are too poor but also because it cries out as if
in agony. The young man, who continues his
protest against the factory, has a feeling that the sweater should not be
sold. Eventually, the sweater ends up in
a pawnshop.
High up on
the hill overlooking the town, the factory owner lives with his family. The wealthy man polishes his rifle while his
wife wears a fur coat indoors. Winter
comes in the form of a beautiful sequence of falling snowflakes “made of
crystallized dreams, spirits, and desires.”
The snow keeps falling and the temperatures drop steeply. The families with foreign made sweaters
manage to survive at first, the storybook-like title cards tells us, but the
shelves of shops become empty. As the
situation becomes critical, the wealthy man order another 5000 foreign sweaters
in “a new pattern ideological tiger stripes in black and white. . . or 50 atom
bombs instead?”
The crisis
is averted when the young man puts on the sweater knitted by his mother – now
red with her blood. He looks and the
snow and comes to the realization that he is a poet: “Look! Aren’t these
beautiful snowflakes the forgotten words of the poor? . . . their dreams, spirits, desires. . . ” As
he writes down these words, the snow melts, and the sun comes out. Owner-less storerooms are opened and all the
people get sweaters.
Visually,
the film does an excellent job of representing the settings and characters of
Abe’s story. Compared to Kawamoto’s
later puppet animation, however, this animation is less expressive with too much
reliance on the text than on the visuals.
Although the text is very poetically written, I think the film would
have been a lot stronger if it had relied on the animation to tell the
story. The red sweater is a particularly
compelling visual motif because it is the only object that is brightly coloured
in an otherwise monotone film. Two
decades later, Steven Spielberg would use this same technique in his Oscar-winning
film Schindler’s List (1993) with the
memorable image of a girl in the red coat.
Based upon a
short story by
Kōbō Abe
Music
Joji Yuasa
Performers
Aki
Takahashi
Yasunobu
Yamaguchi
Backgrounds
Takashi
Komae
Masami Tokuyama
Camera
Minoru Tamura
Sound
Isamu Katto
Sound
Effects
Iwao
Takahashi
Editing
Hisako
Aizawa
Animation
Kihachiro
Kawamoto
Yutaka
Mikome
Takao
Ishikawa
With the
Assistance of
Akiko
Konishi
Chitose Nasu
Hiromi
Wakasa
Seiya Maruyama
Satoru Yoshida
Echo Studios
Screenplay/Direction
Kihachiro
Kawamoto
