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

Promises (約束, 2011)

On an autumn day, a woman kneels under the scarlet leaves of trees mourning the loss of her infant son.  As she cries, the winds picks up the remains of her child and leaves only a dark shadow behind.  This dark shadow, the spirit of her dead child, whispers to her that she can take his shadow home with her.  The woman does so, looking after this transparent shadow of a child in the same way she would a living, breathing child.   She lives happily with her secret until one day, a kind of shinigami (spirit of death) in the form of an elderly man comes knocking and asks for the shadow of the child. 

After the man leaves, the woman folds the child’s shadow into the shape of a bird in order to hide him from the shinigami.  Soon, there comes another ominous knock at the door.  The shinigami has returned and asks for the shadow of the bird.  He informs her that he is a representative of kami (god) and he has been directed to collect the soul that she has been keeping in her home.  Tears run down her face, and the shinigami offers to make a deal with her.  He asks her to sew herself a doll in the shape of a child and to put the shadow in it.  At first it seems that she has made a deal with the devil as she runs fearfully holding the doll, but could it be that the shinigami is offering her child the chance of resurrection?

Promises (約束 / Yakusoku, 2011) is Shikoku-born animator Aki Kōno’s first silhouette animation.  Her earlier films Youth (青春 / Seishun, 2008) and A brightening life (2010) were stop motion animation using puppets and objects.  This animated short is her graduate work for the Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts) animation programme, where she was supervised by Yuichi Itō (Knyacki, Norabbits Minutes).   Promises is actually a blend of silhouette and stop motion animation techniques.  The silhouettes are not as flat as the techniques of pioneers like Lotte Reiniger and Noburō Ōfuji – though there was some texture and layering to their films as well.  Kōno’s silhouettes are constructed in three dimensional spaces with other objects being used for special effect such as liquids, string, cloth, and beads. 

The choice of silhouette animation suits the shadow theme of the film.  The figures have a roughly hewn feel to them (in contrast to the precisely cut figures of a Lotte Reiniger film) which I think adds to the emotional impact of the film.  The mood of the film is also elevated by Kōno’s striking use of bold background colours, such as flaming reds and cool blues/greens/purples, which reminded me of Ōfuji’s use of background colour in The Phantom Ship (幽霊船/ Yūreisen, 1956).   

Kōno wrote the script for Promises in addition to directing and animating it.  It has been seen at both domestic and international festivals and made the Jury Selection at the 2011 Japan Media Arts Festival.  I saw the film at Nippon Connection 2013.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

This blog post was made possible by:

#nippon13 #nc2013

Twelve Months (森は生きている, 1980)

Watching autumn slowly turn into winter here in central Germany, I got to thinking about Tōei Dōga’s delightful children’s anime Twelve Months (森は生きている/ Mori wa Ikiteiru, 1980) and managed to track it down as an extra on a DVD release of The Wild Swans (白鳥の王子, 1977).  It is wonderful to watch with children under the age of 10 because it is a reasonable length (about an hour long), has beautiful depictions of the forest and its wildlife, features great music, and teaches good moral lessons (it pays to be kind / greedy people will have their comeuppance).  The strongest element of this adaptation are the character designs by Osamu Tezuka. 

Twelve Months tells the parallel stories of two young girls of the same age, one poor and one rich.  Anja (Shinobu Otake) is an orphaned girl who lives in near poverty in rural Russia with her nasty stepmother and her equally unpleasant stepsister.  Her family forces her to do most of the hard labour of the house such as collecting wood from the forest for their fire.  Anja’s story crosses paths with that of the spoiled young Tsarina (Ai Kanzaki) when she encounters an elderly soldier in the forest in late December.  He helps Anja collect firewood, and she returns the favour by helping the soldier find the perfect fir tree for the Tsarina, who wants to decorate it in time for New Year’s Eve. 

Next, the Tsarina, who thinks that the whole world must revolve around her desires, gets it into her head that she wants snow drops for her New Year’s decorations. Unheeding of the fact that it is the wrong season for such flowers, the Tsarina sends out a proclamation informing her subjects that if one of them can bring her a basketful of snow drops she will reward them with a basketful of gold.  Anja’s greedy stepmother and stepsister desperately want the gold, and force Anja to go out alone into a blizzard in search of snow drops.  Just as it seems that she is about to freeze to death in the forest, Anja encounters the spirits of the twelve months around a campfire.  Because they have witnessed her kindness to the forest animals, they offer to help her as long as she promises never to tell anyone where she got the snow drops.  Keeping this secret will prove very hard due to the insatiable desires of the Tsarina.  Needless to say, as it is a fairy tale, the story resolves itself with everyone getting what they deserve.

The animation belongs to a series of fairy tale adaptations made by Tōei Dōga in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The series was called Sekai Meisaku Dōwa (世界名作童話), which has been variously translated as World Children's Classics and World Masterpiece Fairy Tales in English.  The series included The Wild Swans (1977), Thumbelina (1978), Swan Lake (1981), and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1982).  Twelve Months, also known as “The Forest Lives” / “The Forest That Lives” (direct translation of Japanese title), was adapted from the Samuil Marshak’s Russian fairy tale of the same name by Kimio Yabuki, Ikoku Oyabu and Tomoe Takashi.   Yugo Serikawa was the chief director, with Kimio Yabuki and Tesuo Imazawa acting as co-directors.  The animation was co-produced with the Moscow studio Soyuzmultfilm, who had themselves produced an acclaimed cel animation of Twelve Months in 1956 with the legendary “Patriarch of Soviet animation” Ivan Ivanov-Vano at the helm.  

The animation was done in Japan, but the music was composed by Vladimir Krivtsov and performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of A. S. Dmitriev.  Incidental music was also provided by Shunsuke Kikuchi.  The theme song Don’t Cry (泣かないわ/Nakanaiwa) is sung by Yoshiko Mari.  The song was not composed for the film but had been a hit for Junko Sakurada in 1976 with lyrics by Yū Aku and music by Kōichi Morita. 

For this review, I watched the German dub of the film, Anja und die vier Jahreszeiten (Anja and the Four Seasons), which was adapted by Andrea Wagner of ZDF, who did the German text for many anime films and series of the 70s and 80s from Vicky the Viking (1974-5) to The Wonderful Tales of Nils (1980-1) and Alice in Wonderland (1983-4).  The theme song has also been beautifully adapted, but instead of singing about restraining one’s tears, the uncredited singer sings about the four seasons.  I have searched high and low to find out who sings the song but have only found German message boards of people asking in vain about where they can buy the song.  It seems it was never released on CD. If any of my German readers recognize the singer, do let me know.  Here are the lyrics of the German theme song with my translations in square brackets:

Wolken ziehen 

Die Bäume werden grün 

Blumen blühen

Es ist Frühling

[Clouds drift by / the trees become green / flowers blossom / it is springtime]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

[Dear Seasons, we thank you for this lovely time of year x2]

Sonnenschein erhellt

Mit goldenem Licht die Welt

Wenn es heiß wird

dann ist Sommer

[The sun shines / with golden light upon the world / When the heat comes / it is summer]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Ohne euch wäre unsere Welt nie so zauberhaft und schön

Ohne euch hätten wir die Welt nie in voller Pracht gesehen

[Without you, our world would not be so magical and beautiful /

Without you, we would never have seen the world in all its splendour]

Wälder glühen

Im bunten Farbenkleid

Vögel ziehen

Es ist Herbstzeit

[The forest glows / in its colourful robes / birds fly by / it is autumn]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Leise fällt der Schnee

Und färbt die Erde weiß

Schnee und Eis

Bringt der Winter

[The snow falls softly / and colours the earth in white / snow and ice / bring the winter]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Ohne euch wäre unsere Welt nie so zauberhaft und schön

Ohne euch hätten wir die Welt nie in voller Pracht gesehen

Nur der Wechsel

Im Ablauf der Natur

Lässt uns glücklich sein

Und an der Welt uns freuen

[Only the changes / brought by Mother Nature / bring us such happiness / and such joy to be alive]

The German cast for Anja und die vier Jahreszeiten is not yet on Anime News Network, and were a bit tricky to find so I also cite them here:

Walter Reichelt (ältester Soldat / Elder Soldier) 

Madeleine Stolze (Anja) 

Gernot Duda (Februar / February) 

Inez Günther (Natascha /Stepsister) 

Horst Sachtleben (Professor) 

Ursula Mellin (Stiefmutter / Stepmother) 

Michaela Geuer (Zarin)

As I mentioned at the outset, this film is available in Germany as an extra on the DVD (Region 2) for The Wild Swans. This DVD has the German dub and the English dub but no subs. I have not found any other legit means of buying / viewing the film. Fans of the song “Nakanaiwa” can find it on Junko Sakura’s Golden Best album.

 Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

A Wind Egg (空の卵, 2012)

Priest: If men don't trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.

Commoner: Right. The world's a kind of hell.

Priest: No! I don't want to believe that!

Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. 

Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?

Woodcutter: None makes any sense.

Commoner: Don't worry about it. It isn't as if men were reasonable.

- scene from Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

I was reminded of Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon while watching the latest film by young CALF animator Ryo Ōkawara:  A Wind Egg (空の卵 / Kara no Tamago, 2012).   Just as the plot of Rashomon circles around an act of senseless violence, so too this animation centres on violence of a most disturbing nature.  A Wind Egg also employs a Rashomon narrative structure with the story being told in fragments from five different points of view.  However, in this case the story is told purely with visuals, music, and sound effects --- no dialogue whatsoever.

Summary

The animation opens with an act of violence: we see the boy from the point-of-view of his abuser as he suddenly gets slapped hard twice across the face.  The opening credits are followed by an establishing shot of a desolate grey farm and  then a close-up of a rooster crowing.  The animation then cuts to the first of five POV vignettes.  The vignettes show fragments of the same period of time.  It is only when they have all been viewed that one can piece together the order of the events that take place.

The Father (父/chichi)

A red nosed, unshaven, aggressive-looking man examines eggs in a shed. He scowls suspiciously from side to side, as if making sure that he is alone, then he furtively caresses and kisses one of the eggs.  He licks the egg lasciviously before being startled by the door opening.  The mother comes in with a box of eggs and drops them ungraciously on table.  He glares at her, quivering with resentment.  The boy’s face pops up from his hiding place under the table.

The Younger Sister (妹/imōto)

With her crazy smile, the younger sister spies on her family.  She grins madly upon witnessing her brother being struck by their father.  The younger sister crawls up the wall like a spider to watch her mother entering the shed.  She shivers in the window and witnesses her brother falling from the sky.

The Mother (母/haha)

The mother walks from the hen house to the shed.  An egg falls from her basket in slow motion to the ground.  Reprise of the scene in shed from her perspective.  She goes outside and strips off her clothes. There is a surreal dream sequence which draws a parallel between the caressing of the egg and sex which ends with the man licking the egg and the boy jumping from the roof.

The Boy (少年/shōnen)

The boy sits in the cage with the chickens.  He watches one defecate and picks it up, puts it in his mouth, chews on it, then spits it out.  He watches geese flying overhead then sinks into the earth.  He watches his mother from the roof as she walks from the hen house to the shed.  He then witnesses his mother enter chicken coop and attack a chicken. He dives off of house.

The Family (家族/kazoku)

This final vignette brings more elements of the story together. We see the full context of the boy hiding under his father’s table, his sister tattling on him then laughing wildly as the father strikes the boy and throws him into an empty shed.  The boy has an egg with him.  The egg hatches a miniature Doppelgänger of the boy.  A final surreal montage: whispering into the ear, a scream, a crazy dinner table scene, the zipping of the mouth, a family in chaos.  .  . the boy on the rooftop in the shape of rooster with glasses on.  .  .  does he fall to his death or fly to his freedom?    

Style

This is Ōkawara’s graduation film for the Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts) graduate animation programme and his first in which he experiments with narrative form.  His earlier animated shorts were more conceptual.  Orchestra (2008), which he co-directed with fellow students Masaki Okuda and Yutaro Ogara, and Animal Dance (2009) bring music and movement together in a way reminiscent of the works of Norman McLaren, and insomniac (2008) visually depicts the way sounds and images clutter the mind and prevent sleep.

Stylistically, A Wind Egg, has much in common with the works of his Geidai mentor Kōji Yamamura.  The grey washed backgrounds and layering of the image with paint flecks during the dream (or rather nightmare) sequence are reminiscent of the techniques used by Yamamura in films like Mt. Head (2002) and Muybridge’s Strings (2011). Colour is kept to a minimal with grey and black being the predominant hues.  

Theme of Abuse

A Wind Egg played at Nippon Connection 2013 as part of the omnibus of Geidai films presented by Prof. Mitsuko Okamoto.  The audience at Nippon Connection has been following the Japanese independent scene for the past decade and there has been much discussion in recent years about the prevalence of abuse and violence in animation by young independent filmmakers.  This trend includes the films of Saori Shiroki – particularly MAGGOT (2007) and The Woman Who Stole Fingers (2010) – and Kei Oyama (Hand Soap, 2008), and Atsushi Wada’s Gentle Whistle, Bird and Stone (2010). 

I cannot speculate on if this reflects anything about modern Japanese society; however, I do believe the personal nature of independent animation allows for artists to address these darker issues of human nature.  I have long been of the opinion that animation has the power to address subject matter that is too difficult for viewers to witness with live action – Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita’s Pica-don (1978) and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) are two films that automatically spring to mind. 

Just as Pica-don and Grave of the Fireflies deal with the trauma of inhumane wartime violence, A Wind Egg takes on the deeply confronting issues surrounding the trauma caused by sexual perversion and domestic violence within the family unit.  The fractured nature of the narrative is indicative of the way in which abuse – be it psychological, sexual or physical – disrupts family life and traumatizes its victims.  Initially, this film appears to be full of despair, but upon further reflection there is indeed a glimmer of hope at the end.  Eggs are symbolic of birth and creation, and roosters are associated with Amaterasu, the Shintō goddess of the sun.  Perhaps the boy has indeed been reborn at the end of the film and is indeed flapping his way into a brighter future. 

A Wind Egg won the Lotte Reiniger Promotion Award for Animated Film at the Stuttgart Trickfilm Festival.  It appears on the DVD Geidai Animation 3^rd Graduate Works 2012.  You can follow Ryo Okawara on Twitter.

#nippon13 #nc2013

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Watakushiritori (わたくしりとり, 2013)

Kazuhiko Okushita (奥下和彦, b. 1985) first came to my attention in 2010 when his animated short The Red Thread (2009) was featured on the NHK’s Digista program.  My review of the film has actually become one of my most read posts of all time.  At first I thought this was due to people researching the East Asian belief in the “red thread of fate” aka the “red string of fate”, but then I found out that it is also the title of a bestselling novel by Ann Hood – also inspired by the same East Asian concept – which means I was likely benefitting from her popularity.  Someone also told me that “the red thread” idiom is used in Christianity to describe the belief that the Jesus Chris appears in every book of the bible either directly or indirectly. 

In his graduate film made at Geidai, Okushita continues to use his “thread” animation technique – drawing images as if they are made from one single piece of thread – but this time he uses many colours , not just red.  Watakushiritori (わたくしりとり, 2013) translates as “My Shiritori” with Shiritori (しりとり) being a word game similar to a word chain in English.  In the Japanese version of a word chain, one player says a word and the next player has to make a word using the final “kana” (syllable) of the previous word.  Koji Yamamura also used this concept in one of his early experimental shorts Japanese English Pictionary (ひゃっかずかん, 1989) – an influence which Okushita acknowledges an interview on the Geidai Animation 04Sail website. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Red Thread, Okushita’s thread concept reminds me of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s La Linea (1971-86) animations, which I loved to watch on TV as a child.  Watching Watakushiritori it occurred to me that although Okushita is employing a similar concept of a single line animation, the film has a very modern look to it.  Part of the reason for this is the thinness of the lines – which would not have been possible without computer animation technology because when shooting animation on film thin lines get washed out.  Think of the bold lines of Warner Brothers animation during its Golden Era.  I remember talking to Atsushi Wada about this at Nippon Connection 2012 when I asked him about his experience of making Concerning the Rotation of a Child (子供の廻転の事, 2004) on 8mm for his Image Forum Animation School project. This was a real challenge for Wada because he prefers to use very thin lines with drawn with a mechanical pencil (what they call a “sharp pencil” in Japan) which he then scans into the computer.  This was completely ineffective with 8mm so he had to make his lines bolder for this film.

Okushita’s work benefits from being designed on computer because he is able to achieve precise, elegantly drawn thin lines set in sharp relief against a white background. The complexity of his thread drawings – particularly in this film where he has to incorporate hiragana (Japanese cursive script) into the drawing – is really quite remarkable.  In the Geidai interview, Okushita said that trying to achieve single thread effect throughout the film was one of the three main challenges of the film.  He also had the challenge of finding words that would allow him to develop a storyline with Shiritori linked words.  This meant keeping a dictionary close at hand when writing the script. The third challenge fell to the composer Yuri Habuka and sound designer Masumi Takino, whom he asked to create a soundtrack which also incorporates a Shiritori motif.

In explaining the concept behind Watakushiritori, Okushita describes how he recalls the past in a series of connected “fragments of memory” and he wanted to recreate that reality in his animation.  The film begins as a typical day in the life, but it transforms into the tale of a relationship between a man and a woman and the rocky, unpredictable way in which it develops. The impact of the interwoven visual and thematic concepts in Okushita’s film is brilliant in its simplicity.  His animation appears uncomplicated and minimalistic, but behind the scenes it is evident that a lot of careful planning and design went into its execution.  Definitely a young animator to keep an eye on.

Watakushiritori appears on the Geidai Animation 4^th Graduate Works 2013 DVD.  The Red Thread is on Youtube.  Check out Okushita’s official website to see more examples of his art:  http://okushitakazuhiko.com/   

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Tokyo University of the Arts Animation at Nippon Connection 2013

At Nippon Connection 2013, a selection of works by graduate students from the Tokyo University of the Arts (aka Geidai) animation programme was presented by NHK producer and current director of the Geidai Graduate School of Film and New Media, Professor Mitsuko Okamoto. 

Although Geidai itself is one of the oldest art schools in Japan, starting off as the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1887, the Graduate School of Film and New Media was established in Yokohama in 2005 with its Department of Animation forming in 2008.  Although the animation programme is only 5 years old, they have quickly established themselves as one of the top places in Japan to study animation as students there are given the opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business including world renowned animator Koji Yamamura (Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor, Muybridge’s Strings) and i.Toon stop motion animator Yuichi Ito (Knyacki!, Winter Days).  Geidai’s students have already found acclaim at animation festivals around the world including Atsushi Wada (In a Pig’s Eye, The Great Rabbit), Saori Shiroki (MAGGOT, Woman Who Stole Fingers), and Ryo Okawara (Orchestra, A Wind Egg).

The Geidai graduate programme only accepts 16 students a year into its 2-year programme.  They have the lofty aim of developing a “new era of Japanese animation” and pride themselves on their dedication to new expression and experimental spirit.  They actively look for students who have originality, are highly motivated, and demonstrate strong themes in their work.  As it is a graduate programme, the students usually come with some animation experience under their belt.  In addition to honing their skills as animators, Prof. Okamoto uses her experience as a producer to teach the students about the business of filmmaking: how to present a plan, how to make a budget, how to create a workable schedule, how to promote one’s film, and so on.

The programme shown at Nippon Connection 2013 demonstrated Geidai’s wide range of styles from hand drawn to computer animation, from the sweet to the surreal.  In the coming weeks I hope to review some of my favourites for you including Aya Tsugehata’s stop motion animation Imamura Store and Ryo Okawara’s A Wind Egg which won the Lotte Reiniger Promotion Award at Stuttgart in June.

The programme that screened at NC2013:

Fully Cooked For You (Onishime otabe, Yuka IMABAYASHI, 2011, 3’44”)

Promise (Yakusoku, Aki KONO, 2011, 8‘27“)

A Wind Egg (Kara no tamago, Ryo OKAWARA, 2012, 10’30”)

The Tender March (Yasashii March, Wataru UEKUSA, 2011, 4’48”)

Imamura Store (Imamura shoten, Aya TSUGEHATA, 2011, 5’16”) read review

Specimens of Obsessions (Hyohon no to, Atsushi MAKINO, 2011, 12’08”)

Flower and Steam (Hana to yome, Eri KAWAGUCHI, 2012, 4’06”)

Maze King (Hakhyun KIM, 2013, 7’01”)

Recruit Rhapsody (Shukatsu kyosokyoku, Maho YOSHIDA, 2012, 7’27”)

Hide-and-Seek (Kakurenbo, Keiko SHIRAISHI, 2012, 7’51”)

Sunset Flower Blooming (Yugesho, Yuanyuan HU, 2012, 10’19”)

It's Time for Supper (Yoru gohan no jikoku, Saki MURAMOTO, 2013, 8’28”)

Some of these shorts and many more can be found on the Geidai University DVD collections for 2011, 2012, and 2013.

#nippon13 #nc2013

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Hiroshima International Animation Festival 2012

The biannual Hiroshima InternationalAnimation Festival 2012 came to a conclusion today.  The final competition consisted of 66 works selected from 2,110 entries from around the world.  The international jury included Aleksandra Korejwo (Poland), Igor Kovalyov (USA), Irina Margolina (Russia), Kosei Ono (Japan), and Marv Newland (Canada) – whose classic film Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) was screened on 16mm at my 10^th birthday party and had a profound effect on me ;)  The international honorary president of the festival was Peter Lord of Aardman. A selection of Lord’s works were also screened at the festival.

The winners are as follows:

Grand Prize

I Saw Mice Burying a Cat (Dmitry Geller, China, 2011)

Hiroshima Prize

Kali, the Little Vampire (Regina Pessoa, Portugal/France/Canada, Switzerland, 2012)

Debut Prize

Sticky Ends (Osman Cerfon, France, 2010)

Renzo Kinoshita Prize

Futon (Yoriko Mizushiri, Japan, 2012)

Audience Prize

Head Over Heels (Timothy Reckart, UK, 2012)

Special International Jury Prize

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, USA, 2011)

Ursus (Reinis Petersons, Latvia, 2011)

Sunday (Patrick Doyon, Canada, 2011)

Tram (Michaela Pavlátová, France, 2012)

Chinti (Natalia Mirzoyan, Russia, 2011)

Special Prize

two (Steven Subotnick, USA, 2011)

Howl (Natalie Bettelheim+Sharon Michaeli, Israel, 2011)

The Little Bird and the Leaf (Lena von Döhren, Switzerland, 2012)

The Great Rabbit (Atsushi Wada, France, 2011)

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, Canada/Japan, 2011)

Read more about the winning films at the official website for Hiroshima 2012.

Seven works by Japanese artists made the official competition:

The Great Rabbit (Atsushi Wada, 2011) (read review)

Muybridge’s Strings (Koji Yamamura, 2011) (read review)

The Light (Yuka Sukegawa, 2010)

Rain Town (Hiroyasu Ishida, 2011)

SPONCHOI Pispochoi (pecoraped, 2010)

Yonalure: Moment to Moment (Ayaka Nakata + Yuki Sakitani, 2011)

Futon (Yoriko Mizushiri, 2012)

In addition to the competition, this year’s festival celebrated the 30^th anniversary of ASIFA-JAPAN, which was founded by the co-founders of the Hiroshima festival – the current ASIFA president Sayoko Kinoshita and her late husband Renzo Kinoshita (read more about them).  The ASIFA-JAPAN 30th Anniversary Special Program celebrated the works of its members through screenings of their animated works and an exhibition of objects related to their works including puppets, paintings, books, and installations.

I was deeply disappointed not to be able to attend the festival this year as there were many special presentations I would have loved to have seen: a Jiří Trnka Special Program to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of his birth; an homage to the late Nobuhiro Aihara (see poster for this year's festival), whose works are so rarely screened outside of Japan; and a focus on animation from Norway.  There was also an omnibus presentation of the best in recent world animation, a special on contemporary Japanese animation, a program for children, and a program on works by students.  In a nod to the founding ethos of the festival, a selection of peace-themed films were also screened dedicated to “the spirit and the heart of Hiroshima.” 

 cmmhotes 2012

Animated Bach

While writing my review of Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings this week, I got to thinking about how many innovative animators have been inspired by the music of J.S. Bach.  In the case of Muybridge’s Strings, Bach’s Crab Canon – which is often described as a musical palindrome – complements Yamamura’s exploration of the possibilities of non-linear time. 

Just what is it about Bach’s music that inspires?  His lyricism?  His mathematical precision? (See: Noralv Pedersen’s “Music is also mathematics” and R.D. Fergusson’s “Johan Sebastian Bach: Mystic and Mathematician”). 

Here is a selection of animation films / sequences inspired by Bach.  Let me know in the comments if you think of any others.

Muybridge’s Strings

(Koji Yamamura, 2011)

music: Crab Canon

Motion Painting No. 1

(Oskar Fischinger, 1947)

music: Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, BWV 1048

See: Michael Barrier on this film

Spheres

(Norman McLaren and René Jodoin, 1969)

music:  Bach played by Glenn Gould

Pastorale

(Mary Ellen Bute, 1950)

Music: J.S. Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." A pictorial accompaniment in abstract forms.

Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor

(Jan Švankmajer, 1965)

See: Dan North on this film

Gestalt (部屋/形態)

(Takashi Ishida, 1999)

music: one of the Great Eighteen Choale Preludes, the hauntingly ethereal BWV 659 “Nun, komm’ der Heiden Heiland” (Come now, Saviour of the heathen) performed on an organ

See: my review of this film

The Art of the Fugue

(Takashi Ishida, 2001)

-          this film was commissioned by the Aichi Culture Centre to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bach’s passing

music: ??? 

Fantasia

(Walt Disney, 1940)

music: the film opens with Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D minor conducted by Leopold Stokowski.  This section of the film was directed by Samuel Armstrong with visual development credited to Oskar Fischinger

The End of Evangelion

(新世紀エヴァンゲリオン劇場版 Air/まごころを、君に)

(Kazuya Tsurumaki/Hideaki Anno, 1997)

music: the soundtrack to this film was composed by Shiro Sagasu but liberally features selections of J.S. Bach’s music throughout including “Air on the G String” (August Wilhelmj’s adapation of J.S. Bach’s “Air” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWC 1068), “Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major”, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, and “Komm, süsser Tod”.

Tale of Tales

(Yuri Norstein, 1979)

music: the score was composed by Mikhail Meyerovich and includes excerpts from several pieces by Bach (most notably the E flat minor Prelude BWV 853 from The Well-Tempered Clavier).  In addition, the film references Mozart (the Andante second movement from Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, K41), the tango “Weary Sun” by Jerzy Petersburski, and most prominently a traditional Russian lullaby.

Man and Raven from Olga Brio on Vimeo.

Man and Raven

(Olga Brio, 2010)

Music: Jascha Heifetz and J. S. Bach

The Triplets of Belleville

(Sylvain Chomet, 2003)

Music: Bach's Prelude No. 2 from The Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) played by Glenn Gould is also featured during the bicycle scene 

 cmmhotes 2012