Home Alone (るすばん, 1996)

In 1997 at the Mainichi Film Awards, Nozomi Nagasaki became the first woman to win the 1996 Noburō Ōfuji Award for innovation in  animation for her stop motion animated short Home Alone (るすばん/ Rusuban, 1996). Since then only one other woman has won the award: Geidai grad Onohana for Crazy Little Thing in 2014.

Home Alone is a stop motion animation that uses a mixture of cutouts, objects, and a puppet designed by Sumiko Hosaka (learn more).  The central character is an anthropomorphic kitten who is catlike in many ways, but is playing the role of a child left home alone for the day.   The kitten seems quite bored at first, alone in the house but for a chicken with a ball and chain (?!).    The kitten plays with a toy mouse, makes a face at a portrait of his family (his mother makes a face back startling him) and reads a storybook unenthusiastically.  The only sounds are those made by the cat and a clock ticking loudly on the wall.

Suddenly the clock increases in tempo and falls from the wall, and the objects in the room come to life.  The books seem to attack the cat, his pillows transform into clouds and fly away.  His two-dimensional parents jump out of the family portrait to join him and his boots and raincoat come to life. The room fills with an ocean complete with flying fish. An alligator eats the sun up on the ceiling.   It is a chaotic and surreal scene.  The frenetic nature of the scene is emphasized by a percussion soundtrack.  Then just as quickly as the room came to life, it all disappears again leaving the kitten alone with the ticking clock.

Although the animation style is not mainstream, the film is aimed at a child audience.  According to N+G Production’s website, their aim is to “try to make sensitive animations,” and they “do not want to bombard children with too much noise and too many images.”  The film seems to be deliberately not kawaii.  I don’t know that the film is “sensitive” by my understanding of the term.  In fact, with its unusual imagery and sound effects, it has much more in common with 19^th century tales for children than those of the late 20^th century.  By that I mean that it unsettling in the manner of the original tale of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll in contrast to the Disney-fied (Alice in Wonderland, 1951).  Although nothing really scary happens, I would hesitate to show the film to a young child because of the eerie, almost nightmarish imagery.  The audience at Nippon Connection 2016 was amused by the absurdity of the film, laughing out loud at the unusual sound effects.

Nozomi Nagasaki (長崎希) was born in Tokyo and graduated from Waseda University.  In the early part of her career she worked as an animator for both Tadanari Okamoto and Kihachirō Kawamoto.   She has her own studio, N&G Production where she directs and animates stop motion using a variety of techniques including puppets, clay, objects and cutouts.   In addition to her independent animation Nagasaki has made animation for commercials, children’s television, movies, and video packages.  She directed a film about stop motion animation, The World of Handmade Animation Films (ハンドメイド・アニメーション映画の世界, 2001).    See her complete independent filmography.

Home Alone screened as part of the programme A Wild Patience – Indie Animated Shorts by Women at Nippon Connection 2016.    It appears on the ASIFA-JAPAN DVD, vol 1, which can be used for non-profit screenings celebrating International Animation Day (IAD) held by ASIFA national groups.

Watch the trailer for Home Alone here.

Credits:

Director

Nozomi NAGASAKI

Assistant Director

Yoshihiro SHINOHARA

Puppet Design

Sumiko HOSAKA (Ningyo Kobo)

Set Design

Junko MURAYAMA

Cinematographer

Minoru TAMURA

Animation

Nozomi NAGASAKI

Sound Effects

Satoshi ISHIGAKI (Image Factory)

Recording

Isamu KATTO (Tokyo TV Centre)

Editing

Hisako AIZAWA

Developing

IMAGICA

Special Thanks to

Satoko OKAMOTO (Echo Co. Ltd.)

Takashi KOMAE

Masako WATANABE

Production

N+G Production

A Poet’s Life (詩人の生涯, 1974)

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

The Old Man and the Sea (老人と海, 1999)

The Old Man and the Sea (老人と海/Rōjin to Umi, 1999) was the first of two times that the Noburō Ōfuji Award for innovation in animation has been won by a non-Japanese director.  This Russian-Canadian-Japanese co-production qualified for the award because it was co-produced by Japanese companies.  One key figure among the Japanese producers is the animator Tatsuo Shimamura, president of his own studio Shirogumi, and professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.  Shimamura had won the Noburō Ōfuji Award one year previously for the Shirogumi animated shorts Water Spirit (水の精/Mizu no sei, 1998) and Kappa Hyakuzu (河童百図, 1998).  Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most independent animators in Russia have had to look to international co-productions in order to finance their work.  In addition to support from Japan, the creative team at Montréal’s  Pascal Blais Studio (Pascal Blais and Bernard Lajoie) were at the heart of this production, and went on to collaborate with Petrov on many commercial projects. 

At the time of the production of this film, the Russian director Aleksandr Petrov (アレクサンドル・ペトロフ, b.1957), had long been admired by fellow animators and animation fans around the world for his superior paint-on-glass animation films.  This involves the painting of a picture and photographing it, then erasing/altering the picture to make the next frame.  This under the camera animation technique requires a great level of skill and planning, because once a scene is started it cannot be corrected.  There have been few practitioners of paint-on-glass, with Petrov being top of the list alongside Vladimir Samsonov (Russia), Caroline Leaf (USA), Georges Schwizgebel (Switzerland) and Witold Giersz (Poland).

Petrov’s Adaptation

Petrov began his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s popular novel The Old Man and the Sea with a detailed storyboard.  According to a short documentary Petrov made about his techniques as an animator, he had his father (Nikolai Sergeievich) dress up in the role of the “Old Man”, Santiago, and re-enact the movements Santiago would make in the boat.  His son Dima filmed the re-enactment and this footage was used as a reference in the studio.   

On the whole it is a faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s tale.  As a short film, obviously the story information has been streamlined, but the key elements are all there.  Petrov’s artistic style, which critics often call romantic realist suits the subject matter perfectly.  It is realistic in the sense that the character movements and events are depicted in a realistic manner, but romantic in terms of the painting style.  For me, Petrov’s style is like an Impressionist painting in motion.   In the live action adaptations of The Old Man and the Sea, there is a heavy reliance on voice-over narration to express the spiritual aspects of the old man’s relationship to his environment.   With animation Petrov is able to capture this visually in such sequences as the dreamy flashbacks to the African animals of Santiago’s youth, the dramatic arm wrestling flashback, and the dream sequence of Santiago as a youth swimming with the marlin.  

Awards and Honours

In addition to the Noburō Ōfuji Award, The Old Man and the Sea won the Oscar for Best Animated Short for 1999, the Grand Prix and Audience Award at Annecy, the Jutra Award for Best Animated Film (top film prize in Québec), and a Special Prize at Hiroshima (2000).  The film additionally won top prizes at the Montréal World Festival, the San Diego International Film Fesitival, Krok, Zagreb, to name but a selection of honours.

Availability on DVD:

Geneon Universal’s 2002 DVD is only available second hand in Japan. It features Erik Canuel’s Genie Award winning 20-minute documentary Hemingway: A Portrait (Canada, 1999). Both films are dubbed in Japanese.

 In the States, the 2005 DVD of The Old Man and the Sea is currently out of print, but some second-hand copies are available.

 In France, there is a 2004 release that features French and English dubs. Order from Heeza or amazon:




 An Italian release is available with English and Italian dubs and subtitles.
 

 2015 Cathy Munroe Hotes

Crazy Little Thing (澱みの騒ぎ, 2014)

This year marks only the second time that a woman has won the prestigious Noburō Ōfuji Award for innovation in animation at the Mainichi Film Concours.  The first was the puppet animator Nozomi Nagasaki for N&G Production’s Home Alone (るすばん, 1996) nearly two decades ago.  Now, Japan’s oldest animation award has been won by recent Geidai graduate Hana Ono (小野ハナ, 1986), who goes by the pen name Onohana in English.  Onohana is from Iwate Prefecture and completed a degree in Art Culture at Iwate University (2009) before doing her MA in Animation at Geidai (2014).  

Order Geidai Animation 2014

Crazy Little Thing (澱みの騒ぎ / Yodomi no Sakagi, 2014) is Onohana’s graduate film from the Geidai programme, where she was supervised by the 2007 Noburō Ōfuji Award winner and Oscar nominee Kōji Yamamura.    According to a short “Making of” Doc made by Geidai that I picked up at Hiroshima last year, Onohana began with an incomplete vision which she developed as she went along.  Once she got stuck in, she explains that the story seemed to take on a life of its own.  She storyboarded the 10-minute short and then made each frame by hand using pencil on paper.  The entire film is in a sombre black and white with very little dialogue. 

The film opens with a shocking scene of a girl, possibly in her early teens, sneaking up to a sleeping man on the sofa.  She slips a noose around his neck and strangles him.  All the action happens in the background, while in the foreground loom tall, dark liquor bottles.  We soon see the space from a ceiling shot as the girl moves to tidy up the room with the hanged man looming over her.  This shot allows us to see that in addition to bottles, the table is littered with beer cans.  She takes the bottles to the kitchen where the floor is teeming with bottles.  The girl’s sad face staring over a sea of bottles tells us all we need to know: this poor girl has been brought to such desperate circumstances by the alcoholism of her father. 

The girl puts on her coat and rushes out into the snow to check the mail.  She cuts a small, forlorn figure against the vast white garden.  The front gate and the house are distorted to loom over her, emphasizing her smallness.  When she steps back into the house, the phone is ringing.  She doesn’t answer immediately, and is shocked by the sound of her father’s voice snarling at her to answer the phone.  He has an open can of beer in his hand and is watching her closely.  The phone goes to the answering machine and we hear the voice of the grandmother.  The father tries to get to the phone, but is blocked by the girl and then the vision from the past disappears and we see that the father is still hanging from the noose. 

Thus the story begins to weave in and out of reality and the imagined, the concrete and the symbolic, as the girl deals with her fluctuating emotions.   At times she is in a rage at her father, at other times she seems to be calmly mourning his passing.  There is even a brief scene that looks like the man mourning a funereal photograph of his younger self.  The story comes to a head with a tree growing symbolically out of the father’s corpse.  The house floods with a black liquid and the girl must climb the branches of the ever growing tree to escape, hopefully to a better future that the horrors of the past. 

It is a deeply troubling film that examines the growing problem of individuals living in isolation in Japan since the collapse of traditional family structures.  Stylistically, Onohana uses a lot of shots from directly overhead that show the floorplan of the house.  When you go to the real estate agent in Japan, you don’t usually see photographs of the apartment but rather such floorplans since space is at such a premium.  Not only do these scenes add visual interest, but they emphasize how the girl feels trapped in that space, like a guinea pig in a cage.  It is a powerfully moving film that is not for the faint of heart.

Crazy Little Thing has screened at many festivals over the past year including Nippon Connection, Tokyo Anima!, SICAF, Fantoche, Anilogue, and Geneva. The film received an honourable mention for the Walt Disney Award for Best Graduation Film at Ottawa.  It appears on the DVD Geidai Animation: 5th Graduate Works 2014. 

Learn more about Onohana on her official website or follow her on twitter, tumblr, and vimeo.  Onohana also belongs to the animation group Onionskin along with fellow animators Toshikazu Tamura, Ai Sugaya, and Yewon Kim.  In addition to their indie work, they make music videos and commercials. 

Cathy Munroe Hotes 2015

Combustible (火要鎮, 2012)

“Fires and quarrels are the flowers of Edo, yet the greater essence is the fireman”

The ancient city of Edo was known as the City of Fires because of the frequency and ferocity of its fires.  This was due to a combination of factors from the high flammability of the densely built wooden nagaya (長屋/row houses) to arson.  Between 1601 and 1867 alone, the city suffered nearly 1800 fires – 49 of them considered “great fires” that killed hundreds, if not thousands of people. 

The record of these fires appears in paintings, wood cuts, and scrolls – many of which can be viewed on the Institute for Fire Safety and Disaster Preparedness website – and the popular legends surrounding many of the fires have inspired everything from kabuki plays about the arsonist Yaoya Oshichi of the Great Fire of Tenna to Laura Joh Rowland’s mystery novel The Fire Kimono, which is set during the Great Fire of Meireki.  Popular manga-ka and animator Katsuhiro Ōtomo and his design team at Sunrise used woodblock print artists the inspiration for his unique animated short Combustible (火要鎮/Hinoyōjin, 2012).

Set in the 18^th century, the story begins with the unfurling of a cloth-bound emakimono (scroll painting).  The camera tracks slowly left, in the direction that one reads a scroll, over a highly detailed depiction of 18^th century Edo from the busy river, over the working class Shitamachi (low city) to the more affluent Yamanote (“foot hills” – or “high city” as in Edward Seidensticker’s 1984 book).  A male chorus sings a kiyari – a ritual song which was sung by hikeshi (Edo firefighters).  Traditional kiyari would list the tools needed by the firefights but with the words all drawn out like a chant. 

During the slow tracking shot, a hinomi-yagura (fire lookout tower) appears in the foreground to foreshadow the events to come.  The camera pauses in a large garden of the affluent home of a young girl called Owaka-chan (Saori Hayama).  Bored on her own in the garden, her spirits are lifted by the appearance of the boy next door, Matsuyoshi (Masakazu Morita), on the tiled garden wall.  A lyrical sequence ensues showing their varied play together, their agile figures dissolving in and out to show the passage of time as the garden subtly changes seasons. 

The children’s cheerful voices become a memory of the past as the camera dissolves to a red room with a hanging scroll painting of the garden on the wall.  Owaka is now a young lady in a formal kimono sitting with her mother.  The women’s response is interrupted by the sound of hanshō (alarm bells) in the distance.  Owaka’s mother sends a boy up onto the roof to the lookout to discover the location of the fire.  All across the black sky of Edo, men have climbed onto their roofs to observe the fire – all except Matsuyoshi.  He surprises the women by climbing the wall, running through their garden to escape from his family. 

The next scene shows Owaka as the dutiful daughter, serving her family’s guests under their watchful eyes.  As soon as she is in the privacy of her room, she weeps.  Owaka is much more adept at hiding her displeasure from her family than Matsuyoshi whose father has become violent with rage.  Matsuyoshi kneels on the floor in front of his father, his shirt sleeve torn off to reveal a tattooed arm.  The hikeshi firefighters – who normally came from the lower classes – were as heavily tattooed as today’s yakuza with water symbols such as dragons to give them courage and bring them good luck on the job.  It seems that Matsuyoshi has run away from home to become a heroic firefighter.

We hear Owaka and Matsuyoshi talking about the contrast between their childhood and their present situation against still scenes from Owaka’s empty house and garden.  Owaka is then seen reclining in apparent misery next to her koto – the stringed instrument she has doubtless had to learn to play in part of her training to be a nobleman’s wife.  Night falls and Owaka sits in her room with a beautiful wedding kimono and her elaborate trousseau.  A voice-over of her father’s bragging tells us that they are just waiting on the final touch: the obi for her wedding kimono.  Owaka sighs in misery and throws a fan across the room.  She doesn’t notice until it is too late that the fan has landed in her lantern.  Before long, the lantern bursts into giant flames.  Owaka’s first instinct is to run for help but then she reconsiders.  Perhaps this fire can alter the inevitability of her fate?  The drums and hanshō thrum loudly as the hikeshi firefighters gather to fight the fire as it rages through the Yamanote district.  Matsuyoshi is one of the brave men who nimbly ascend tall ladders onto the rooftops to assess the situation.  Will he be able to rescue Owaka or will her foolishness lead only to tragedy and devastation?

12th Century Animation (12 seiki no animation)

Isao Takahata

Watching Ōtomo’s short but masterful film, I was reminded of Isao Takahata’s fascinating illustrated book 12^th Century Animation (十二世紀のアニメーション, 1999) which examines how the composition of Heian picture scrolls prefigure the techniques used in modern animation.  It even includes examples from picture scrolls that dramatically depict Heian era fire – a scroll that Ōtomo may be referring to in an interview with Asian Beat last summer.  Using a complex mixture of traditional and CGI animation techniques, Ōtomo and his team have created a film combines the quiet beauty of 18^th century emakimono (picture scrolls) with the dynamism of CGI movement.  I particularly love the added touch of the letterboxing using traditional Japanese cloth instead of black bars.

This duality is expressed in the dramatic structure of the film.  As Ōtomo explains in Asia Beat, the first half of the film represents “stillness” and the second half “movement” with its “intense fire and action sequences”.  The slow tracking camera using mostly long and extreme long shots used in the first half contrasts with the fast cutting action shot from a variety of angles in the second half.  Similarly, the quiet sounds of garden birds of the early scenes are replaced by the drums and bells of the traditional dance music employed during the fire sequence as the film rages towards its abrupt end.  My two favourite shots in Combustible employ very different techniques: the glorious slow tracking opening establishing shot of Edo and the exciting CGI sequence of Matsuyoshi and his fellow firefighters flying up onto the rooftops by ladder.  As our POV ascends the tall building like a weightless crane shot, I believe I even said “wow” out loud at the sight of the rows of houses up in flames.  Fire and water are notoriously challenging for animators to get right and this film is a tour de force in the animation of fire. 

Available on the Short Peace DVD (JP only)

Short Peace BD (JP only)

Short Peace BD Special Edition (JP only)

Katsuyoshi Ōtomo won the Noburō Ōfuji Award for Combustible at the Mainichi Concours last year.  The film was also shortlisted for the Oscar for Best Animated Short and was nominated for the prestigious Annecy Cristal.  Although it started making the festival rounds in 2012, Combustible was theatrically released as part of the omnibus Short Peace alongside Shuhei Morita’s Oscar-nominated animated short Possessions (九十九/Tsukumo, 2013) as well as shorts directed by Hiroaki Ando and Hajime Katoki.  Short Peace was released on DVD and BD in Japan this month.  No word yet on any English DVD/BD/download release dates.  For fans of animation, the special limited edition BD is well worth the investment if you don’t mind the lack of English. 

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

Direction/Screenplay:

Katsuhiro Ōtomo

Music:

Makoto Kubota

Cast:

Masakazu Morita (Matsuyoshi)

Saori Hayama (Owaka)

Character Design:

Hidekazu Ohara

Animation Director:

Tatsuya Tomaru

CGI Director:

Shūji Shinoda

Animation:

Hidetsugu Ito

Hiroyuki Horiuchi

Koji Watanabe

Kouichi Arai

Mari Tominaga

Masaaki Endou

Shuichi Kaneko

Takahiro Tanaka

Background Art:

Junichi Taniguchi

Yoshiaki Honma

Effects Animation Director:

Takashi Hashimoto

Visual Concept:

Hidekazu Ohara