KurzSchluss #677: Berlinale Special – Mirai Mizue

Mirai Mizue (MM) was interviewed by ARTE as part of the KurzSchluss short film programme at the Berlinale earlier this month with his CaRTe bLaNChe producer Tamaki Okamoto (TO) acting as his interpreter.  You can currently watch the six-minute interview at Zoom – Die Kurzfilme der Berlinale Shorts.  But, as television stations have a habit of deleting the online content after a certain period of time, I have written up an English transcript of the interview. I  have omitted Okamoto's interpretation and done my own translation of Mizue's answers (with assistance, as ever, from my fluently trilingual husband)   I have also eliminated “ums” and other non-essential expressions to cut to the essence of the answers.

The highlights of this interview for me are Mirai Mizue’s kimono featuring a print of images from WONDER and Tamaki Okamoto’s stunning hairstyle.  The questions are rather pedestrian – they seem to be a list of questions to be asked of all the animators – but Mizue’s answers are fascinating.  I love how his face transforms into an expression of mischievous delight at the end when he is asked to draw something for them and he whips out a handful of markers from the sleeves of his kimono.  Priceless. 

ARTE: Are you living animation?

MM:  I think that everything I do in my daily life is related to animation.  I feel animation all the time, whatever I do.

ARTE:  What was the first image of your film?

MM:  It is just a simple black point.  It signifies the starting point of drawing. 

ARTE:  How much did your film cost?

TO:  20,000 - 25,000€

ARTE: Who are you inspired by?

MM:  For classic animation, I admire animators like Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren.  I also like animators like Georges Schwizgebel for the way they use music in their work. 

ARTE: What’s the story?

MM:  The story does not necessarily have to come from me.  The audience can make the stories themselves after seeing my films.  I just want to make animation with colour, form, and music in order to make people feel happiness or some other emotion.  The story will be different for each audience member because they will each react uniquely to their experience of the film.

ARTE:  Do you draw every day?

MM:  Yes, WONDER, was a project where I actually had to draw every day for 365 days.  Initially, I had to force myself to draw every day for the project.  At the beginning, the goal was just to complete the daily task for the animation film, but after a while - and this was a new experience for me - the situation changed.  I was no longer drawing just for the film but I was overcome with a sensation of taking great pleasure from drawing and I wanted to feel that sensation every day.    

ARTE: Can you make a drawing for us?

[MM pulls markers out of his kimono sleeves and sets about drawing on a sheet of plain white paper]

Interview ©2014 ARTE /Berlinale

Transcription and additional text by Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

Zakka Films: An interview with Seiko Ono

Rokkasho Rhapsody (Hitomi Kamanaka, 2006)

One of the biggest frustrations of fans of Japanese film is that we hear about a great documentary playing at international festivals and have to wait years before it is available on DVD.  Even then, the film is usually only released in Japan and without English subtitles – thus limiting the audience and making it difficult to use for teaching purposes.

All that changed earlier this year when the U.S-based company Zakka Films opened its Filmmakers’ Market with the aim of offering Japanese and Asian documentary filmmakers the opportunity to bring subtitled DVDs of their films fresh onto the market for consumption like fish at Tsukiji. 

Zakka Films is the brainchild of Seiko Ono, wife of respected Yale professor Aaron Gerow (author of Visions of Japanese Modernity and A Page of Madness).  After my dedicating the month of October last year to reviewing DVD releases by Zakka Films, I contacted Seiko Ono to learn more about how she came to start this exciting new DVD label.

Tell me about yourself and your background in the film industry.

In the late 1980s in Japan I started working at Studio 200 of the Seibu Department Stores. Things were about to decline, but Seibu still had lots of museums, movie theaters, performance theaters and galleries. Unlike the department stores in the US, they were trying to provide an entire life to customers: not just fashionable brands, but the arts as well. Studio 200 was one of the Seibu art spaces, and was sort of an all-purpose theater playing rare films, presenting dance performance, experimental music concerts, art exhibitions, etc. People working there, including me, coordinated many different kinds of events, and I had some wonderful opportunities to work with films which were not shown at commercial theaters such as Taiwan New Wave films. It was extremely exciting for me to work there, and in fact I learned so many things and met a lot of film people, which helped me later. Just before the 1990s, Seibu’s art spaces started closing one after another out of financial difficulties. People around me started leaving because no one wanted to be transferred to the shoe section or some other section of the Seibu Department Store. In 1990 I joined the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, which was preparing for the second festival in 1991 (the YIDFF takes place once every two years). After that, for nearly 20 years, my work involved programming and coordinating the YIDFF. I am no longer officially at the YIDFF, but I am still involved.

Zakka Films seems like a real labour of love.  What inspired you to start the company?

In 2004 my husband got a job at Yale in the US, and all of us moved to America. I still continued to work for the YIDFF from afar even though I was not a programmer anymore. I had more spare time to start thinking of doing something I had never done before, or something that could justify me living here in the US. Considering my long career at the YIDFF, it didn’t take a long time to get the idea to sell Japanese documentaries on DVD. I already had connections with many documentary productions and filmmakers. It was a quite natural idea to start thinking of working on Japanese documentaries. There were only a few Japanese documentaries that you could obtain in the US, and the few that existed tended to downplay the presence of the director, such as with Out of Place: A Memoir by Edward W. Said and Radiation: A Slow Death. The first is by Makoto Sato and the second by Hitomi Kamanaka, and both of them are pretty famous documentary filmmakers, but their names as directors were sometimes hard to find in publicity. Customers were not always even aware these were documentaries from Japan. I felt there was something not quite right with this situation. That was one impetus for starting Zakka Films. By the way, Zakka Films means 雑貨映画 in Japanese. It is a made up word combination, but zakka in Japanese means miscellaneous goods, so I thought I’d deal not just with documentaries, but also with other rare films which are powerful and excite fans of good cinema. As you know, the first DVD of Zakka Films was The Roots of Japanese Anime, a collection of classic animation, not documentary. You see I had no experience in running my own business in Japan, and here in the US I was a non-English speaker, so I thought I should not try something too difficult at first. Classic animation had a broader appeal and there were already many fans of Japanese animation. Starting with this, I could learn how to produce a DVD, how to promote it, and how to sell it.

Although much of pre-war animation has been lost, many great animated films by Noburo Ofuji and Kenzo Masaoka did survive until the present day.    What criteria did you use in selecting films for The Roots of Japanese Anime: Until the End of WWII? 

If you want to access classic animation films, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is the best place to visit, but it is almost impossible for us to make a DVD from their films. Fortunately, there are some classic animation collectors in Japan. All the films on The Roots of Japanese Anime were from one collector whom I had known for a long time. At the beginning of this project, I had a longer list of films to include, but the process of working on permission and rights issues trimmed it down to eight films. For me Momotaro’s Sea Eagle (review) was the one which couldn’t be removed, since it was so historically significant. We also made a booklet that comes with the DVD which includes historical backgrounds of each film, and out customers have liked that.

Do have any plans to release more anime in the future?

Right after I released this DVD, I received requests from many customers about what they want next. Many of them were popular 1970s anime which were made for TV such as the anime of Fujio Akastuka or Go Nagai. If I won a fortune in a lottery, I might put out such DVDs, but that is a bit beyond our scale. However, if I have another chance to work on classic animation again, I would do it.

Zakka Films released four documentaries by legendary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto who passed away in 2008.  Did Tsuchimoto know of the plans for their release?

I wish he had known of this plan. Two years after his death, my husband and I visited his office, Ciné Associé, a company which was taken over by his wife and sometimes editor of his later films, Motoko Tsuchimoto. I told her about my project before the plans were even concrete, and she was very happy to hear of it, and it was her enthusiasm that helped start the project. Of course I needed to discuss the project with Siglo, the production company for Minamata: The Victims and Their World (review). Both of them were so supportive. Motoko-san provided us tapes, documents, books and whatever was helpful for Zakka.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Tsuchimoto’s documentaries about Minamata and Hiroshima seem more important than ever – particularly his focus on the victims of these manmade catastrophes and their stories.  What can today’s documentarians learn from Tsuchimoto?

Tsuchimoto’s belief was that “If there is no record, there is no truth.” When he started making documentaries about Minamata, Minamata disease was taboo: no one wanted to talk about this disease, which is why his first attempt to make a documentary about Minamata for television totally failed. So what he did was to enter their world: he and his staff started living there, and volunteered to do things like drive a car to help them. Minamata was a poor town and cars were still rare. After building closer relationships with them—a method that wasn’t unusual in the 1960s given the Sanrizuka series by Ogawa Productions—he and his staff gradually started shooting. Their office was always open so people from Minamata could make casual visits and Tsuchimoto could show them the rushes they just shot. Building trust, people who refused to be filmed at the beginning ended up turning to ask him to film them! That’s why he could shoot so many of the victims for Minamata: The Victims and Their World. 

This documentary became an important document in publicizing Minimata disease so they could be officially recognized as a victims by the government of Japan at that time. Tsuchimoto’s Minamata series is not just a document, it is a record of human dignity. For cinematic beauty, I believe some of his films should be ranked among the top films of world cinema history. You cannot find in his films the terrible images of the victims that you can find by searching YouTube with the keyword “Minamata.” He patiently waited until the patients were relaxed and tried to film their most beautiful expression. I think that’s how he in the end could create works that made you think deeply about social contradictions. After the Fukushima nuclear accident, many documentary filmmakers have been to Fukushima or Miyagi to make documentaries. I think it is fine to have many different styles and methods, and not all of them need be masterpieces. But I wonder how many filmmakers think like Tsuchimoto did about how to film such tragedies, and how their work relates to the issues. The documentaries I like to see are not those that are complete when you’re finished watching, but those that start then. Tsuchimoto’s films are like that.

On the Road: A Document (1964) is a groundbreaking film for its experimentation with the form of dramatized documentary.  Can you talk a little bit about why this was such a radical film when it was released and how it was received by audiences?

This film was originally made as traffic safety film for the Metropolitan Police, but it was shelved for nearly 40 years because Tsuchimoto did not make the film that was ordered. Tsuchimoto was working with the drivers union to expose their problems and unhealthy labor conditions, while also masterfully editing the footage like a city symphony, so when a police official finally saw the film, he called it “useless—the plaything of a cinephile.” Until recently the film was not shown openly except at some film festivals, so for a long time On the Road was a kind of phantom film. The production company went bankrupt, so the rights finally reverted to Noriaki Tsuchimoto himself, and the DVD was released in 2004 in Japan.

The name “Zakka” (miscellaneous goods) suggests that you plan to expand your catalogue to include more than just classic works of animation and documentary.  What is next for Zakka Films?  

I am going to continue working on Tsuchimoto’s works, but in the spirit of my company’s name, zakka (雑貨), I would like to extend my business and move beyond the limitations imposed by our size and finances. The project I just opened is The Filmmakers’ Market (FM). FM is a new marketplace for documentaries that tries to break down the walls separating Japanese filmmakers and foreign viewers and allows filmmakers to bring their English-subtitled works in for direct sale, kind of like a farmer’s fresh produce market. When I produce and release my own DVDs, there are countless steps such as making subtitles, designing the DVD cover, making booklets, and so on; that is a big investment in time and money, so we have to limit ourselves in what we actually release. But FM is basically Zakka helping independent filmmakers sell the DVDs they have already made to a foreign market. It opens up the possibilities to obtain rare documentaries, some of which are not even commercially released in Japan. We feature not only Japanese but also other Asian documentaries. All of the DVDs are produced by the directors and producers themselves; for some, Zakka will help make an English booklet or cover, but some may have only Japanese on the package or in the booklet (we will note as such when selling it). But and all of them will have English subtitles. Please come and look at the films brought to market!

産地直送 Filmmakers’ Market (official website)

ROKKASHO RHAPSODY  Director: Hitomi Kamanaka (read review)

In 2004 the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant was completed in Rokkasho village as a facility for reprocessing spent fuel from Japan's nuclear reactors into plutonium. The film spotlights the people of the village, who hold diverse opinions regarding this huge, nearly operational national project.

ECHOES FROM THE MIIKE   Director: Hiroko Kumagai

The story of the Miike Coal Mine, the largest mine in Japan, which ceased operations on March 30, 1997. Hiroko Kumagai interviewed over 70 individuals, men and women, including Koreans who were forcibly brought to Japan. The film looks at Miike not just to explore the past, but also to think about the future: what it means to work and to live.

BREAKING THE SILENCE  Director: Toshikuni Doi

In the spring of 2002, the Israeli army surrounded and attacked the Balata refugee camp. The camera follows residents living in at state of terror and records their lives and feelings.

ARTISTS OF WONDERLAND  Director: Makoto Sato

This is a film about seven artists. It's also about seven people who are mentally handicapped. This has all the marks of a Makoto Sato film: the quirky humor and passion for everyday human life.

BINGAI  Director: Feng Yan

Bingai, a Chinese documentary by Feng Yan—a director deeply inspired by Shinsuke Ogawa—has just been added to the Filmmakers' Market at Zakka Films. Bingai won the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize (the grand prize of Asia program) at the Yamagata Film Festival.

MAPPING THE FUTURE NISHINARI  Directors: Yukio Tanaka, Tetsuo Yamada

Nishinari in Osaka is home to one of Japan's largest concentrations of day laborers, with much of the population being composed of homeless persons, buraku (a discriminated community of descendants of outcast groups), former yakuza, and Korean-Japanese. This documentary presents the people of Nishinari, not from on high, but rather from their own level.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Art of the Absurd: An Interview with Atsushi Wada

In a Pig's Eye (Wakaranai Buta, 2010)

Atsushi Wada is an award-winning alternative animation artist. I first encountered his work at a screening of Tokyo Loop in December 2006 at Image Forum in Tokyo. When screened in the context of other surreal animations by artists like Yoji Kuri, Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara, the work of Atsushi Wada stands out because of his muted colour pallet and very deliberately paced character movement.

When I have seen Wada’s work screened with other alternative animated shorts at Nippon Connection in Frankfurt, the perplexity of the audience is palpable. You can hear people asking themselves “What in the world is this all about?” His films pose a particular challenge to audiences because they feature both the surreal and the absurd, which can provoke extreme reactions.

Watching In a Pig’s Eye - which won best film at Fantoche in September - I found myself laughing out loud at the screwball comedy aspects of the boys' acrobatic interatctions with the giant pig in the garden.  Wada says that most audiences view the film silently and that my reaction may say more about my unusual sense of humour (which may indeed be true – partly attributable to the amount of Monty Python I watched growing up), but it is part of the nature of the absurd or surreal humour that it can evoke a wide range of emotions on the part of the spectator ranging from revulsion to elation, incomprehension to sudden clarity. The only illegitimate reaction to a Wada film is complete dismissal, because his films have a lot to teach us about patterns of human behaviour.

Wada’s films are for me a kind of visual surrealist poetry that require repeated screenings in order to fully appreciate them. When viewing them in a festival setting one really needs a pause before the next film begins to fully take in the ramifications of his use of symbolism and movement. Fortunately for us, CALF is releasing a DVD of his works in December so that fans can take the time to appreciate the charms of each film. Wada is an intelligent and intriguing artist, and while I often feel that I don’t quite “get” everything he is trying to say with his animation, there is something very compelling about them that always brings me back to watch them again.

Interview with Atsushi Wada

Congratulations on winning Best Film at Fantoche! What kind of feedback did you get from the audience there for In A Pig’s Eye?

Thank you very much. In A Pig’s Eye has in a way been less appreciated by audiences than my previous works. It is quieter and calmer than my other works. Furthermore, audiences seem to find the story difficult to understand. I did not really intend to make it difficult to understand though. . .

In the “Making of” section of Tokyo Loop, you explain that you use a 0.3mm “sharp pen” (mechanical pencil) for sketching. What other materials do you use?

I use a 0.3mm “sharp pen” only for sketching. To be more precise, I draw lines with the 0.3mm “sharp pen” and I use a 0.5mm “sharp pen” for shading in hair and clothes. I then scan the drawing into the computer and add colour. I don’t use cel animation paper. Instead I use regular copying paper or rough textured hanshi (Japanese calligraphy paper).

Your use of colour is usually very subtle and minimalistic. Can you talk about how you use colour?

There is a negative reason for this: I don’t like thinking about colour. I’m also not good at it. I therefore don’t increase the number of colours and I choose light colours as much as possible.

In a Pig’s Eye had a lot more laugh-out-loud screwball comedy than other films of yours that I have seen. Can you talk about your use of humour – particularly the absurd in your films.

As I mentioned earlier, I think there is not much laughter in this piece. Therefore, it could be that you have an unusual sense of humour. That being said, humour is an element that is absolutely necessary for me – not only in relation to my own work, but in any animation. Even the most serious works require a sense of humour in order to acquire depth. People who use the surreal tend to be thought of as being odd. However, it is actually just the opposite. Those who use the surreal are quite down-to-earth people. It’s not just about making something that is surreal, but about finding balance between extremes. It is through this process that one actually achieves something that is surreal.

What inspires your animation?

I think that books and documentaries have a lot of influence on me. When I hear words I imagine pictures. Subtle gestures or behaviours create a kind of flash of realization in me. Actually, the project that I am working on at the moment developed when I saw an old Japanese documentary.

Do you think about your audience when you animate, or is your main focus on the aesthetics of your art?

I consider both. I believe that I should try to balance the subjective and the objective in my work. Even when I rely on my own intuition, I think that authors who manage to take a step back and look at themselves objectively as much as that’s possible are able to create great art. It may not be that I am literally thinking of the audience, but I think that it is necessary to have an objective point-of-view.

On the CALF website, it says that you are always thinking about the concept of “ma” 間. I understand this concept in terms of use of space, but you apply it to the “tension produced between movements”. Can you explain how you apply this to animation?

When I try to explain the meaning of “ma”, I always have difficulties. So I’ll give an example: the composer Tōru Takemitsu has talked about the use of “ma” in music. It’s not just about silence, but that silence only becomes possible because there is sound. Takemitsu said that because of this, one has to think about both sound and the absence of it together. I feel the same way. If one applies this to animation, it is because there is movement that there is also “silence” (the absence of movement). I do not only mean movement and the space and time between movements, but that it is necessary to have movement in silence. Both need to be included in the concept of “ma”. It is important to think about how an animated movement affects the “silence” that follows it, and how that connects to the movement that follows the “silence”.

Are there other animators whom you feel also use “ma” in their work?

I think that there are many. Even if it’s not mentioned explicitly, it is of the upmost importance for an animation have that “ma”.

One underlying theme of your films is about the pressure on the Japanese to conform to the expectations of the group. Does this come out of your personal experiences?

I get that question a lot. For my animation to work, it is necessary to depict humans who are being moved mechanically within society. It is not something that I have strong personal feelings about. I just feel that it makes my work more interesting.

Event at Image Forum, November 20-26, 2010

The sheep with human faces in your films represent for me both being docile (hitsuji no you) and being a source of comfort – like when a man rubs his face in the sheep’s fleece. Can you explain more about your use of sheep as a motif?

I seem to somehow like not just sheep but docile animals in general – goats, turtles, elephants, and pigs. I think my interest in them has to do with their way of quietly and slowly walking around and grazing. Seeing them roaming and grazing makes me wonder what they might be thinking. One could say that I like animals that give me space for thinking. With respect to the sheep, I think you are right that they have “amae” (甘え- a Japanese concept concerning the giving / receiving of comfort). There is something about sheep that makes one want to impulsively throw oneself at them. Then again, if one really throws oneself at a sheep they are terribly stinky.

How did you become interested in animation?

Until I started creating works of animation myself, I didn’t really have much interest in animation. My first opportunity to make animation came during my university studies. I felt this urge to move a doodle that I had done. However, it wasn’t really that I was interested in the movement itself, but in the “ma” that develops by putting the drawing into a time sequence. This desire to express “ma” has continued in me unchanged ever since.

Do you remember your first experience with experimental / art animation? What was it?

My first experience with art animation was probably the work of Jan Švankmajer. I can’t recall if it was at a cinema or on video, but it was either Alice or Faust. I was strongly influenced by the tenacity of purpose in his films and I find the editing impressive.

Which animators or artists do you admire?

Igor Kovalyov, Priit Pärn, Kōji Yamamura, Kenzō Masaoka, and Nobuhiro Aihara are just few of the many that I admire.

Mechanism of Spring (Haru no shikumi, 2010)

Your latest film The Mechanism of Spring (Haru no shikumi, 2010) showed at Venice in September. Can you tell me about it?

The theme is “haru no uzu-uzu-kan” (spring fever). I drew living beings, happy about the coming of spring. Turtles, frogs, snails, and crows are frolicking about with the kind of lively movements I imagine they would make. In order to capture the lightness of the image of spring, I felt that the pace of the story should match the movement. I had not done anything with this kind of tempo or rhythm before, so I learned a lot from this film. I discovered things that I want to use again in the future.

What are your future goals as an animator?

I would ideally like to create animation in my own way and earn a decent living from it. At the moment it is very difficult to strike a balance between my artistic production and cost of living. In addition to this, I would like to create an environment in which my art can be seen by as many people as possible.

My thanks to Atsushi Wada for taking the time to answer my questions. 

Atsushi Wada’s work will be screened together with that of other CALF artists Kei Oyama, Mirai Mizue and TOCHKA at Zipangu Fest in the UK on Sunday 28 November at the Genesis Cinema in Whitechaple. Click here for more details.  

Image Forum in Tokyo is hosting a screening event in his honour called Atsushi Wada and World Animation November 20-26.  Read more about it here.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Interview with Akino Kondoh

I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with artist, manga-ka, and animator Akino Kondoh at Shinsedai this year. Her 2004 painting Red Fishes was used as the eye-catching poster art for the festival, and her 2006 animation Ladybirds’ Requiem (Tentou Mushi no Otomurai, 2006) preceded Momoko Ando’s Kakera (2009) at the opening event.

Childhood influences

Kondoh was born into an artistic family. Her father and brother are both architects and her homemaker mother studied design at university. Kondoh was never particularly interested in television. Instead, she recalls enjoying having picture books read to her by her parents and being taken to museums. Kondoh also had little interest in popular manga as a child.  She did; however, discover Garo (ガロ, a monthly anthology magazine for avant-garde manga which ran from 1964-2002) when she was a junior high school student. Kondoh’s own manga art has been featured in alternative manga magazines and one of her striking images adorns the cover of the debut English language edition of AX: A Collection of Alternative Manga. This cover art had previously been used for volume 42 (2004) of the Japanese edition of AX (アックス).

Garo cover art

Kondoh cover art - order here

Insects

I have long been interested in the prevalence of insects in Japanese art and culture. Cicadas, for example, are always used as signifiers in movies to indicate that the setting is late summer. When my children were in hoikuen (nursery school) in Bunkyo-ku, they had a pet kabuto-mushi (Japanese rhinoceros beetle) in the same way that a Canadian Kindergarten might have a hamster. In Kondoh’s art insects like ladybirds (ladybugs in Canadian vernacular), butterflies, and insect larvae play an essential role. When I asked Kondoh about this she told me that insects have long been an object of fascination for her. She recalls playing with insects as a child, so it has been only natural that they have become a source of artistic inspiration in her work.

Introduction to art animation

While a student of graphic design at Tama Art University, Kondoh was introduced to animation in her second year of studies through assignment work. Her professor was Masashiro Katayama (b. 1955), who has enjoyed a long and successful career as an animator and illustrator (see my review of Winter Days, and Kawamoto’s Self Portrait). In her third year at Tamabi, Kondoh made The Evening Traveling (Densha kamoshiranai, 2002), her first animation short. The Evening Traveling won her awards at the Japan Media Arts Festival (2002), the Digista Awards (2002), and the third Yuri Norstein Grand Prix / Audience Award at Laputa Animation Festival.

The use of music in her animation

Kondoh and her brother became big fans of the band TAMA when they were teenagers. Through a fortunate series of events, Kondoh was able to develop a professional relationship with band member Toshiaku Chiku. Prof. Katayama often invited animator Tatautoshi Nomura of ROBOT (the company that employs Oscar-winner Kunio Kato) to guest lecture his class. Nomura is also a fan of TAMA and has often worked with the band for the soundtracks to his animations both as musicians and as seiyū (voice actors). Kondoh was able to get permission from Toshiaku Chiku to use his song Densha kamo shirenai for her film of the same name. (English title The Evening Traveling)  At first, Kondoh explained, Chiku was not really sure about her project, but when the film was a success and won awards at festivals, he agreed to compose an original score for Ladybirds’ Requiem.

 French edition of her manga

Elaborate vision, minimalist style

Akino Kondoh’s art carries us into a complex, dream-like world. Yet while the images she creates are highly detailed, at the same time she employs a very minimalist aesthetic. When creating the images for her animation films, she uses plain art paper. Her tools are graphite and marker. Her colour palette is predominantly black against a white background – as in The Evening Traveling which was entirely monochrome. Filler colours like grey or the brilliant reds of Ladybirds’ Requiem are done with markers. The images are then scanned and edited using Adobe Photoshop and After Effects for Macs.

Prolific artist with an eye for detail

Kondoh’s passion for her craft drives her to put in long hours at the canvas. While some artists prefer to work in the morning hours, or well into the night, Kondoh’s entire day revolves around her desire to keep on creating new work. At the same time, Kondoh is a perfectionist with very high standards. There are actually two versions of Ladybirds’ Requiem. The one that is floating around on various video streaming sites was done as a student work in 2003 and has a running time of 2’50”. Kondoh expressed a deep dissatisfaction with this work and so in 2005 she set out to remake the film. She started from scratch, drawing entirely new images for the animation which was eventually completed in 2006 with a running time of 5’38”. A limited edition DVD of the film (only 12 copies!) was released for sale to her representatives Mizuma Art Gallery and snapped up by high end art connoisseurs. It is this version of the film that played at Shinsedai and at Naomi Hocura’s Seconds Under the Sun screenings.

Kondoh’s fascination with contemporary art

Funding from Bunka-cho (the Agency for Cultural Affairs) allowed Kondoh to do a residency in New York City from November 2008 until October 2009. For that first year in New York she lived in Chelsea. She has now moved to Astoria and is supporting herself through her art. When I asked her “Why New York?”, she responded that she wanted to immerse herself in contemporary art and get exposure to the art community outside of Japan.

Kondoh’s depiction of Eiko, the young woman protagonist at the center of her work, has often reminded me of art deco influenced illustrations that I saw at the Yayoi Museum when I lived in Nishikata. I was also reminded of the unusual world of girls I had once seen at the Collection de l’art brut many years ago in Lausanne, Switzerland. When I described the work to Kondoh, she immediately put a name to the artist – Henry Darger. It turns out that Kondoh shares my interest in l’art brut or Outsider Art and she spoke enthusiastically about the Henry Darger collection at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, which is located near the MOMA.

Future Plans

I was impressed by Kondoh’s high ambitions and passion for her work. She dreams of showing her work all over the world. Among other projects she has currently on the go are collaborations with the New York avant-garde jazz musician John Zorn, for whom she designed the cover art for his CD The Goddess: Music for the Ancient of Days. She does plan to do more animation in the future, and is working constantly on her art. She expressed her enthusiasm by saying: “I want to keep creating” 

 

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Maya Yonesho

The work of animation artist Maya Yonesho (米正万也) jumped out at me when I first watched the collaborative film Winter Days because her unique style of combining types of handmade animation (stop motion of a book and watercolour animation on the pages of the book) reminded me of the experimental films of Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger. In a recent e-mail exchange with me, Yonesho added the names of Taku Furukawa, Kihachiro Kawamoto and Clive Walley to the list of filmmakers whose work has inspired her. Like McLaren, Fischinger and Walley, Yonesho’s work is abstract and she likes to synchronize her animation with music and sounds. Her work is identifiable by her use of cheerful watercolours and her mixing of media. Wiener Wuast, for instance features a hand holding up a card of paper against various outdoor Viennese locations with watercolour animation dancing across the paper synchronized to music by Norbert Trummer.

Many contemporary animation artists come to Europe in order to immerse themselves in unique animation traditions such as the Czech school, the Estonian school, the Aardman school in the UK, among many others. Kihachiro Kawamoto was the forerunner of this trend when he studied under Jiri Trnka in Prague in the 1960s. Fusako Yusaki, whom I wrote about last September, has been a central figure in the Italian animation community since the success of her Fernet Branca commercials in the 1970s. The relationship between European and Japanese animators has strengthened in recent decades through artists sharing work at animation festivals in Utrecht, Oberhausen, Hiroshima, and elsewhere.

Maya Yonesho has an MA in Conceptual and Media Arts from Kyoto City University of Arts. She has also studied in England and did a research project in Estonia in 2002. Yonesho then found herself invited to be a member of the jury at the Tricky Women International Animation Festival [note: the ‘Tricky’ in the festival name is a play on words involving the German for animation: der Trickfilm or der Zeichentrickfilm] in 2003. This has led to a long creative relationship with the city of Vienna. Yonesho currently divides her time mainly between Vienna and Kyoto. In Vienna, she teaches workshops, makes films, and does exhibitions of her art. In the autumn term she lectures at Kyoto Seika University.

Thanks to modern technology, Yonesho finds that she is quite flexible to be able to work anywhere in the world using a scanner, laptop, and he International Express Mail service to send her short animation work to the NHK (the Japanese public broadcaster). She recently completed a series of 6 one-minute films for the NHK very young children called “Dance of Circles, Triangles and Squares” and her current project “Colours of the Seasons” will have four installments, one for each of the seasons.

In describing her method of filmmaking, Yonesho says “When I create an animation, I first decide on a theme, then edit the sound, and finally I draw the images to match the sound. The theme always develops from something that has been on my mind, but rather than create a story and address the theme explicitly, I prefer to express abstractly, through sound and music, a mood or atmosphere that cannot be expressed in words. Naturally, it pleases me when a viewer can perceive and empathize with the idea I had in mind when I created the piece, but I like for each viewer to interpret it in her or his own way. One of the aspects of animation I love is simply the fact that it moves. In my work I emphasize this aspect of movement and also rhythm, so I try to keep the shapes as simple as possible, and have them move to the rhythm in pleasing ways. The reason I often make the sound before I make the image is because I see sound as an extremely important element, when I use a person's voice, I try to analyze it and make the image complement the mood of the voice” (Source: Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan)

In Yonesho’s work, one finds a desire to use images as a form of international communication. Her first abstract animated short was synchronized with theme “we can understand each other without understanding each language” (Source). This idealitic vision is reminiscent of the ending to Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952). I was also reminded of an interview I once read with Sayako Kinoshita, who founded the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in the 1980s with her husband Renzo Kinoshita. The Kinoshitas, after enjoying a positive reception at animation festivals abroad in the 1970s decided to start a similar festival in Japan with the ideal of striving towards world peace through visual communication. Hence the decision to host the event in Hiroshima.

Yonesho’s recent film Wiener Wuast plays with notions of the tourist observing the city of Vienna. I found an interesting critical discussion of a recent screening of the film at the MASC Foundatation on Paul Sakoilsky’s blog. He also provides several high resolution stills from the film and a link to a tiny video of the film. The title translates as Vienna Mix and since 2006 Yonesho has also produced other workshop films in a simalar style including Taiwan Mix, Norway Mix, Croatia Mix, and Israel Mix.

Update: Maya Yonesho's work can now be purchased on DVD from Anido.

Filmography

• One Lonely Cactus (6’35”, Super 8, paint on cel, 1985)

• Kitsune no mado (5’, Super 9, paster & ink on paper, 1986)

• dance・ing (collaboration, 12'40", mixed media, 1992)

• Cactus Boy (Saboten-kun, 3'36", claymation/stop motion, 1993)

• Mindsaver (10’30”, mixed media, 1994)

• Mindsaver 1995 (7’, mixed media, 1995)

• Momoiro no Kirin (6’, puppet, 1995)

• Good Morning News (6 TV spots, 3’ each, claymation/stop motion, 1995)

• Chocolate Talk 1&2 (4’50”, stop motion, 1996)

• Bisco Dance 1&2 (22” & 1’09”, stop motion, 1996)

• a dream about cherry (1’25”, ink on paper/stop motion, 1996)

• Kikyo no Yume: Visionary (4’09”, betacam, pencil and pastel on paper, 1996)

• Don’t you wish you were here? (4’, betacam, ink on paper/stop motion, 1997)

• Mindsaver 1997 (7’44”, DVD, mixed media, 1997)

• introspection (1’30”, 16mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 1998)

• believe in it (3’20”, DVD, ink on paper/stop motion, 1998)

• learn to love (3’, DVD, ink on paper/stop motion, 1999)

• Countdown (1’20”, DVD, ink on postcards, 2001)

• Winter Days (collaboration, 1’30”, 35mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 2002)

• Üks Uks (7’, 35mm, ink on paper/stop motion, 2003)

• Wiener Wuast (Vienna Mix, 4’48", DVD, mixed media, 2006)

• Niao Shan Tao (Taiwan Mix, 2’49”, DVD, mixed media, 2006)

• Troll i Ord (Norway Mix, 3’37”, DVD, mixed media, 2007)

• Hrvatska Gibanica (Croatia Mix, 4’23”, DVD, mixed media, 2007)

• Dances of Circles and Squares (6 NHK TV spots, 1’ each, HiVision, 2007)

• Tsiruf Mikrim (Israel Mix, 4’23”, DVD, mixed media, 2008)

• Colours of Seasons (work in progress, 4 short films, 2008)

My thanks to Maya Yonesho for her correspondence with me about her work. Check out her website for more photographs of her work and her CV.

Renku Animation "Fuyu no Hi"

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008