CALF at Nippon Connection 2011

We had excellent turnout for the CALF events last weekend at Nippon Connection. There were three CALF Events: the CALF Animation Special screening event, the Filmmaker’s Discussion with Nobuaki Doi, Mirai Mizue and Takashi Nagata, which I hosted, and a PiKA PiKA Workshop with Takeshi Nagata of Tochka.

The programme for the CALF Animation Special was slightly different than in the printed programme that I reported on last month. The first half of the programme consisted of films by young animators. It opened with Aico Kitamura’s Getting Dressed (2010) which is one of my favourite recent animated shorts. Anyone who has trouble getting out of bed in the morning to face the world will be able to identify with the main protagonist of this film. I could hear murmurs of recognition from female spectators sitting around me during the film.

While Getting Dressed faces the topic of depression head on, many of the other animated shorts were even more distressing or disturbing including Saori Shiroki’s Maggot (2007), Dong-Hun Kim’s Yoko (2010), Shin Hashimoto’s Beluga (2011) , and Wataru Uekusa’s Gentle March (2011). Fortunately, these more depressing films were counterbalanced by the uplifting tale of Naoyuki Tsuji’s Angel (2008) and Masaki Okuda’s dynamic A Gum Boy (2010).

A Gum Boy is so far my favourite animated short of 2011 (see my picks for the top animated shorts of 2010 to get an idea of what I like). Not only are the drawings and animation well executed, but I love it when the movement and editing of an animation works so well with the rhythm of the soundtrack. In this case, Masaki Okuda has chosen a text that is rife with Japanese onomatopoeia (sound words) which give the piece bounce and humour. I am hoping to track down a screener of this film so that I can write a full review of it. Keep an eye out for A Gum Boy on the animation festival circuit this year.

The second half of the programme were animated shorts by the artists who already have DVDs on the CALF label: Atsushi Wada, Kei Oyama (DVD forthcoming this fall), Mirai Mizue, and Tochka. In addition to the films on the original programme, the line-up also included Atsushi Wada’s Gentle Whistle, Bird and Stone (2005) and Well, that’s Glasses (2007) and Kei Oyama’s Consultation Room (which appears on Image Forum’s Thinking and Drawing DVD).

The films Gentle Whistle, Bird and Stone and Oyama’s Hand Soap (2008) made quite the impression on the audience because they deal so directly with bullying and abuse. Oyama’s technique of using photographs/scans of organic textures can evoke physical sensations in spectators and one audience member in particular seemed to have been quite upset by the emotions the film stirred in him.

Wada’s latest film, Mechanism of Spring (2010) was received warmly with audience members laughing out loud at the antics of the young boys. Whereas many of Wada’s works evoke sensations of control, this film has a much freer, unrestrained dynamic to it. The audience also responded very warmly to Mizue’s works and marvelled at the intricacy and complexity of Tatamp (2010) and Playground (2010). One of the audience members asked Mizue if synaesthesia played a role in his matching of colour with music, but Mizue seems much more interested in matching animated movement to tempo. With each new film he challenges himself to use more complex movements and to experiment with layering the images in innovative ways.

Installation view through peephole of Tochka's Steps

Tochka’s latest film Steps (2011) was one of the highlights of the festival for me. I am an unashamed fan of Norman McLaren and the stop motion animation and pixilation in this film were inspired by McLaren and Claude Jutra’s A Chairy Tale (1957). A small PiKA PiKA figure arranges and rearranges tiles in a step formation on a checkerboard floor for a pixillated human figure to climb. A delightful modern use of stop motion animation.   It had apparently originally been conceived as an installation in which people had to view it view peepholes.

Takeshi Nagata of Tochka also showed me some 30 second stop motion animated shorts that he and Kazue Monno did for MTV many years ago. It is a shame that MTV did not allow CALF to put these on their DVD because they are fantastic.

I both observed and participated in the Tochka workshop last weekend. It was a lot of fun and I will write about the event when the resulting PiKA PiKA short is edited and available online.

The Austrian documentary filmmaker Stefan Nutz attended all of the events in order to shoot footage for his film about independent animation in Japan. He unfortunately had to cancel his trip to Japan in April because of the earthquake and tsunami but he has already gathered a lot of terrific material and it promises to be a very engaging film.

Thank you to everyone who came out and supported the CALF events at Nippon Connection. It was a great success and I think our guests from Japan were very satisfied with the response. CALF DVDs can be ordered via their online shop.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Nippon Connection 2011

One Big Hapa Family (ワン・ビッグ・ハッパ・ファミリー, 2010)

Kunal Sen's animation of Uncle Suey's childhood memories.

At the 2006 reunion of the Koga side of his family, Yonsei Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns noticed for the first time that after his grandparents’ generation, not a single member of the Japanese side of his family had married another person of Japanese ethnicity. He did a bit of research and discovered that the Japanese in Canada are the most integrated of any other Asian community in the country. One Big Hapa Family documents his journey into his family’s history, and by extension the history of the Japanese in British Columbia, to find out why Japanese Canadians have such a high mixed marriage rate.

In so doing, Stearns has brought together two very Canadian cinematic traditions: documentary film and animation. He collected interviews with all members of his family, local historians, and other intermarried couples in order to get a broad perspective on the issue of ethnicity and marriage in Canadian culture. The material that he collected was then loosely structured like the layers of an onion: first the story of the elders (the Issei and Nisei generations in his family), followed by the story of his parents’ generation, his own generation, and even the newest members of the family, with his own personal journey being the core of the documentary.

Jeff Chiba Stearns with Grandpa Koga

The resulting film is a compelling mixture of archival photos and film footage, family photos and home movies, interviews and animation. The animated sequences are colourful, visually engaging, and demonstrate a variety of animation techniques. Stearns himself does some chalkboard, ink on paper, and stop motion sequences – not to mention the Yellow Sticky Note animation style for which he is known. Additional animation was done by Ben Meinhardt, Louise Johnson, Kunal Sen, Todd Ramsey, Jonathan Ng, and Sean Sherwin. Some sequences that really stood out for me were Louise Johnson’s beautiful paint-on-glass animation for Roy’s internment train story, Todd Ramsey’s imagining of the angry Kelowna mob, and Kunal Sen’s animation of Uncle Suey’s racism stories from his childhood. 

The way in which Sen animates Uncle Suey’s experiences at the Okanagan Mission School is brilliantly done. First, seeing the teacher’s fountain pen shortening the boy’s name “Suemori” to “Sue,” without regard for the fact that she is saddling the boy with a girl’s name is visually impactful.  Then, when Uncle Suey recites  the words from a racist children’s rhyme that he learned at the school, the words lift up off the page so that they circle the image of young Suey reading aloud (see top image). In this sequence Sen has captured the way in which these words have haunted Uncle Suey his whole life, circling round and round the image of him as a young boy, just as they must have done in his head all these years. A very moving scene that only animation could capture in this way.

In addition to the animation, Stearns has employed a number of other visual techniques that give the film a unique look. There is an objective documentary camera that shoots interviews and Stearns himself in a fairly standard fashion, but this is alternated with a subjective camera which Stearns shoots himself. This footage was captured using a Canon 40D Digital SLR camera for taking rapid fire photo sequences. The sequences that were shot in this fashion take on a jerky, ‘animated’ look that reminded me of Grant Munro and Norman McLaren’s pixilation technique (see Oscar-winning NFB film: Neighbours/Voisins, 1952). It also matches well with the rapid montages of family photographs.

Yellow Sticky Note animation sequence

The sequence in One Big Hapa Family which featured footage from Stearns’ 2005 trip contrasts the differences between Japanese and Canadian conceptions of national identity. In Japan, Stearns found his “Japaneseness” being rejected by most people that he encountered. His appearance and body language did not fit their mould of what it means to be “Japanese”.  In my experience, the Japanese rarely openly question their own sense of national identity because their school system hammers into them the myth of a monoethnic culture – a myth that has been wonderfully negated in books like John Lie’s Multiethnic Japan (Harvard UP, 2001), and David Suzuki and Keibo Oiwa’s The Japan We Never Knew: A Journey of Discovery (Stoddart, 1996). By contrast, in Canada we are taught that identity is a multifaceted entity that is individually rather collectively defined as almost all of us are either mixed ethnicities (or “hapa” - a Hawaiian loan word Stearns explores the use of in this film) or recent immigrants. 

The concept of Japanese-Canadian identity gets refracted into a multiplicity of meanings by Jeff Chiba Stearns’s family when he confronts the younger generation with his camera and asks them the uncomfortable question “What are you?”  For a first time documentarian, he demonstrates a real knack for editing – there are wonderful montages of past and present home movies and photographs that demonstrate both change and continuity within the family. The film also offers up wonderful moments where the memories of one generation differ from those of another generation. The couples of the Sansei generation assert that there were no problems within the family with intermarriage, but that is contradicted by Grandma Stearns who reveals that she and Grandma Chiba did have concerns, but did not tell the younger folks about it. The Yonsei generation also reveals that Japanese food was only eaten for New Year’s or when their father was away because their Caucasian Dad did not like sushi. These tantalizing gems suggest that there are many more stories simmering beneath the surface, but I think that Stearns has managed to balance the needs of his documentary with respect for the privacy of his family quite handily.

One Big Hapa Family is a unique film that captures both serious issues of racism and integration, while at the same time providing a lot of laughs through the wonderful family stories that are shared. It is fascinating to see that after two generations of a concerted effort to integrate, the younger generations are making an effort to retain/reclaim some of their Japanese culture and language. While the main focus may be on Japanese-Canadian identity, it is through the mirror of the Koga family that viewers will see the complexity of their own family and national histories in a new light.

One Big Hapa Family is available for international purchase on Region-Free DVD via the Official Website. It includes both the 85’ Director’s Cut and the 48’ Broadcast version. Bonus materials: One Big Hapa Family CD featuring the soundtrack by Genevieve Vincent.

Jeff Chiba Stearns Filmography
(click on links to watch the films/trailers)

2000 Kip and Kyle

2001 The Horror of Kindergarten

2005 What Are You Anyways?

2007 Yellow Sticky Notes

2010 One Big Hapa Family

2010 Ode to a Post-It Note

To learn more about the film check out:

A talk by Jeff Chiba Stearns after the premiere in Calgary

and

An Interview with Jeff Chiba Stearns

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Tochka Works 2001-2010

The collaborative art team Tochka (トーチカ) has had a distinctive online presence for many years now.  Their creative method of animating with light has inspired many artists around the world to make their own lightning doodles from Lichtfaktor here in Germany to the artists behind the 2007 Sprint commercial. Tochka’s short videos have been shared extensively on the internet, but CALF’s second volume in their DVD series Japanese Independent Animators gives fans a sense of the history of the PiKA PiKA Lightning Doodle movement.  Like Maya Yonesho's Daumenreise and Rinpa Eishidan's videos, Tochka's PiKA PiKA  films belong to the tradition of collaborative art.

Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno, the creative duo that make up Tochka – came up with their lightning doodle animation method in 2005 and christened it PiKA PiKA. The Japanese language is replete with evocative onomatopoeias – words whose sound suggests their meaning  – like "buzz buzz" or "drip drop" in English.  “Pika pika” (ピカピカ), as any fan of Pikachu from Pokemon can tell you, is associated with lightning or flashes of light.

The seemingly magical images of people drawing with coloured lights is actually fairly easy for the amateur animator to achieve. In fact, Tochka came up with the method as a way of teaching the principles of stop motion animation to a workshop that ranged in ages from 3 to 60. As the accompanying booklet explains, one only needs a camera with long exposure capabilities, a flashlight, and a nice black background. While the shutter is open, the “animators” draw shapes repetitively in the air with their flashlights. When the images are played back consecutively at normal speed, the light animation comes to life.

The use of drawing with light in photography is believed to have originated with the avant-garde artist Man Ray in 1935 when he used his pen light to create the self portrait Space Writings (check out the interactive material accessing this work at The Smithsonian). Another famous practitioner of light animation in photography was Pablo Picasso, as you can see in his collaborative photographs with Gjon Mili (examples here and here).

Tochka has taken the artistic concept of photographing points of light at a low shutter speed and married it to contemporary technologies and to their political beliefs in the democratization of art and the use of art to bring people of all walks of life together in a harmonious activity. Their films are not only animations, but also a documentation of their travels around the world where they collaborate with school children, artists at festivals, and even just people they meet while walking the streets of neighbourhoods from Indonesia to Canada. They also use music by local artists on the soundtracks which adds to each film’s flavour as a document of a particular place and time.  This interactivity between filmmakers, musicians, participants, and viewers is truly unique.

Their marriage of their light doodles with music reminded me of Norman McLaren’s imaginative film Boogie-Doodle (1941). A further reminder of McLaren came while I was viewing the “Jumping” section of their PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008) video. McLaren’s Oscar-winning film Neighbours (1952) used an animation technique which Grant Munro coined pixilation where people are essentially transformed into stop motion puppets. The Jumping sequence in PiKA PiKA in Yamagata takes the Jumping sequence from Neighbours and multiplies it by more than a dozen as you can see in these screencaps:

McLaren's Neighbours (1952)

PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008)

Tochka’s PiKA PiKA films are fun to watch and look as though they were fun to make by the participants. It’s like an animated form of mural-painting or graffiti art.  This was suggested to me by their compilation film PiKA PiKA (2007) which has scenes where both graffiti and lightning doodles are being created simultaneously.

The behind-the-scenes footage of their shoots in the Osaka neighbourhood of Naniwa-ku earlier this year demonstrates how PiKA PiKA can be used in a positive way to document the people and places of a neighbourhood. While in their early films the faces of the “animators” with the lights were obscured, in this footage they light the faces of the local people they encounter during the night shoots while they frame them with lightning doodles. This documentary footage is particularly magical for the way that it shows the transformation of the participants from portrait subjects to active participants. The delight on their faces to see the results of the animation process played back to them from a laptop is truly a joy to behold.

Another element of Tochka’s work that I enjoy is their foregrounding of the process of animation and the tools they use to achieve it. This seems to belong to their desire to share art, rather than simply being privileged practitioners of it. The opening sequences of their films often document the people and the process they used to make the film. For example, The Lovely Memories (2009) is a documentary of an artistic workshop, an animation, and a loving tribute to Lomography cameras (famed for their colourful, soft focus images) all rolled into one (read an interview with Tochka about shooting with the Diana F+ and Instant Back).

This DVD is by no means a complete works of Tochka who have done a wide range of stop motion films over the years for both commercial and artistic purposes. The DVD’s main focus is the PiKA PiKA output since 2005. However, in the special features section of the DVD they do include one of their early stop motion animations Build (2001) which screened on a massive wall in Kobe to commemorate the earthquake – it is a disturbing and fascinating film which playfully references early computer games like Pong and Tetris. 

Other extras include a slideshow of 100 PiKA PiKA stills and a behind-the-scenes featurette of a PiKA PiKA workshop at Suito Osaka (2009,. There is also a short snippet shot for Design Tide (2007), a long edit of PiKA PiKA in Indonesia (2008), and the trailer for PiKA PiKA in Kanazawa (2008). 

Tochka Works 2001-2010 can be purchased online at CALF. The shop is currently Japanese only but an English version is in the works. Alternatively, try contacting them via e-mail or Facebook. The DVD is bilingual Japanese – English.  To learn more about Tochka, visit their homepage.

UPDATE 13 October 2010: CALF's English language webshop is now up and running!

DVD now available in France from HEEZA

Related Posts:

 Mirai Mize Works 2003-2010

Atsushi Wada’s Day of Nose

Kei Oyama’s Hand Soap

Maya Yonesho Profile
Rinpa Eshidan

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Japanese Oscar Winners 4: Best Animated Short

It was a big coup for Kunio Katō (加藤久仁生, b. 1977) last year when he won the Oscar for best animated short. Although La maison en petits cubes (Tsumiki no ie, 2008) had won high praise at festivals around the world including the prestigious Annecy Cristal, it is highly unlikely that Katō anticipated becoming the first Japanese animator to win an Oscar for a short film. With only a handful of nominees out of an international selection of innovative works, the competition is so tough that Katō was the first Japanese animator to ever win in this category. 

 Atama Yama (Koji Yamamura, 2002)

Six years earlier, Kōji Yamamura (山村 浩二, b. 1964) came close with his remarkable film Mt. Head (Atama Yama / 頭山, 2002). Unlike Katō, who is still in the early stages of his career, Yamamura is at the peak of his career. Having spent the 1990s honing his multi-layered animation style, the past decade has seen Yamamura producing one acclaimed work after another, each of them winning animation festivals around the world. Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor (Kafuka Inaka Isha / カフカ田舎医者, 2007) was his most brilliant work to date, but it didn’t even garner an Oscar nomination.  Technically Yamamura's films are brilliant, but his storytelling style may be too abstract and cerebral for the Academy who traditionally like crowd-pleasing fare.

I’m not sure how animated shorts have historically been eligible for nomination, but in recent years a film must first win an award at a qualifying festival to be considered by the Academy. Judging by previous nominees and winners, it is certainly a very prestigious category to find oneself in.  The Best Animated Short category was inaugurated at the 5th Academy Awards in 1932 - in contrast to the Animated Feature category which only began in 2001. In the 1930s, animated shorts were much more common that feature length films. They played before the big name Hollywood features along with newsreels and other shorts. The early years of this award are dominated by Walt Disney (who won 12 times), with Universal, MGM, and other studios occasionally slipping a nomination in. In those days, it was the production studio and not the individual artist who got the award. In the 1940s and 1950s, Warner Brothers and UPA began showing up in the nominations as often as Disney. In the 1960s, foreign films began to make their way into the nominations. Interestingly, Canada’s top animator of the century, Norman McLaren, won his first two Oscars in the Best Short Subject rather than the Animation Category – I guess pixilation was considered too avant-garde to be animation in those days (in fact, the category was called Short Subjects: Cartoons up until 1973). By the 1970s, and continuing up until the present, the category no longer represented mainstream animation but cutting edge works from around the world.

 The Magic Pear Tree (Jimmy Murakami, 1968)

Before Yamamura, only two semi-Japanese projects were nominated in this category. The first was nisei Teruaki “Jimmy” Murakami (b. 1933), the Japanese-American animator from California. Murakami, who has an animated documentary about his life called Jimmy Murakami, Non Alien making the rounds at the documentary festivals this year, was interned at the age of 8 with his family during the Second World War. He is best known for his adaptations of Raymond Brigg’s books The Snowman (1982) and When the Wind Blows (1986). Murakami was nominated for his only Oscar in 1968 for The Magic Pear Tree.

 The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, 1999)

A Japanese producer also had a hand in the making of Aleksandr Petrov’s The Old Man and the Sea (老人と海, 1999), which not only won an Oscar but also won the Grand Prix at festivals around the world . It is the only animated film with a non-Japanese director to win the Noburō Ōfuji Award at the Mainichi Film Concours. This international (Canada/Russia/Japan) co-production was co-produced by Tatsuo Shimamura. Shimamura (島村達雄, b. 1934) also co-produced with Kihachirō Kawamoto the animation omnibus Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi/ 冬の日, 2003). He also has an illustrious career as an animator in his own right founding his own studio (Shirogumi) in 1974.

This year’s nominees for best animated short represent France, Ireland, the UK, and Spain. In terms of animation technique, I find the selection heavy on computer animation (apart from the Wallace & Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death).  As my regular readers will know, I don't mind the use of computers in animation, but I prefer a good handmade film. In terms of innovations in plot and storytelling technique, the films get high points for creativity and sense of humour. La dama y la muerte (The Lady and the Reaper, Javier Recio Gracia) gives a humorous take on the battle between death and modern medical science. The prize for pure chutzpah goes to Logorama (Nicolas Schmerkin) – I am sure it is only a matter of time before some of the big corporate logos sent up in this short go after the French animators (starting with Mickey D’s). My personal favourite of the bunch is Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (Nicky Phelan and Darragh O’Connell) because I love feminist retellings of fairy tales.

The artists featured in this piece need your support.  Jimmy Murakami has a DVD out of his films. The Old Man and the Sea is available on DVD in Japan and in the States, Canada, & France. The following films can be purchased via cdjapan:

pieces of love Vol.1 Tsumiki no Ie (La Maison en Petits Cubes)

Animation

Atamayama - Koji yamamura Sakuhinshu

Animation

"Toshi wo Totta Wani" & Koji Yamamura Select Animation

Animation

Digista Vol. VII

Collections of short animation at film festivals are usually hit or miss affairs. This is particularly true when the assembled films are all by students or first time animators. Not so in the case of Digista, which is sponsored by the NHK. The assembled shorts which screened at Nippon Connection on Friday were all of a very high quality.

Digista is an abbreviation of ‘Digital Stadium’. The name of the program is slightly misleading because the films are not necessarily produced digitially. Rather the forum for screening (television) is digital. The films actually represent a wide range of animation styles including watercolour, cel, puppet, pixilation, and CG.

Speaking to producer Hiroko Namba of Directions (producers of Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s Time of Eve, among other projects), at the festival I learned about the process by which the Digista films are chosen. First a ‘curator’ is selected. The curators are already established artists. First time animators are then invited to send their work in to the curator for consideration. The curator then selects the best work for screening. The Digista films are screened on Saturday night at midnight on BS2 and repeated Monday night at 1am and Friday at 11pm on BShi. They can also be screened on the NHK website and on Youtube.

The Digista program has an excellent track record for discovering new talent. Previous animators featured on the program include Richiro Mashima, who has had viral video success on the internet with his film Ski Jumping Pairs (2002) and this year’s Oscar winner Kunio Kato whose film Around appeared on the program.

Digista Vol. VII represents the best of last year’s Digista shorts. Hiroko Namba was very interested in collecting feedback from the audience that she could take back to the animators. This included polling the audience about their favourites. I learned from her after the screenings that the curators had selected a ‘best of the best’ for a special prize. The winner was Masanori Okamoto (岡本 将徳) for his film Mending a Puncture (パンク直し).

Mending a Puncture is a very interesting film for its turning of a mundane event, the repair of a bicycle tire, into something extraordinary. Apparently he spent a month observing workers in a bicycle repair shop so that he could get the detail just right. The result is a technically brilliant animation.

My personal favourite film was Taijin Takeuchi (竹内 泰人)’s The Wolf Loves Pork (オオカミはブタを食べようと思った). It is a very complicated stop motion animation that involved animated photographs inside a room. The photos feature a boy in a wolf costume and a model of a pig. The photos themselves depict a scene shot outside, but the photos themselves occupy and interior location (an average apartment). As the photos multiply, a scenario is animated in which the wolf boy chasing the pig. Takeuchi has done a remarkable job in matching exterior shots to the interior shots. For example, the pig is shown in the photos to be escaping down a flight of stairs, while in the interior space he is descending from the table to the floor (see image above) . Another great match is when the photographs reach the kitchen sink. The wolf boy in the photos swims across a pool, while the ‘photo’ of him floats across the water in the sink. It really is a film that defies description and must be seen to be believed. An exceptionally creative animation.

Another animator who impressed me with his innovation was Sho Yamaguchi (山口 翔) whose film Trip takes us on the self-reflexive journey on an artist whose sketches transform from line drawings into 3D-CG figures around the city. The film cleverly combines elements of cel animation, pixilation and computer animation with a great storyline to boot. The most memorable for me was the 3D-CG whale floating over the city street.

Other great films included two by Hiroco [sic.] Ichinose (一瀬 皓コ) who does humorous animations which reminded me of the films of Koji Yuri and Taku Furukawa. Tomoyoshi Joko (上甲 トモヨシ)’s film Buildings was also very amusing. K oshi Shimada (嶋田 晃士) and Shunsuke Saito (斎藤 俊介) had some impressive surrealistic works. Sonoko Yamada (山田 園子)’s film Wash used watercolour paintings washed out by sponges in a mesmerizing way. Yumika Koide (小出 悠美香)’s puppet animation Give and Take (持ちつ持たれつ) was also excellently done and reminded me of the early films of Tomoyasu Murata (who apparently is also a curator this year).

I am going to have to watch Shuichi Nishikoji (西小路 修一)’s film Sho-chan’s Summer (しょーちゃんの夏休み) again, because I was distracted by it’s lack of a soundtrack and did not fully appreciate the film. Hiroko Namba informed me that this was artist’s intention, but as there are often technical snafus at Nippon Connection I didn’t realise this until the film ended. Namba also told me that Nishikoji made this, his first animation, at the age of 65. He has had a career as an illustrator, which would explain the high quality of the cel animation.

All of these films and more are available for viewing on the NHK's website here, so check them out!

Films Screened at Nippon Connection:

ha・P ( 4’05, Hiroco ICHINOSE)
BUILDINGS (5’44, Tomoyoshi JOKO)
TONARINOKUNI (5’07, Natsuki TAKEMURA)
KAIGA NO KISEKI (4’20, Koshi SHIMADA)
SHO-CHAN'S SUMMER (2’54, Shuichi NISHIKOJI)
WASH (2’30, Sonoko YAMADA)
MENDING A PUNCTURE (3’40, Masanori OKAMOTO)
A WOLF LOVES PORK (4’20, Taijin TAKEUCHI)
MOCHITSU MOTARETSU (6’08, Yumika KOIDE)
USHI-NICHI (9’09, Hiroco ICHINOSE)
KARERAHA (6’47, Kiminori ITO)
TRIP (2’34, Sho YAMAGUCHI)
CRAZY CLAY WRESTLING (6’21, Takena NAGAO)
YUME (2’26, Shunsuke SAITO)
EXISTENCE METAPHOR (3’21, Mayuko KANAZAWA)
KASUTERA BOUSHI (1’29, Yuka KAMBAYASHI)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Rinpa Eshidan

Collaborative art has a long history in Japan. Woodblock artists like Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro have garnered international acclaim as individual artists, but their art actually involved a team that included an artisan block carver, a printer and a publisher. Similarly, film directors like Hayao Miyazaki tend to get all the credit in the press, but I’m sure Miyazaki would be the first to tell you that his films would not be as successful as they are without the team of animators working behind the scenes at Studio Ghibli.

Rinpa Eshidan is an exciting team of artists who, according to their website, were brought together by common interest in creative expression. Rinpa (輪派) is a term they have created from 輪 meaning wheel or ring　and 派 meaning group. On their website they define rinpa as meaning “to bring people together”, while eshidan (絵師団) means an art team. The term rinpa may also be a reference to the rinpa (aka rimpa; same pronounciation, different kanji: 琳派), the school of decorative painting founded in the seventeenth century by the artists Honami Koetsu and Tawaraya Sotatasu and brought to further prominence half a century later by Ogata Korin and Kenzan.

For me, this reference to rinpa (琳派) suggests that the members of Rinpa Eshidan wish to emulate the way in which these early artists staged a revival of a certain style of traditional Japanese art. Some of the art that they have featured in their online gallery such as 松波 (possibly pronounced matsuba or ‘pine wave’) does have some resemblance to a traditional rinpa (琳派) aesthetic.

Rinpa Eshidan was formed in November 2005 by Noiz-Davi (the nom de plume of Yoshiaki Kusunoki) and Daisuke Yamamoto. The team of artists work together on video projects that document the process of artistic creation. They believe that the creative process is “where art come to life” and they want to use their videos to engage the spectator in that process. They post their videos online rather than display them in galleries in an act that democratizes art. They cleverly brought attention to themselves online with their video ようこそ、Youtube Japan へ　(Welcome, to Youtube Japan) which was featured on the Youtube Japan homepage and is quickly approaching the three million views mark after only being online for eight months.

Several English bloggers have referred to Rinpa Eshidan’s videos as examples of time-lapse photography, which is not accurate. In time-lapse photography, each film frame is captured at a rate much slower than normal playing speed. To my eye, what Rinpa Eshidan have actually done is either shoot frame-by-frame or to remove frames from a video-taped painting session. This results in examples of stop motion animation and pixillation. Stop motion, such as when the clay becomes animated and changes form, consists of individually shot frames that together give the impression of movement. Pixillation, an animation technique pioneered and named by my all-time favourite animator Norman McLaren, also involves shooting one frame at a time objects or characters (people) whose movement is entirely controlled by the filmmaker. Rinpa Eshidan do not use these animation techniques ‘purely’ – I have a feeling that they shoot at regular speed, then choose certain frames to use rather than shooting frame by frame – but the resulting films certainly do foreground process over product.

Some discussion online has also referred to them as street artists, but from their website I had the impression that they also do display their art in more traditional gallery spaces. I think what is exciting about Rinpa Eshidan is that they are clearly interested in creating a bridge between traditional art forms (painting, sculpture, pottery, animation, rimpa, Nihonga), avant-garde art (expressionism, street art) and contemporary modes of representation (music video, online video).

For more information about Rinpa Eshidan check out their homepage and their Youtube Channel.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Nihonga 5: Kosemura Mami

Of all the Nihonga artists represented at the Yokohama exhibition, I found the work of Kosemura Mami (小瀬村真美) the most fascinating. I have not seen very many film installations before, so perhaps I will sound naïve when I describe how spellbinding I found Kosemura’s moving paintings. Each moving painting was inspired by a traditional painting. I haven’t had a chance to muddle my way through the interview with the artist to see if it describes her techniques, but it looked as though she filmed both real objects and painting objects, sometimes in real time, sometimes it looked as though the images had been composed frame by frame. Each moving painting is a DVD of varying length (5 to 23 minutes) being played on endless repeat.

The first moving painting one encounters is one of the series Flowering Plants of the Four Seasons (shown above). I believe that the first one represented spring (I’m not sure where summer was lurking, but I never found it). It consisted of a large canvas onto which two side-by-side overlapping DVD images were being projected together. The back side of the canvas had the autumn version of the same scene. From a distance, it looks like an illuminated painting of a pond scene complete with a realistic soundtrack of pond sounds (breeze, water, insects). The movements within the scene are subtle: the breeze gently ruffling leaves and causing reads to bob up and down. It is only when one looks closely at the scene can one see the digital artefacts of the medium. The winter scene was even more sparing with a pair of bamboo trees and a flowering plant set against a concrete wall as snow softly falls and coats the plants.

It was truly magical to watch these scenes evolve in subtle ways and it has left me pondering the relationship between a still painting and spectator and how it too evolves over time. Here is what the artist herself has to say about her own thought processes:

What interested me most about the folding screen paintings or wall paintings that were the basis for Flowering Plants of the Four Seasons was the fact that there is no boundary between painting a real object while looking at it and copying an image that has already been painted. Both types of sketching are related to the act of observing everyday reality.

A flower changes slightly and is given a new form as it moves lightly from one picture to another.

I feel a similar sensation in the gradual changes in vision that occur when editing my woks. How much can the form of the flower vary and still be identified with the real object? At what point should it be seen as an artificial creation?

Even if the flower takes on a strange form removed from its everyday condition through a gradual process of editing, our awareness is quickly brought back to everyday reality when it begins to move before our eyes

The two paintings could be enjoyed while sitting on a raised tatami mat the artist had provided for her spectators (as in the photo at the very top -- but it is from an earlier exhibitionby the same artist). In Priming Water, instead of projecting onto a blank screen was replaced by an old wooden Japanese sliding door. I’m not sure if it is what is known as a shoji door or if it has another name, as only the top half of the door had the square pattern with the rice paper. The bottom half of the door was a long rectangle of rice paper onto which an image of pond water was projected from behind the screen. In the pond water, one could see carp surfacing. Their movements were very realistic, as were the sound effects. The image, however looked painted, and I suspect that Kosemura may have painted the scene frame by frame in order to animate it.

The other painting that could be viewed from the tatami was inspired by Hashiguchi Goyo’s woodblock print Woman with Kimono Undergarment (1920). This moving painting, titled simply Woman in the Mirror, was either projected from behind the wall or involves a modified flat screen tv. The image was projected onto a tall Japanese mirror with a wooden frame that attached to a very low make-up cabinet. It had clearly been designed so a Japanese woman could do her hair and make-up while seated on the floor and then could stand and see her full profile in the mirror. The scene was of a traditional Japanese room with tatami, shot at a canted angle that recreated what one would see in a mirror reflection of one’s room. For this moving painting, Kosemura had dressed a model in a kimono with the same colour (red and white) as in the Hashiguchi painting. The woman was not looking at herself directly in the mirror but the spectator would catch fleeting glimpses of her as she passed partially into the frame and out again. We never see her face but do see her adjust her kimono. The image was slightly jerky and gave me the impression that it might have been done using the technique of pixilation, an innovation made famous by Norman McLaren in his animation Neigbours (NFB, 1952) though it had already been invented back in the early days of filmmaking. This technique involves actors being filmed frame-by-frame instead of in real time, turning the actor into a kind of stop-motion puppet.

Kosemura’s last moving painting, Comb, uses the same technique. Inspired by Hashiguchi’s woodblock print Woman Combing her Hair (1920). Again, Kosemura uses a model dressed in a similarly coloured kimono (this time a blue pattern) and again the model’s face is obscured as we watch her slowly brushing her hair. Again, this moving image has a painterly quality to it. These last two paintings have had me thinking about the male artist as voyeur, a term more commonly used when speaking about photography than traditional Japanese art. Kosemura’s work changed the way I looked at the Hashiguchi paintings and I wondered about his relationship to these two women he has captured in such an intimate and personal space.

I spent the most time in this room, as Kosemura has reignited my interest in the relationship between art, time, and space. The beautifully rendered moving paintings capture the poetry found in the minutiae of daily life. As in an Ozu film, even the briefest of gestures denotes volumes of meaning, if only we take the time to look and appreciate its worth.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006