Takenaka & Marlene Dietrich

I saw an exhibition this week at the Yayoi Art Museum of the work of Eitaro Takanaka (竹中英太郎, 1906-1988). The Yayoi Museum specializes in magazine illustrations - particular pre-war illustrations. I have seen amazing exhibitions there of art from children's magazines of the 1920s and 1930s where you could see the influence of style on animation that developed after the war.

Takanaka specialized in illustrations for thrillers, horror, and detective stories. In the 1960s and 1970s, he did some amazing, vibrantly coloured surreal paintings. He also did a series of paintings inspired by Marlene Dietrich, such as the one above. The poster below advertises a performance by Dietrich in Tokyo in 1974 (昭和49). I love the placement of the moth (detail follows at bottom). It says so much about Dietrich as a sensual, transformative creature. I would love to have it as a poster to frame on the wall! She would have been in her seventies, but Takanaka clearly sees her as still being at the peak of her powers of seduction.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006

Mt. Head (頭山, 2002)

I was introduced to the animation of Koji Yamamura (山村浩二） by one of my students. His unique style has become famous through the many animations he has done for children. This film, Atama Yama (Mt. Head), is his first for adults and it was so successful on the international festival scene that it was nominated for an Academy Award.

The film is based on a rakugo (落語：a traditional form of comic storytelling) story and is narrated by Takeharu Kunimoto (国本武春), a musician and storyteller who is famous for pairing the shamisen with American bluegrass music. He also accompanies Atama Yama on shamisen. The story that unfolds is surreal in nature, but the animation renders it quite riveting. A stingy man living in a hovel of an apartment in Tokyo scavenges some cherries he finds lying on the ground. As he eats the cherries, he mutters to himself that it would be a waste to throw the pits away so he eats them as well. Soon, a cherry tree begins to grow from his unusually bulbous head. At first, he clips it away and saves the tiny green sprouts in a jar, but after a while, he can’t be bothered anymore and allows the cherry tree to grow. The story then descends into an even more surreal world as people gather on his head to celebrate hanami under the cherry blossoms. The people annoy him so much that he uproots the tree and throws it away, but the hole that remains fills with water on a rainy day and turns into a pond and people come again to swim in it. The ending is rather unusual and sudden, but I’ll let you find out for yourselves.

My student informed me that Yamamura has cited the influence of Estonian animator Pritt Pärn, Russian animator Yuri Norstein, Dutch-Canadian Co Hoedeman and my all-time favourite animator, Scottish-Canadian Norman McLaren. Personally, I was reminded of Terry Gilliam’s animation in Monty Python – perhaps because he often had things coming out of the heads of his animated figures.

The influence in Norstein is noticeable in the layering of images in Atama Yama. Norshtein uses multiple glass panes to give his images a three dimensional look. Unlike Norstein, however, Yamamura does use computers for the assembly of his films – possibly including the beautiful layered look – but it is clear that he mixes hand-drawn images with CGI. This allowed Yamamura to use the movement of the camera in interesting ways. The quality of light in Atama Yama was particularly stunning. In the opening scene in particular, the layering images combined with the use of light gives the impression that real sunshine is washing into the image.

Perhaps most impressive for me was the use of a point-of-view camera as the man eats the cherries. We hear the sounds of him chewing and see the plate of cherries through his eyes. When he reaches out his hand to take some more, and while he is chewing, the camera bobs up and down just as the head of the protagonist would. A brilliant sequence that had me feeling queasy at the man’s baseness.

I found myself chuckling at many points throughout the film – especially at the Japanese stereotypes that the story and animation poke gentle fun at – “Spring has come and the cherry blossoms are in bloom… the salarymen are also in bloom…. the office girls are also in bloom!” recites the narrator in that wonderful sing-song fashion of rakugo accompanied by the hilarious animation of the event by Yamamura.

Update 2020: you can watch the film online here. 

Update 2023: behind the scenes footage here.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006

Nana (ナナ, NTV, episode 1, 2006)

序章・奈々とナナ Prologue: Nana and Nana

When I was a kid in the mid-eighties, my friends and I loved watching Jem and the Holograms on TV. My sisters and I bought the ‘Barbie’ dolls of the main protagonists, which came with cassette tapes of music from the animated series, and sang along and pretended that we were the Holograms or the Misfits (Roxy, Stormer and Pizzazz were much more exciting than the Holograms, whose names I don’t even remember anymore). Nana, the NTV anime based on the manga by Ai Yazawa (矢沢あい) appeals to the latent Jem fan in me. The anime debuted in the spring, but I have only just started watching it. I have been reading the first manga in the series (I think Yazawa-san is up to book 16 or 17 already… it started back in 2002) at a snail’s pace since the summer as a way to improve my Japanese.

Marketing for the live action movie of the same name, Nana (Kentaro Otani 大谷健太郎, 2005) and the accompanying pop songs have been everywhere this past year and I have been fascinated by the depiction of the two main protagonists in the advertisements – two young women who meet on the train for Tokyo who discover that they have the same given name, Nana (though written differently), and are the same age, 20. When I saw the DVD of the debut episode for sale at our local convenience store for 707 yen (‘nana’ can also mean 7 in Japanese and the girls end up sharing apt. 707 on the 7th floor of an old Western-style building) I bought it on a whim and can now officially proclaim myself hooked by the series.

Like Jem, the storyline of Nana has two competing bands Black Stones (BLAST ブラストis their nickname) and Trapnest (or Toranesuトラネス). Unlike Jem, this is not a simple battle of the bands story. Nor is it a story about a conflict between the two Nanas. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find a complex coming of age tale about two young women who go to Tokyo with very different ambitions and learn a great deal about themselves and each other through the ups and downs of their love lives and careers. Episode 1 seems to have been designed as a teaser episode that starts at the point when the two Nanas meet for the first time and decide to live together. Episode 2 (which I also plan to review) takes us back to where the manga begins and gives us a bit of backstory on both of the young women.

Nana Komatsu (小松奈々) is the kawaii shoujo, the stereotypically super-cute girl with big round eyes and a round face who is the typical protagonist of shoujo manga. Shoujo (少女) means ‘girl’ in Japanese but the term is also used in English to refer to this genre of manga as a whole or also to a certain type of female protagonist. This Nana has her hair dyed a lighter shade (it often looks blonde in the anime), dresses stylishly but conservatively, talks in a high-pitched voice and is very eager to please. Early on in the girls’ relationship Nana Osaki observes that Nana Komatsu is very much like a puppy dog: eager to please but needs a lot of attention. She gives her the nickname Hachiko (ハチ公) after the famously faithful dog whose statue at Shibuya station is a popular meeting place. Her friends also abbreviate the nickname to ‘Hachi’ which means 8 in Japanese.

Nana Osaki (大崎ナナ) is the kakkoii shoujo (かっこいい少女) or super-cool girl. Episode 1 shows Hachi to be in awe of Nana and emphasizes their differences (their similarities in terms of goals, insecurities, etc. will reveal themselves in later episodes). Where Hachi is talkative, Nana is quiet. Hachi wears pinks and pastels while Nana wears black. Hachi wears a modest amount of jewellery while Nana sports lots of rings, several piercings and even a tattoo (very uncommon in Japan as tattoos are associated with the yakuza – many public baths have signs out front saying that people with tattoos are not admitted) of a lotus (we find out its meaning later). Much to the envy of Nana, Hachi comes from a warm-hearted, small-town family and has two sisters. In contrast, Nana never met her father and her mother abandoned her to be raised by her grandmother when she was only four. Since her grandmother passed away, she has had to support herself.

The biggest contrast is their reasons for coming to Tokyo. Hachi is coming to follow her boyfriend and other friends there and seems to have no ambitions for herself other than romantic and domestic bliss -- as testified by the fact that she spends her first day in Tokyo cleaning Shoji’s apartment and making him dinner instead of going sight-seeing or looking for a job. Nana is coming to Tokyo to try to prove herself as a punk rock singer by making it big in the music industry and her love life remains a mystery in this episode. The girls have been brought together by fate, but they also seem to be drawn to each other by a kind of mutual attraction. The anime really emphasizes this through the romance of the setting – I know there is a theme of the number 7 but there is no way an apartment that “広い” (spacious) could be had in the Tokyo area for only 7万 (less than $700 CAD / €500 a month)!!! Even if it is an old building (Hachi says that it was built before she was born, which is really old to young Japanese people) without an elevator.

I must admit to being seduced by the hyper-romance of anime though – the softly falling snow, the idealized mise-en-scene such as the washed-out look of their apartment with it's backlit window, and so on. The attention to detail and realistic touches are stunning in many sequences. When Hachi’s keitai (cellphone) buzzed at one point, I actually checked my own keitai because to see if I had a message because it sounded exactly the same! I am looking forward to watching the rest of the series and will report on it here. I plan to buy the DVD of the next episodes this week. So far, I am quite fascinated by the depiction of the Nanas. Hachi is a character that most teenaged girls can identify with – dreaming of romance but not really sure about what she wants to do with her future. Nana, on the other hand, is the brave, rebellious girl that young women wish that they could be more like. From what I have read about the series on the internet (I have discovered that there is quite the buzz about this anime on English and French blogs), I have a feeling that the characters are about to get a lot more complicated in the common episodes.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006