Muybridge’s Strings: Koji Yamamura and Selected Works from the NFB

Where: Skip City, Saitama

When: June 2 – July 22, 2012

Last weekend saw the opening of a Koji Yamamura exhibition at Skip City in Saitama Prefecture.  The centerpiece of the event is Yamamura’s co-production with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) Muybridge’s Strings (2011).  Muybridge’s Strings is playing with a selection of Yamamura’s top films from his early work for children Karo and Piyobupt: Imagination (1993), to his most recent short short Anthology with Cranes (2011) which is inspired by a 17^th century scroll painting by Tawaraya Sōtatsu.  Click on film titles for individual reviews.

Selected Works by Koji Yamamura

Karo and Piyobupt: Imagination (カロとピヨブプト-あめのひ, 1993)

Kid’s Castle (キッズキャッスル, 1995)

Mt. Head (頭山, 2002)

The Old Crocodile (年をとった鰐, 2005)

Fig（無花果, 2006) from Tokyo Loop

A Child’s Metaphysics (こどもの形而上学,2007)

Muybridge’s Strings (マイブリッジの糸, 2011)

Anthology with Cranes (鶴下絵和歌巻, 2011)

In addition, Yamamura has curated a selection of some of top NFB animated shorts past and present. 

Selected NFB Works

Canon (カノン, 1964)

by Norman McLaren and Grant Munro (ノーマン・マクラレン、グラント・マンロー)

Mindscape / Le paysagiste (心象風景, 1976)

by Jacques Drouin (ジャック・ドゥルーアン)

               

The Bead Game (ビーズゲーム, 1977)

by Ishu Patel (イシュ・パテル)

               

Jeu (技, 2006)  

by Georges Schwitzgebel (ジョルジュ・シュヴィッツゲベル)

Wild Life (ワイルド ライフ, 2011)      

by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby (アマンダ・フォービス、ウェンディ・ティルビー)

The exhibition also features original illustrations and storyboards.  The event runs until July 22^nd.

Muybridge's Strings is being released on Blu-ray in Japan in August.

Order the Flip Books today:

Muybridge no Ito 1  [Flip Book]

Muyvridge no Ito 2  [Flip Book]

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 3

Sunday, March 25, 2012

On this day I rose early and went for a stroll around the Eiffel Tower and along the Seine with Sakadachi-kun (see tumblr). I then hopped on the Métro Line 6 and headed to the Cinémathèque Française at Bercy.  There was a long queue to get into the Tim Burton Exposition – the one that first appeared at the MOMA in 2009.  Even though they only allowed so many people in per hour, the exhibition was still overcrowded and hot.  I was surprised at the number of parents who had brought very young children to the exhibition.  I witnessed one young girl’s innocent childhood being blemished with nightmarish imagery as she stared as if transfixed at a figure of an infant with nails in it.  It was worth putting up with the crowds to see Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) costume, as well as a long row of Jack Skellington heads from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) in a lit display box.  Each head had a slightly different expression on it to give spectators an idea of the process of stop motion.

The regular museum of the Cinémathèque Française had free admission on this day.  It was smaller than I had expected, knowing what treasures are in the archives of the Cinémathèque Française, but there were indeed many delightful things on display.  Martin Scorcese has already donated some set pieces from Hugo (2011), but I was much more impressed to see the original magician’s coat from Georges Méliès’  A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1920) in full colour and with hand-embroidered shapes on it.    Some of my favourite things on display at the museum:  a self portrait of Asta Nelson  (here it is on flickr, but it not as vibrantly coloured or as textured in postcard form), Mrs. Bates' head donated by Alfred Hitchcock shortly after the release of Psycho (1960), Mae West’s serpent turban from Leo Macarey’s Belle of the Nineties (1934), original poster art from Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1937), and Nikolai Cherkasov’s costume from Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-6).

For fans of animation, there are many wonderful things to discover in the Cinémathèque Française.  On the walls just before one goes upstairs there is original art from Hans Richter’s Rythmus 23 (1923) and Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924).  The Cinémathèque also hold the collection of the pinscreen animation pioneers Alexandre Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker.  On the upper level of the museum there are two pinscreens on display.  A tableau from 1930 – presumably the one used for the groundbreaking film Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont chauve, 1933)  and a larger screen from 1943.  The large screen holds approximately 1,140,000 pins and was restored for the Cinémathèque by NFB pinscreen animator Jacques Drouin.  The smaller tableau had the image of Bébé Nicolas on it – a character invented by Alexeieff to amuse his daughter when she was young.

There was great excitement at the Forum des images on Day 3, for Raoul Servais (official website) had come from Belgium to see his old friend Yuri Norstein.  I was drinking coffee in the Forum’s café when he entered and witnessed the warm embrace between the two men.  Norstein was delighted to see Servais and introduced him to the audience at the screening of Norstein’s early works and collaborations.  It was wonderful seeing Roman Kachanov’s enchanting The Mitten (1967) on 35mm.  Many of the films in this programme did not have subtitles, but this did not bother me because I had seen the ones with dialogue before.  The highlights of this programme were Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Norstein’s The Battle of Kerzhenets (1971) The Seasons (1969) on 35mm in their full widescreen glory.  They were truly a wonder to behold.

In the evening, Ilan Nguyen  and Serge Éric Ségura did a long presentation on the career of Kihachirō Kawamoto.  This included many rare photographs and video clips of Kawamoto and projects that he worked on throughout his career.  Nguyen teaches animation at Tokyo University of the Arts and is a well known animation expert in France.  He very kindly gave me programmes from the Nouvelles Images du Japon festivals that he assisted in organizing at the Forum des images in past years which have included showcase of the works of Osamu Tezuka, Yōji Kuri, Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Kōji Yamamura, and many others.  The French premiere of Kawamoto’s Winter Days occurred at the 2003 festival.  According to his profile on the website of the French periodical éclipses (revue de cinéma), Ségura is working on two books: one about the career of Servais and one about Kawamoto. 

The presentation opened with a clip of Kawamoto singing a Russian song on Japanese TV – which thoroughly delighted Norstein.  The main thrust of the presentation was to demonstrate the way in which Kawamoto had to wear many different hats during his life in order to make a living.  It is very difficult for independent animators to make a living on animation alone. 

There were photographs from Kawamoto’s early childhood – many of which were not in the two Japanese books profiling his life such as those of his mother Fuku (1891-1940) and his father Kinzaburō.  Kawamoto was born and raised in Sendagaya – the neighbourhood in which he was to live for the rest of his life.  His family dealt in porcelain.  There was a photograph of Kawamoto’s paternal grandmother Suzu Kawamoto (1861-1937) who was a major influence on the path his life was to take: teaching him how to make dolls and taking him to the theatre with her.

In the chapter I wrote on Kawamoto for Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 (ed. John Berra, 2012), I mention the fact that Kawamoto was a big fan of Hollywood and European film of  the 1930s – even making dolls of Greta Garbo and Danielle Darrieux.  Nguyen and Ségura presented a pastel that Kawamoto had made of Swedish film star Zarah Leander next to the original photograph that he had used for inspiration as well as dolls he made of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot.

For me the highlights of the presentation were photographs I had never seen before such as Kawamoto on the  set of productions at Toho including Senkichi Taniguchi’s Escape at Dawn (1950) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Actress (1947).  We saw clips of a Horoniga (character with a beer stein for a head used in advertisements for Asahi Beer in the 1940s and 50s) animated short directed by either Tadasu Iizawa (1909-94) or Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-99), as well as the first few minutes of Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo (1956) – which I would have loved to have seen in its entirety.

They also had on hand first editions of the Toppan storybooks, which Shiba Pro later published internationally – such as the Golden Press Living Storybooks series.  I have written about my copy of The Little Tin Soldier (1968) – click here.  There were also clips from other animation Kawamoto had done for the NHK such as the opening credit sequence of Okaasan Ishō and Boo Foo Woo (1960-7).  There was a series of Asahi Beer commercials with the slogan “Watashi no biru” (My beer) which were hilarious send-ups of westerns – Kawamoto had apparently been a huge fan of westerns as a teen, particularly John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). 

There was one bit of information that took me totally by surprise: I leaned that Kawamoto had elaborate tattoos on his back and upper arms.  Today in the west it has become quite commonplace for people to have tattoos, but in Japan such tattoos are associated with the yakuza.  Many sentō (public bath) have signs declaring that people with tattoos are not welcome to bathe there.  Kawamoto had his tattoos done between 1956 and 1963 apparently as a kind of act of rebellion; a way of marking himself as an individual.  Ségura and Nguyen even showed us a photograph of Kawamoto’s tattoos taken from the rear with him only wearing a fundoshi (traditional male underwear).  This was followed by a series of photographs from Kawamoto’s trip to Eastern Europe.  I looked at the famous photograph of Kawamoto with Jiří Trnka (1912-69) with new eyes.  Kawamoto looks very conservative in his suit: a small, unassuming man in contrast to the hulking form of Trnka.  To think that under that smart suit, Kawamoto was hiding an elaborate work of tattoo art!

One of the questions that had been niggling at me for some time was the mystery of Kawamoto’s first feature film: Rennyo and his Mother (1981).  This 93 min. puppet animation never plays at retrospectives of Kawamoto’s career and has never been made available on video or DVD.  They showed a clip from the film and it looks absolutely stunning.   After the presentation, I asked Nguyen about the availability of the film and he said that it also screens rarely in Japan as the rights are held by the religious organization who commissioned it.  The scenario for the film was written by Kaneto Shindō (Kuroneko, Onibaba) and it features voice acting by Kyōko Kishida and Tetsuko Kuroyanagi.  Although it was not a personal project of Kawamoto's, rather a commissioned work to order, I still feel the work is significant and would love to see it some day.

During the overview of the latter half of Kawamoto’s career there were photographs of him at festivals and other events around the world.  Notable photographs included one of him with Yuri Norstein at 1985 animation festival in Varna – which is the occasion on which the two of them became friends, with Jim Henson in 1986, with Břetislav Pojar at Annecy in 1987, in Shangai in 1987 signing the contact to make To Shoot Without Shooting (1988), and with Karel Zeman and Nicole Saloman at Hiroshima in 1987.  The presentation concluded with footage from the Kawamoto memorial service in 2010 which featured a very moving march of the large puppets from his NHK special series Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 

The presentation was followed by Takashi Namiki’s documentary Living With Puppets: The World of Kihachirō Kawamoto (1999) – read my review here.  The weekend concluded with a screening of Kawamoto shorts including a rare screening of Tadahito Mochinaga’s Little Black Sambo and the Twins (1957), for which Kawamoto had crafted puppets.  Read about this film here.  I slipped out of the final screening event after this film, for I had seen all the other films many times before.

 

with the illustrious Alexis Hunot

I had a chance on the final day of the Kawamoto-Norstein event to get to know animation expert Alexis Hunot a bit better.  I am a longtime fan of his blog Zewebanim and was pleased to find that he is also a fan of this blog.  It turns out that the review that I wrote about Takashi Namiki’s book Animated People in Photo, struck a personal chord with Alexis because his uncle Jean-Luc Xiberras (April 1, 1941- December 26, 1998) is featured in the book.  My blog post apparently triggered Alexis to track down a copy of the photograph for his mother.  Xiberras was the director of Annecy from 1982 until his passing in December 1998.  It was under Xiberras’ direction that Annecy moved from being a biennale to an annual event in 1998.  There is an interview with Xiberras from 1997 on AWN as well as a touching homage to him from 1999 in English and French with tributes written by Frédéric Back, Bruno Edera, and many others. 

Alexis Hunot did his studies in cinema, but his love of animation began when he discovered the works of Back, Norstein, and Jan Švankmajer at Annecy 1987 where he worked as an assistant.  He teaches at Gobelins  and has a monthly radio programme with Florentine Grelier about animation with called Bulles de rêves.   You can see a video of him giving a lecture here, and here is the interview he did with Yuri Norstein.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

PREVIOUSLY: Kawamoto-Norstein @Forum des Images, Day 2 (Part II)

FIRST ENTRY IN THIS SERIES: Kawamoto-Norstein @ Forum des Images, Day 1

A Wonderful Medicine (ふしぎなくすり, 1965)

This 15-minute stop motion animation is an important landmark in Japanese animation history.  A Wonderful Medicine (ふしぎなくすり, 1965) is the first independent film by Tadanari Okamoto (岡本忠成, 1932-90) after he founded his own studio Echo Productions (Echo Kabushiki-gaisha) in 1964.  It is also the first stop motion / puppet animation to win the Noburo Ofuji Award, which for 1965 was jointly awarded to Okamoto and experimental animation pioneer Yōji Kuri.  Okamoto was to go on to win this prestigious award more times than any other animator.

A Wonderful Medicine is an adaptation of the short-short story Nusunda Shorui (盗んだ書類) by novelist Shinichi Hoshi (1926-1997), acclaimed for his “short-short” science fiction stories – many of which were illustrated by another Ofuji award-winning animator Makoto Wada and one of Kuri’s fellow Animation Sannin no Kai members Hiroshi Manabe.  Short-short stories belong to the genre flash fiction, and as such tend to be not only short but also boast fresh, innovative storylines and unexpected endings. 

The evil genius imagines the medicine giving him powers of defying gravity / the winding road leading up to the scientist's lab

In an opening reminiscent of To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), an open top convertible winds its way up a coastal hill to a lookout point.  But instead of Cary Gant and Grace Kelly, the car holds a tall, skinny, evil genius with a Poirot moustache and his short, checked-cap-wearing lackey.  The two men are targeting a moustachioed elderly scientist who quirkily has a boy assistant and a talking crow. 

Posing as a potential customer, the evil genius spies on the scientist and overhears him making a new discovery.  Believing this new “wonderful medicine” to be something useful for his plans for world domination, the evil genius and his lackey plan a bold mission to steal the “wonderful medicine.”  Comical at every turn, they are almost foiled by the alarm systems and the talking crow, but in the end their cunning allows them make off with their prize.  In a hilarious twist at the end (spoiler alert), the lackey – who is coerced into being the guinea pig – takes some of the “wonderful medicine” which turns out to be a cure for turning a wicked heart into a good and wholesome heart.  Overcome by his new-found sense of morally upstanding principles, the lackey confesses his crime to the scientist, who is delighted to learn that his new medicine works as intended.

Examples of special effects

Compared to Okamoto’s graduate work Mirror (1960), one can see an improvement in the fluidity of character movement and general expressiveness of the characters – skills which Okamoto acquired during his period working under Tadahito Mochinaga at MOM Productions.  In an amusing touch, the scientist and the evil genius, whose mouths cannot be seen, both talk via their moustaches going up and down.  The establishing shots, both exterior and interior, set the scene beautifully.  The most innovative sequences occur when the crow tries desperately to prevent the thieves from taking the medicine.  Scribbles and even foam have been overlaid on top of the scene in order to depict the chaos of the fight in a dynamic fashion – I am guessing that as with Eastern European puppet films of this period (hugely influential on Okamoto throughout his career), and indeed as with Kihachirō Kawamoto’s early puppet films, this film was shot on the horizontal surface of an animation table with the camera looking down from above.  This would have allowed Okamoto to add depth and special effects on plates of glasses placed at different camera distances above the puppets.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

A Wonderful Medicine appears on the first DVD of the Collected Works of Tadanari Okamoto (JP only), which I reviewed for Midnight Eye.  This review belongs to my series on the Noburo Ofuji Award.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Muybridge's Strings Flip Books (マイブリッジの糸 フリップブック, 2011)

Fans of Kōji Yamamura who live outside of Japan may not be aware that it has become a tradition for the great animator to publish a book tie-in along with his latest film releases.  For Kafuka Inaka Isha, he published a slim, hardcover illustrated storybook edition of Franz Kafka's acclaimed short story A Country Doctor in Japanese translation.  


For his latest animated masterpiece Muybridge’s Strings (マイブリッジの糸, 2011), Yamamura and his publishers came up with the ingenious idea of creating  flip book tie-ins.  According to the introduction,  Yamamura wanted to create a book that would reflect the temporal themes of the animation.  Although I have not yet seen it, I have read that Muybridge's Strings employs a parallel editing structure that interweaves a story from the past (the time of Muybridge) with a story set in the present.  

Front covers: book slipcases, flip books, info booklet 

There are two complementary flip books available: (マイブリッジの糸I and マイブリッジの糸II).  They are published in a format of 13x8cm and consist of a slipcase and flip book in full colour, accompanied by a monochrome paper booklet.  When the front covers of both slipcases are pushed together (top photograph) they form the full length poster for the film.

Back covers: book slipcases, flip books, info booklet

Each flip book features a series of images on the right-hand side pages and transcribed music from the film by Normand Roger and J.S. Bach on each facing page.  The pages are of two different alternating lengths which means that once you have flipped through one side of the book, you can turn the book over and flip through a different series of images.  This forward and backward structure is also drawn from the animated short which references J.S. Bach's Crab Canon - a clever piece of music which is the musical equivalent of a palindrome.  It is best scene and heard, so I recommend checking out this helpful explanatory video.

Info booklets

Both flip books are accompanied by the same information booklet.  It features an introduction by Yamamura as well as an interview with him about not only the flip books but also the making of this Japanese-Canadian (NFB/NHK/Polygon) co-production.  See all photos on Google Plus or Facebook.  Even if you cannot read Japanese, these books are a visual delight and a must-have for collectors of independent animation.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

ISBN 978-4-89194-909-9
ISBN 978-4-89194-910-5

Order the Flip Books today:

Muybridge no Ito 1  [Flip Book]

Muyvridge no Ito 2  [Flip Book]

Animated People in Photo (Takashi Namiki, 2000)

ORDER NOW

1975 was a decisive year in the life of Takashi Namiki, the animation producer, historian and the chairman of Anido (read his profile here).  Kihachirō Kawamoto invited Namiki to go to the Annecy International Animated Film Festival with him.  It was not only his first trip abroad, but also the first time attending such a large festival dedicated to animation.  He’d attended and organized animation screenings before, but this one week at Annecy “was like a dream.”  To have so many people gathered together who shared his enthusiasm for the art of animation caused him to feel strangely elated.

At the time “manga eiga,” as animation was then known, was not held in such high esteem in Japan.  Before going to Annecy, Namiki felt that he was the only one who truly understood animation as an art.  This notion was shattered completely at Annecy.  To learn that there were so many people interested in animation as an art and to discover so many wonderful animated works at Annecy was an inspiration to Namiki.

In 2000, Namiki published a photographic chronicle of his friendship with the “animated people” of the world called Animated People in Photo.  It documents the faces of animators, directors, historians, producers, and the organizers of animation festivals that Namiki met during the 25 years since that first festival in Annecy. 

At Annecy 1975, Namiki could not speak the language and he didn’t know anybody yet, so he wandered around and took photographs.  The photograph that he is most proud of is of the great pinscreen animation pioneer Alexandre Alexeieff (1901-1982), who had shot to fame in 1931 with the film he made with his wife Claire Parker Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le mont Chauve).  The photograph opens the collection and is indeed one of the best photographs that Namiki shares with us in this book.  Other favourites of mine include a shot of Kawamoto chatting with legendary stop motion animator Karel Zeman at Annecy 1987, Barry Purves with chopsticks in Tokyo in 1995, Břetislav Pojar at Hiroshima 1985, a young  Hayao Miyazaki in some kind of a truck or van outside Shin-Akitsu Station in 1979, anime pioneer Kenzō Masaoka in his home (Tokyo, 1978), Les Drew at NFB Studios (Montréal, 1990), stop motion animation pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga at Hiroshima 1998, Ward Kimball doing an impression of Charlie Chaplin while holding a figurine of Chaplin (LA, 1991), legendary Chinese animator Te Wei (Tokyo, 1981), Yasuji Mori in front of his home (Tokyo, 1992), and Yasuo Otsuka in a Parisian antique shop (1999).  The photograph of the author himself at Annecy 1975 was taken by Kawamoto and is also one of the best photographs of the bunch.

Animated People can be ordered online from Anido.  The photos are not printed on glossy paper, but still look reasonably good.  This is a must-have collection for the animation aficionado – though it’s hard to beat Namiki as a collector: his private archive boasts over 5,000 films and many relics of early animation.  The afterword by Namiki is only in Japanese, as are the profiles of the people photographed, but the photographs are all labelled in English.  

Here is a complete list of the people included in the book by country:

Belgium: Raoul Servais (b. 1928), Véronique Steeno (b. 1950)

Brazil: Marcos Magalhães (b.1958)

Canada: Frédéric Back (b. Germany, 1924), Ishu Patel (b. India, 1942), Jacques Drouin (b. 1943), Les Drew, Wendy Tilby (b. 1960)

China:  Yan Ding Xian (b. 1936), Shuchen Wang (1931–1991), Te Wei (1915-2010)

Croatia: Joško Marušić (b. 1952)

Czech Republic: Břetislav Pojar (b. 1923), Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934), Jiří Barta (b. 1948), Karel Zeman (1910-89), Michaela Pavlátová (b. 1961), Pavel Procházka, Pavel Koutský (b. 1957), Vlasta Pospíšilová (b.1935)

England: Barry Purves (b. 1955), Bob Godfrey (b. 1921), Brothers Quay (b. 1947), John Halas (b. Hungary, 1912-95), Mark Baker (b. 1959), Nick Park (b. 1958)

Estonia: Borivoj Dovniković (b. 1930), Priit Pärn (b. 1946)

France: Alexandre Alexeieff (1901-82), Bernard Palacios (b. 1947), Jean-Luc Xiberras (1941-98), Jean-François Laguionie (b. 1939), Michel Ocelot (b. 1967), Nicole Salomon, Paul Grimault (1905-94)

Germany: Bärbel Neubauer (b. Austria), Marec Fritzinger

Holland: Paul Driessen (b. 1940)

Hungary: Csaba Varga (b. 1945), Edit Bleier, Eva M. Tóth, Ferenc Mikulás (b. 1940), Gizella Neuberger (b. 1953), József Gémes (b. 1939), Mária Horváth, Péter Szoboszlay, Szilágyi Varga Zoltán (b. 1951)

Israel: Edward Herscovitz (b. Egypt, 1921-2006)

Italy: Bruno Bozzetto (b. 1938), Giannalberto Bendazzi (b. 1946)

Japan: Fusako Yusaki (b. 1937, works in Italy), Hayao Miyazaki (b.1941), Isao Takahata (b. 1935), Kazuko Komatsubara (1943-2000), Takamura Mukuo (1938-92), Osamu Tezuka (1928), Kihachiro Kawamoto (1925-2010),  Yoji Kuri (b. 1928), Yoichi Kotabe (b. 1936), Yasuo Otsuka (b. 1931), Tadanari Okamoto (1932-1990), Yasuji Mori (1925-92), Norio Hikone (b. 1936), Taku Furukawa (b. 1941),  Syo Yoshimura, Ryotaro Kuwata, Goro Sugimoto (1924-87), Tadahito Mochinaga (1919-99), Shinichi Suzuki (b. 1933), Seiichi Hayashi (b. 1945), Kazuhide Tomonaga (b. 1952), Yoshinori Kanada (1952-2009), Kenzo Masaoka (1898-1988), Masao Kumagawa (1916-2008)

New Zealand: Bob Stenhouse

Poland: Aleksandra Korejwo

Russia: Aleksandr Petrov (b. 1957), Fyodor Khitruk (b. 1917), Garri Bardin (b. 1941), Igor Kovalyov (b. 1963, working in the USA), Yuri Norstein (b. 1941)

Switzerland: Bruno Edera, Georges Schwizgebel (b. 1944)

USA: Bob Kurtz, Caroline Leaf (b. 1946), Charles Solomon, Chuck Jones (1912-2002), Frank Thomas (1912-2004), Jimmy Murakami (b. 1933), Joan C. Gratz, Marc Davis (1913-2000), Myron Waldman (1908-2006), Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), Renya Onasick, Ward Kimball (1914-2002), Will Vinton (b. 1947)

Author & Editor : Takashi Namiki

All Photo by Takashi Namiki

Illustration : Masahiro Katayama

First Edition : June 2000

size: A5 (H210×W148mm) 112P/ Hardcover

94 photos are all monochrome

Shigeru Tamura’s Top Animated Films

The fantastic world of Shigeru Tamura’s illustrations and animations is a curious combination of science fiction landscapes with 19th and early 20th century characters that look more European than Japanese. When I looked up Tamura’s response to the Laputa 150 poll, I half expected the list to include a lot of Eastern European animation because the young boy in URSA minor BLUE is called Yuri. While the list does include Yuri Norstein’s celebrated classic The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), Tamura’s list actually reveals his fascination with a wide spectrum of animation styles.

Tamura lists 15 animation favourites in no particular order. He clearly loves early animation such as Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the early Felix the Cat series, and Betty Boop’s comical outing as Snow White (1933). He also displays a fondness for classic animation series such as Mickey Mouse when he was at his best in the 1930s and the Tex Avery classics (Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, et al.).

As Tamura works mainly with hand drawn and computer animation, I was surprised to see such a variety of stop motion animation on his list. From the pioneering stop motion work in the original King Kong movie to the surreal worlds of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988), the Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles (1986) and the bolexbrothers’ The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993), Tamura clearly has an admiration for innovative filmmakers. It’s particularly interesting to note his choice of Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out (amusingly called “Cheese Holiday” in Japanese) as a favourite rather than Nick Park’s more polished later Wallace and Gromit films. A Grand Day Out is pleasingly rough around the edges and has a more outlandish plot than the others.

What distinguishes Tamura’s own work for me has always been his bold use of colours and his fantastic imaginary worlds. I can see how the psychedelic colours of Yellow Submarine (1968), the imaginative worlds of Fantastic Planet (1973) and Laputa: Castle in Sky (1986), and the poetic splendour of Night of Bald Mountain (1933) would appeal to Tamura’s poetic sensibilities. If you haven’t seen the films and series on Tamura’s list, I highly recommend seeking them out.

Gertie the Dinosaur

(恐竜ガーティ, Winsor McCay, 1914)

Felix in Hollywood (1923)

Early episodes of the classic Felix the Cat series

(１９２０年代頃の猫のフィリックス, produced by Pat Sullivan, c.1920s)

The classic series ran from 1919-36

Paramount Pictures (1919-1921)

Margaret J. Winkler (1922-1925)

Educational Pictures (1925-1928)

The Band Concert (Wilfred Hand, 1935)

Mickey Mouse Series 1935-1939

(１９３５年-１９３９年頃のミッキーマウスシリーズ, Wilfred Jackson/David Hand/Walt Disney)

Snow White (Betty Boop Series)

(ベティの白雪姫, Dave Fleischer, 1933)

Night on Bald Mountain

(禿山の一夜, Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve, Alexandre Alexeieff/Claire Parker, 1933)

Happy Go Nutty (1944)

The works of Tex Avery

(テックス・アヴェリーの一連作品, 1942-1958)

Hedgehog in the Fog

(霧につつまれたハリネズミ, Yuri Norstein, 1975)

Street of Crocodiles

(ストリート・オブ・クロコダイル, Brothers Quay, 1986)

Alice

(アリス, Jan Švankmajer, 1988)

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

(天空の城ラピュタ, Hayao Miyazaki, 1986)

Fantastic Planet

(ファンタスティック・プラネット, La Planète sauvage, René Laloux, 1973)

Yellow Submarine

(イエロー・サブマリン, George Dunning, 1968)

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out

(ウォレスとグルミット チーズホリデー, Nick Park, 1989)

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

(親指トムの奇妙な冒険, Dave Borthwick, 1993)

King Kong

(キングコング, Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

To support this independent artist you can order his work at cdjapan:

Ginga no Sakana - URSA minor BLUE (JP only)

URSA minor BLUE (soundtrack on CD)

Steps (Tochka, 2010)

The animation team Tochka (Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno) are famous for their PiKA PiKA or “lightning doodle” animation technique. In the course of their career they have actually practiced a wide range of stop motion animation techniques. In my review of their CALF DVD Tochka Works 2001-2010, I pointed out that the “Jumping” section of their film PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008) uses a pixilation technique similar to that used in Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952). It was with great delight that I discovered during the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection that Tochka was continuing to experiment with this technique.

Pixilation, a term attributed to NFB animator Grant Munro, is a technique in which live actors are animated frame-by-frame together with inanimate objects. Takeshi Nagata told me that for Steps (2010), they took their inspiration from the Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra film A Chairy Tale (1957) in which Jutra has an encounter with a chair that refuses to be sat upon.

Jutra and the chair in a stand off in A Chairy Tale

a similar stand off in Steps

In Steps, we are presented with an empty room with a checkerboard floor pattern and a lone bulb hanging from a cord on the ceiling. Slabs in the formation of steps slide out of the walls, through the room, and back out the opposite wall. The opening sequence ends with the door opening, the steps sliding in with PiKA PiKA lights spelling out the title in the air and a PiKA PiKA stick figure running through the frame.

A salaryman sleeping in his pajamas slides in through the open door and is soon resting on a bed of slabs, with his clothes on a rack nearby. The PiKA PiKA stick figure jumps on his face and soon the man and the stick figure are engaged in a slap stick routine in which the man’s clothes slide out of his reach, and the stick figure taunts him and they fight with each other.

In the next scene, the man returns, as if from work, into the empty room. The PiKA PiKA stick figure slides in slabs and shapes them into steps that the man climbs until he has to duck his head because he is too close to the ceiling. The stick figure first tries to knock him down, then shoves the man – still atop a pile of slabs – out the door.

Tochka’s Steps not only borrows the A Chairy Tale’s pixilation technique but also matches it in its playfulness and innovative design. There are some key differences between the films. In A Chairy Tale, the chair itself was given human attributes: provoking Jutra then later trying to win his affection back again. In Steps, the interplay is between the actor and an animated human stick figure drawn in the air with light. The inanimate objects such as the coat rack and the steps do not acquire any human attributes. Instead, it is suggested that their movement is manipulated by the playful, scalawag PiKA PiKA figure.

Ghostly form of an animator briefly visible

Another big difference is that in A Chairy Tale, the way in which the chair has been animated remains invisible to the naked eye. No matter how much the viewer strains to see if there are strings attached to the chair, the illusion of movement is so complete that it really does appear as if the chair has indeed come to life and is moving of its own volition.

Not so in Steps, where the careful spectator can see the ghostly black figures of the animators in some of the frames. This is characteristic of the PiKA PiKA films, which seek to demystify the art of stop motion animation. It’s a postmodern twist on the NFB style pixilation in which it is not just about the illusion of movement but about our awareness of the hand of the animator(s) in the making of a stop motion film.

This added dimension would have been much clearer in the original presentation of the film which was as part of a video installation.  Exhibition visitors would have watched the film standing in the same room and looking through peep holes on the wall.  See Tochka's Flickr stream to get an idea of the exhibition space at Aichi Triennale 2010.

A brilliant little film, which makes me excited to see what new projects Tochka have up their sleeves. To learn more about Tochka and their PiKA PiKA workshops read about my observations of their Nippon Connection workshop in Frankfurt. The Tochka Works 2001-2010 DVD can be purchased from CALF or within Europe via BAA.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Nippon Connection 2011