22nd Image Forum Festival

The 22nd Image Forum Festival kicks off this Sunday with its usual feast of experimental films and videos both domestic and international. They have four different screening categories this year: New Forum Japan, Japan Tomorrow, New Forum International, and Dream Machine.

New Forum Japan features dozens of experimental shorts made in the past year by Japanese experimental filmmakers and animators. My favourite contemporary animator, Tomoyasu Murata, is screening an omnibus of his Kazoku Dekki series. Check out his website for stills from the four short films. Another exciting entry in the New Forum Japan line-up is a new 16mm film ZAP CAT from Nobuhiro Aihara.

Japan Tomorrow presents the prize-winning films for this year. They had an astonishing 455 entries into the competition from across Japan. The big prize winner was Yosuke Nakamura’s film Unconscious (2007, video, 5’). The Terayama Shūji Prize went to Naoyuki Tokumoto’s film Shiawase (Happiness, 2007, video, 22’). Other winning films included Aienkien Tashou no en koko wa Yamane yongo gumi, Line, Kaiki, and Mermaid.

Image Forum has not only been a place for the fostering of new Japanese experimental film talent, but it is also a forum for Japanese audiences to see experimental work from abroad. The New Forum International showcases a wide range of experimental work from performance art to the latest in avant-garde 3D-CG animation. I highly recommend the programme of contemporary German Experimental Animation which features the work of Max Hattler and Robert Seide. They are currently touring Japanese art galleries, colleges, and other venues. Click here to see their itinerary. The fourth category, Memory Machine features an international selection of films that explore themes of memory, dreams, and hallucination.

The festival runs until the 6th of May. Click here for information about the venue, tickets and screening schedule.

From Innocence to Impermanence

Last month Image Forum in Tokyo screened ten short animation films by cutting edge contemporary animators under the title:

無垢から無常へアート･アニメーションの転換点

Moku kara Mujou e Āto Animēshon no Tenkanten

After much contemplation, the best translation I can come up with is: “From Innocence to Impermanence: Art Animation’s Turning Point.” Moku (innocence) and Mujou (uncertainty/impermanence) are both Buddhist terms with a depth of meaning that require much more contemplation than a single blog entry allows. The simplest explanation is that one of the basic teachings of Buddhism is “shogyo mujou” meaning that all things are impermanent and that world is in a constant state of flux. My interpretation of this title is that the work of these experimental artists represents a new phase in the ever-changing world of art animation in Japan.

These ten films represented Japan in the Play Forward section of the 60th Locarno Film Festival (April 2007). Play Forward, conceived by Tiziana Finzi, provides an opportunity to present a wide selection of contemporary films that indulge in audiovisual experimentation. The works presented in Play Forward are strong, radical, and sometimes extreme in either form or content.

If you can read Japanese, Takashi Sawa’s introduction to the line-up, film summaries, and stills can be found here. One point of interest Sawa raises is how the increased use of digital technologies have affected animators. My feeling, based on my viewing of other films by these artists, is that most of them try to find a happy medium between traditional animation styles and modern technology. Much of the work in the work of these filmmakers is still done by hand, but computers speed up the editing process considerably. Mika Seike is particularly interesting for her use of scanned real objects (like leaves), collage, and digital technology (the image at top is from Seike’s film).

I have not yet seen the films on this programme, but was translating the information about these new films for my own research purposes and thought I would share them with you. Some of the films have showed separately at international festivals this past year including Aurora (Norwich, UK), VIFF, and the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival. As this is their second time screening as a set, I am hopeful that Image Forum will produce another DVD as they did with Thinking and Drawing and Tokyo Loop.

Most of these artists have worked with Image Forum in the past. Tanaami Keiichi and Nobuhiro Aihara have made many collaborative films together which they call “animation battles.” Check out anipages for more details. They also produced films independently of each other. They both, along with Mika Seike, Atushi Wada, among others, contributed films for Tokyo Loop. Seike, Suwami Nogami, Naoyuki Tsuji also had their work featured in Thinking and Drawing. Satoshi Ono, one of the younger animators in this group, is perhaps best knowm for the documentary film Homemade Sake (Danshizake, 2001). The film was the product of his studies at Image Forum and won him an award upon graduation from their filmmaking program.

Suzie no Name (Suzu no Name wa, 2006, video, 17’)

Toru Morofuji

In international festivals, this film has screened under the name Suzie no Name, but I think the actual Japanese title would be read Suzu no Name wa, which means “What’s the bell’s name?” In it, a man and a woman from the same country encounter each other in a noodle shop in Bali. They encounter strange characters at every turn. This is the extended version of Morofuji’s earlier film 6756 HAKATA (2003).

Inch-High Samurai (Issun Boushi, 2007, 16mm, 5’)

Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara

Issun Boushi is a renowned character from a series of children’s picture books published by Kodansha – similar to the story of Tom Thumb in English folklore. Tanaami and Aihara dig deep into their childhood memories of these book to create the images for this film. Not unlike the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Tanaami and Aihara highlight the fear and malice of the classic Issun Boushi tales, and well as their dark humour and unspoken eroticism.

Face to Face (Omukai-san, 2007, video, 9’)

Mika Seike

From the stills I have seen of this film, it is clear that Seike continues to use her signature visual style of scanned objects from nature coloured against a background whose texture reminds me of newspaper print. The male and female characters use the same actors (or models? I think she photographs them then animates the photographed image) as in her previous film. Seike’s films have a feminist theme about the relationship between men and women. In Fishing Vine, the man was a voyeur looking at the woman first through binoculars and then trying futilely to climb up the grape vines to her. In this film, the man and woman finally have a face to face encounter. The film shows how their conversations deepen day by day.

Day of Nose (Hana no hi, 2006, video, 10’)

Atsushi Wada

Benjamin Ettinger saw this film at VIFF in 2005, but as they give a new date it may have been re-worked in the mean while. Ettinger calls it “a surprisingly enjoyable bit of surrealism, with salarymen patiently lined up to have their noses pinched and people lunging at goats and so on. Wada is interesting because he’s mentioned that he didn’t get into animation because he cared about animation. . . It all started with the germ of simply being curious to see how a crude sketch would look if it moved. His films have the naïve freshness and unpredictability of kids’ drawings.” For his full review, click here.

Well, That’s Glasses (Sou iu Megane, 2007, video, 8’)

Atsushi Wada

This film, like Day of Nose, uses Wada’s trademark rounded pen and ink characters to explore what it means to create and how one’s vision alters over time.

3 a.m. (Younaka no Sanji, 2006, video, 6’)

Nogami Suwami

A mysterious and rather beautiful reverie in three short chapters, this film ponders the eternal question of what it means to drink coffee in the middle of the night.

Forgetting (Bou, 2006, video, 5’)

Satoshi Ōno

This film dwells on the question of forgetfulness in our modern culture of convenience and cult of the new, and ponders the value of what is thrown away.

Children of Shadows (Kage no Kodomo, 2006, 16mm, 18’)

Naoyuki Tsuji

In this strange tale depicted in Tsuji’s regonisable charcoal drawing style, a brother and sister are nearly eaten by their father. They escape their home and run away with their father’s black car. They end up in the wilderness, where they meet a giant and a witch. The soundtrack uses the sound of a bass guitar, and the Aurora programme describes it as a cross between a manga and a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

IN IN (2006, video, 2’)

Yoshino Saito

Saito takes the art of animation back to its basics by animating line drawings done on a white board. A modern take on Stuart Blackton’s pioneering chalkboard animation, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906).

BRAIN ASH (2006, video, 8’)

Tomoharu Suzuki

This film takes on the weighty themes of human consciousness and double suicide.

A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコー, 2007)

A noticeable trend at Nippon Connection this year was films that favoured atmosphere and character development over plot. Like Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest and Yosuke Fujita’s Fine, Totally Fine, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケッコ/Tennen Kokekko) devotes a lot of attention to setting just the right tone through his careful attention to setting and community. This results in a heartfelt picture of the life of a young woman growing up in rural southern Japan.

Yamashita is skilled at creating realistic portraits of the lives of teenagers, as he demonstrated in his hit film Linda Linda Linda (2005) which told the story of a group of girls preparing a punk-rock number for a high school talent show. Gentle Breeze moves from the more urban high school setting of Linda Linda Linda to a rural school in the mountainous prefecture of Shimane. Screenwriter Aya Watanabe adapted the award winning 1996 manga Tennen Kokekko by Fusako Kuramochi.

The central character is Soyo Migita, played charmingly by the model turned actress Kaho. Soyo is the eldest student of only six children in a combined primary and junior high school. The children have all grown up together and function like an extended family. It may seem unrealistic for a school to exist with so few students, but it is not uncommon in rural Japan. I have visited such a school at the opposite end of Japan – the town of Toyotomi in northernmost Hokkaido – which had 40 students and even had an American on staff teaching English. Like Soyo, who will have to travel by train to high school the following year, the students in Toyotomi have to become boarders in Sapporo, five hours drive away from home, in order to complete their high school education.

Yamashita introduces us to the rural school, with its roosters in the playground (the kokekko of the Japanese title is an onomatopoeia for sound of a rooster crowing), through the eyes of Soyo. Thus we see her motherly care of young Sa-chan, who is prone to not making it to the toilet in time, and her sisterly relationship with the girls closer to her age. The only boy in the school is Soyo’s brother Kotaro.

The harmony of the group of children is disrupted by the arrival of Hiromi Osawa (Masaki Okada), an attractive boy Soyo’s age who has transferred from his school in Tokyo. Hiromi has moved in with his grandfather because his parents are in the middle of a messy divorce. Thus begins the slow, awkward, but completely realistic, first romantic experience for Soyo.

Hiromi’s arrival also instigates the development of several different storylines and themes. The film ponders the contrast between urban and rural life in Japan and the difficulties for children in rural communities to have a romance without the whole town knowing about it. Soyo must learn to deal with the jealousy of her girlfriends at her budding romance with Hiromi.

I don’t want to give the impression that the film overly romanticizes country life. There are many suggestions of darker things going on behind the scenes. Soyo becomes aware of the fact that Hiromi’s mother may have been sweethearts with her father when they were younger, and she speculates that they may still have feelings for each other. Yamashita handles these subplots deftly. As we only see the world through Soyo’s perspective, these background stories are suggested but Yamashita leaves it up to the audience to fill in the details, much in the same way one would in real life. The chatty postman, who embarrasses everyone with his gossip and speculation, adds a dash of humour to the proceedings.

Films about young love often come off too stagy because the actors lack the maturity to pull off romantic scenes convincingly. At other times, comedy is used to distract from the awkwardness of young love. In A Gentle Breeze in the Village, Yamashita leaves the awkwardness in and allows the two young actors to fumble their way through the early stages of teen romance with charm, tenderness, and the real discomfiture that attends such moments. The resulting film is a real pleasure to watch. Here the trailer to give you a hint of why you should watch this film:


Filmography: Nobuhiro Yamashita　（山下 敦弘）

* 1999 Hazy Life (どんてん生活/Donteneikatsu)
* 2003 No One’s Ark (ばかのハコ船/Baka no hakobune)
* 2003 Ramblers (リアリズムの宿/Riarizumu no yado)
* 2004 Cream Lemon (くりいむレモン/Kuriimu Remon)
* 2005 Linda, Linda, Linda (リンダリンダリンダ)
* 2005 Ten Nights of Dream (collaborative film; ユメ十夜/Yume juu-ya)　
* 2006 The Matsugane Potshot Affair (松ヶ根乱射事件/Matsugane ransha jiken)
* 2007 A Gentle Breeze in the Village (天然コケコー/Tennen kokekkō)

Tennen Kokekko (English Subtitles)

Japanese Movie

Tennen Kokekko Original Soundtrack BY REI HARAKAMI

Original Soundtrack (Rei Harakami)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008