Saori Shiroki’s MAGGOT (2007)

A house stands against a pitch black sky surrounded at the end of a field of tall grass.  The house is surrounded by a tall, imposing wall. Suddenly, there is a movement in an upper storey window and a young boy escapes the house down a rope. As he exits the gate, he crouches down and begins to hop like a bunny rabbit down the path. He pauses for a moment, kneeling in order to pick up something small and put it in a jar, and then he continues to hop down the path.

In the next moment, we see that he is chasing little maggots as they crawl about under the light of a street lamp. He follows the little white worms to the base of the streetlamp and they lead him to a cardboard box. Opening the box, he discovers the carcass of a rabbit, its stomach wide open as if it has been disembowelled in a lab experiment.

In the reverse shot of the boy’s reaction to his discovery, we suddenly find ourselves back in his room. He delightedly pulls out the rabbit, holding it up in his arms as if he were a child discovering The Velveteen Rabbit at Christmas. He lays the rabbit on a table and gets out his jar of maggots and pours them into his gaping belly then sews up the rabbit. The maggots begin to devour the flesh of the rabbit, causing its surface to writhe. The boy widens his eyes in wonder and delight.  He embraces the rabbit, as if in a scene out of a storybook and a tear falls from his eye. In the final shot of the film before the credits, a maggot falls, replicating the moment of the tear, against a black background and crawls off screen.

I first saw MAGGOT as part of the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection 2011. It was the only film on the programme that was completely silent. There was some unease in the audience because we thought there was a technical problem, but the lack of a soundtrack was an intentional decision on the part of the animator Saori Shiroki. I contacted her to find out why she decided to leave the film silent.

The first reason is that she was concerned that the music would distract or mislead the audience in their interpretation of the film. Shiroki experimented with several different options for the sound design of the film, but none was satisfactory. Using realistic sounds of the maggots would distract from mood of the piece as the boy himself is the emotional centre of the film. Shiroki explained to me that she felt there would be no music in the boy’s head because he is so intently concentrating. She wanted to create the impression of the child as an innocent and adding music may have taken away from the impression she wished to create.

The second reason relates to Shiroki’s love of silent movies. Of course, silent movies were never really completely silent as they had musical or benshi accompaniment, but silent movies do draw our attention to the importance of sound in a film. Particularly, how the accompaniment can alter our interpretation of the film. Shiroki’s passion for silent movies also explains the colourless nature of her films. Instead, she  is drawn to the stark contrasts of black and white composition. The absence of colour means that the textures of the brush strokes are central to creating mood.

For me, MAGGOT gives the impression of a lonely child. In order to interact with the world, he must escape from the confines of his room. There is something so tragic about the innocent delight he takes in collecting the maggots and holding the rabbit corpse in his arms. It makes such a contrast with the classic children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit in which the velveteen rabbit first competes with other toys for his boy’s affection and then seeks to become real through love. MAGGOT is this story in reverse: the boy appears to have no toys and seeks to bring to life a real rabbit that has been killed. It’s a heartbreaking series of images and not for the faint of heart. . . nor the weak stomached.

This is part three in a four part series examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984). Click on titles in the filmography to read more.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Filmography

2004　Fumoto no Machi (麓の町, 6‘15“)
2005　Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 3‘45“)
2005　The funeral (1’53”)
2007　MAGGOT (2’45”, silent)
2010　Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女/Yubi wo nusunda onna, 4’15”)

Saori Shiroki's Night lights (夜の灯, 2005)

The rooftops of a darkened city, a couple walking by a lone streetlight on an otherwise darkened street, an old man rocking in a creaky chair in the corner of a room lit only by the moon or the streetlight entering through the window.

The old man appears to be waiting for something. His fingers drum on his knee. He rises from the rocking chair and paces the shadowy room with the floorboards creaking under his feet. He reaches up and fumbles in the dark turning on the overhead light to reveal a baby crib. A close up on the baby sleeping, with its mouth agape. A moth flutters about the room and old man tries in vain to bat it away. His skeletal hands put a blanket on the baby. The moth still flits about until it lands on the baby’s face. A reverse shot reveals the old man’s shocked face, and then we see that the moth has moved to cover the baby’s face as if like a mask. An exhalation from the baby causes the moth to fly away again and we see a series of short reverse shots of the faces of the man and the baby.

The scene is interrupted by a display of fireworks over the rooftops of the town – which has a distinctly eastern European look to it. The old man now sits in the rocking chair with the infant and we hear the sound of someone returning to the dwelling and see the shadow of a figure entering the room. No words are exchanged as the smiling mother picks up the baby and takes it with her to the next room and we hear the sound of a television being turned on. The moth returns and sits on the windowsill next to the man. He captures it and puts it on his own eyes – smiling for the first time as if he too were a child. The moth escapes and flies out the window to land on the streetlight.

I first encountered Saori Shiroki’s Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 2005) when it was posted on YouTube in 2009 as part of Yokohama ArtNavi’s feature on young animators. At the time, the film did not make as much of an impression on me as say Atsushi Wada’s Day of Nose (鼻の日, 2005), Ryo Ookawara’s Animal Dance (アニマルダンス, 2009), or Ayaka Nakata’s Cornelis (コルネリス, 2008). The main reason for this is that the extremely low resolution version of the film on YouTube (240p) does not do the film justice at all. The low resolution blurs the careful paint strokes that make up each image. Each sequence of the film is like a moving painting, rendered using a paint-on-glass technique. The distinctly eastern European look of Night lights recalls the films of the most famous practitioner of paint-on-glass Aleksandr Petrov.

Aleksandr Petrov's paint-on-glass film The Dream of a  Ridiculous Man (1992).  I was reminded of this film by Shiroki's use of the streetlight in Night lights

One of the most striking aspects of Night lights is Shiroki’s symbolic use of the moth. Insects are frequently used in Japanese art. In animation their appearance can be as innocuous as being a sign of summer – as in the case of cicadas in films like My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Or they can take on a much more darkly playful and mysterious role as in the art of Akino Kondoh.

Shiroki is using the moth as a kind of mask. When the moth is on the face of the baby – it looks like a sinister death mask, with the dark circles on the wings resembling strange eyes. But when the old man places the moth on his own face, it takes on a more playful meaning, suggesting youthfulness. The moth, like the butterfly, is an insect symbolically associated with the soul and reincarnation – the interplay between the moth and the old man and the baby suggest this association of the moth with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is a beautiful and hauntingly rendered animation that reminds us that life can be as fragile as the fluttering wings of the moth.

This is the second of a four-part series examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984).  To read more, click on the titles in the filmography below.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Filmography

2004　Fumoto no Machi (麓の町, 6‘15“)
2005　Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 3‘45“)
2005　The funeral (1’53”)
2007　MAGGOT (2’45”, silent)
2010　Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女/Yubi wo nusunda onna, 4’15”)

Saori Shiroki's The funeral (2005)

This is the first in a series of four posts examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984). Shiroki began making animation while a student of painting at Tama Art University. She continued her study of animation with the graduate programme at Tokyo University of the Arts where students receive guidance from a number of top animators including Koji Yamamura and Yuuichi Itoh (i.toon animation).

I first encountered Shiroki’s work when her film Night Lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 2005) was selected by Yamamura to be featured on the Yokohama ArtNavi. Like Yamamura, Shiroki’s work has been influenced by European and North American independent animation. She uses a paint-on-glass technique reminiscent of the films of Aleksandr Petrov and Caroline Leaf. This direct, under-the-camera technique involves a process in which artwork is continually being destroyed as new artwork is created. When properly executed, the technique has the effect of being a kind of painting in motion.

A scene from The Street which captures a similar mood as The funeral

My first impression of The funeral (2005) was that it begs comparison with Caroline Leaf’s The Street (NFB, 1976) which also concerns itself with the death of a loved one. Both animated shorts use paint-on-glass animation to evoke the complex emotions associated with mourning. Based on a story by Mordecai Richler, The Street is narrated using voice actors. In contrast, Shiroki has chosen a much more impressionistic approach. There is no dialogue or narration, only the melancholic music composed by Shirou Murakami.

Hunched mourners walk along a desolate path, presumably on their way home from the funeral (left image). In the home, a woman sits at a table with her head bowed, another person sits alone huddled in the corner while a female figure peer s in the doorway to check up on him. An elderly woman recites tales of the past and two male shadows appear on the wall: wraithlike creatures bringing her stories to life (right image). After the loss of a loved one, our memories sometimes become cloudy and we remember only series of impressions or images of the event. Shiroki’s use of paint-on-glass, a technique which leaves traces of the movements that have gone before still on the screen, adds to this impression of memories blurring together in one’s memory and also expresses the sorrow of the event.

The funeral is an evocative, beautifully realized film and quite sophisticated for such a young animator.  My only regret was the film was only two minutes long.  Despite the sorrowful subject matter, I could have watched the delicate flow of images for many more minutes.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

The next post in this series: Night Lights

Filmography

2004　Fumoto no Machi (麓の町, 6‘15“)
2005　Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 3‘45“)
2005　The funeral (1’53”)
2007　MAGGOT (2’45”, silent)
2010　Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女/Yubi wo nusunda onna, 4’15”)