Sky Colour Flower Colour (空色花色, 2005)

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

This short puppet / mixed media animation by Tomoyasu Murata (村田朋泰) features the female character from Indigo Road (藍の路, 2006), the third film in his Michi (Road) Series. A key theme in each of the first three films of the series is loss: the death of a child (Scarlet Road), the death of a dog and the moving away of a childhood friend (White Road), and the dissolution of a relationship (Indigo Road).

Although there is no explicit suggestion in the title Sora Iro Hana Iro (Sky Colour Flower Colour) that this film belongs to the Road Series, fans of Murata’s puppet animation will spot the connection immediately. The woman, with her short black hair, white shirt, and expressive eyes is unmistakably the same puppet used in Indigo Road. The piano music that opens the film is also very similar to the piano themes in the Road films whose main protagonist is a pianist. Both Sakamaki Fumikazu (composer for Scarlet Road and White Road) and Tatsuhide Tado (composer for Indigo Road and Lemon Road) are credited alongside Murata himself for the music in Sora Iro Hana Iro.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The film opens on a train platform set against a bright white background with the woman sitting on the bench changing the film in her camera. She looks up to see an adult dog at the edge of the platform looking at her. Both the white background and the dog suggest the film White Road. The dog is a similar size to the adult dog in white road but has different coloring.

Towards the end of the first scene, the woman and dog stand together watching an indigo, computer animated butterfly as it passes through the station and flies into the fields. This again is a reference to Indigo Road, in which the man finds a broken butterfly on the ground after the woman has left him – a butterfly which was alive in flashback scenes.

The butterfly, a symbol of spiritual transformation that appears often in Japanese animation, links the opening scene to the following scene in which the woman and dog stand together in a lush green Japanese forest. I say Japanese forest, because my husband (a keen birder who has spent many years in Japan) recognized the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul) on the soundtrack – a very common bird native to Japan. The locations of the Road Series are unclear and likely purely an imaginary realm inspired by Murata’s own travels and aesthetic interests. Indigo Road looks like it’s set in a central European town, while Lemon Road could be set in rural Arizona. Murata has a love of old technologies, such as TVs and radios, and his puppet sets look like a slightly worn version of the 1950s.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The woman and the dog wander the forest side-by-side, always facing now in the same direction, like the elderly couple in Ozu’s Tokyo Story and the woman pauses occasionally to take photos. A car, that looks like it is driven by the woman, passes through the forest at the end of this scene, but as it goes by, we see the backs of the woman and dog walking into the forest. This doubling of the main protagonist also happened with the pianist in Indigo Road when he was cleaning the toilet. At this point, it becomes apparent that with Sora Iro Hana Iro, Murata has not made a straight-forward narrative story, but rather series of subjective impressions to tell us more about the state of mind of this female protagonist, whom I shall call the photographer from now on.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The piano theme returns with the return of the butterfly, and the photographer looks up through the trees at the bright sky. Bathed in the rosy colour of the setting sun, she sits down on a bench and closes her eyes, and we are treated to an ethereal dream sequence (likely computer animation) of neon and pastel figures of children, a carousel and floating lights that at times look like glowing fireflies and at other times like stars. This sequence (particularly the children, the carousel, and the bright colours on a black background) are very similar to the themes and aesthetic of another Murata film Merry-go-Round (2008).

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

The dream sequence ends by repeating the shot of the road through the forest with the car returning. This time the car stops and we are granted a closer shot to confirm that the photographer and the dog are both in the car watching the backs of themselves going into the woods. On this surreal note, the film fades to black and the piano theme continues over the credit sequence.

My interpretation of this film is heavily influenced by my knowledge of Murata’s other films, and it’s hard to say how much meaning I would have read into the film if I watched the film ignorant of his other works. In a way, it was a relief to find that the woman was alive – though with the dream-like imagery of this film she may only be alive in a spiritual sense. The deaths of loved ones are made clear in Scarlet Road and White Road, but in Indigo Road it wasn’t clear if the woman had died or left. For me, Sora Iro Hana Iro, tells me that the woman, an artist in her own right and not just the housewife she seemed to be in Indigo Road, has left to go on a spiritual journey. The colours of this film, are much more optimistic that Indigo Road, and so I have the impression that her journey is a positive one of growth for her. The title suggests the red colour of the flower that is a symbol of the Road Series, and the sky changes with the scenes (white, blue, rosy, and black night sky). The butterfly suggests that she is undergoing some kind of a spiritual transformation in her life.

Although the film seems to have actually been completed the year before Indigo Road, they seem to be partner films. And, there are many connections between it and the most recent installment in the series Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008). Sora Iro Hana Iro is a truly beautiful short film which, like most Murata films opens up more questions than it answers, but is an aesthetic treat all the same. As will become clear when I review Lemon Road in the next few days, Murata seems be mixing media more and more with his films. In many ways, he seems to be taking up the mantle of Tadanari Okamoto (岡本 忠成, 1932-1990), a puppet animator who challenged himself with each new project to try out new methods and push the boundaries of animation made by hand.

Sora Iro Hana Iro and Merry-go-Round are two of 20 shorts (including animatied company logos) available on the DVD The Dream is Crouching (夢がしゃがんでいる) and can be ordered online at tomoyasu.net (within Japan) or by contacting his company for orders outside of Japan.

Tomoyasu Murata Sakuhinshu - Ore no Michi

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Musings on Yoji Kuri & Chair (Isu, 1964)

Animator and artist Yoji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928) is one of the founding fathers of Japan’s art animation scene. Along with graphic designer and ad-man Ryohei Yanagihara (柳原良平, b. 1931) and renowned book cover designer Hiroshi Manabe (真鍋博, 1932-2000) Kuri formed the Animation Sannin no Kai (Animation Group of Three) in 1960. In doing so, the three animators were following in the footsteps of the Sannin no Kai composers of the 1950s (Yasushi Akutagawa, Ikuma Dan & Toshiro Mayuzumi), who had banded together in order to stage performances of their avant-garde style of music together. The Animation Sannin no Kai put on three events in which they showcased their work in November 1960, December 1962, and April 1963. From 1964 this event was expanded into a wider Animation Festival, which during its annual run until 1971 showcased the experimental fare of such artists as Taku Furukawa, Sadao Tsukioka, Goro Sugimoto, Keiichi Tanaami, and even Osamu Tezuka. (for more on these events see anipages)

Of the original Animation Sannin no Kai, Kuri was the only artist to make a career out of animation. Throughout the 1960s, his films appeared at international festivals throughout Europe and North America. His 1962 film Clap Vocalism (Ningen Doubutsuen, 3’), with a score by Toru Takemitsu (famed for his work on Akira Kurosawa’s films), won the Special Jury Prize at Annecy and the bronze medal at Venice. Over the years he has been celebrated around the world both as an animator and as an artist, having dabbled in a wide range of arts including sculpture, painting, illustration, and flip books.

Even now in his 80s, he is still very active as an artist and contributed a humourous short film Funkorogashi to Image Forum’s omnibus collection Tokyo Loop in 2006. Funkorogashi (see image at top of page), which poked fun at dog owners who resemble their pooches and allow the dogs to poop all over town, was in Kuri’s signature style: minimalistic line drawing animation (black on a white background) with some sections coloured in with bold reds, greens, yellows, and blues. It also demonstrated that he has retained his school boy humour after all these years.

It has taken me some time to warm up to Kuri’s work as an experimental animator. Normally, I am rather fond of black humour (Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Ealing Studios’ Kind Hearts and Coronets rate as 2 of my favourite comedies of all time) and, as a big fan of Buster Keaton, I do appreciate a good visual gag. But, the often sexist representation of women in Kuri’s films more often than not leaves me feeling cold.

On a purely aesthetic level, I appreciate the truly innovative use of the soundtrack in Kuri’s films. In an interview on his Takun Films DVD (sold by Anido), Taku Furukawa (古川タク) says that he and Kuri often did all the voices themselves. . . even the female ones such as the male and female Olympic athletes comically chanting “Chu Chu Chu Chu” in Au Fou! (Satsujin Kyōjidai, 1965, 13’). He also used the skills of cutting edge avant-garde composers of the day including not only Toru Takemitsu but also Akiyama Kunihara (1929-1996), Hayashi Hikaru (b.1933), Yoko Ono (b. 1933, yes, John Lennon’s wife), and also Ono’s first husband, the brilliant composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933). The soundtracks interact in fascinating and unexpected ways with the animation.

Kuri makes a cameo appearance in 'Chair'

The film that brought me to a greater appreciation of Yoji Kuri as an experimental animator was Chair (Isu/ 椅子, 1964). My first thought upon seeing this film was that it must have been at least in part inspired by Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra’s stop motion film A Chairy Tale (1957). McLaren’s films were brought to Japan in the late 1950s and as Kuri had been attending international festivals throughout the early 1960s, I would be surprised if he had not seen the film.

The premise of Chair is this: Kuri asked a number of people from a wide variety of walks of life to sit on a chair for 15 minutes in front of his single camera set-up. In the opening title card he asks the spectator to imagine what they would do with the time and says that the film is about the unease that modern people feel when they don’t have anything to do. The regular people (a school teacher, a young girl, a university student, a salaryman, a Buddhist priest, a cop, among many others) were paid a fee for their time, while the celebrity figures such as artist Taro Okamoto (岡本太郎), singer George Ai (アイ・ジョジ), the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (谷川俊太郎), and the aforementioned composer Ishiyangi (一柳慧) did not receive any payment for their services.

I don’t know if Kuri actually edited out frames of the film by hand or if he used a time-lapse camera technique of shooting a frame every so many seconds (This is the most likely case: time-lapse as a technique does date back to the silent films of Georges Méliès and Arnold Fanck ), but the end result is that the 15 minutes are reduced to a matter of seconds. The result is mesmerising. The most impatient people are made comical by the jerky movements that result from the time-lapse effect.

I wondered when watching if all the participants were aware of the camera, because most seemed to pay it no heed at all. Some, like Kuri himself (see screencaps above) who is the last subject before the camera, clearly did know and probably plan what he would do. Many of the subjects are very patient at waiting (surprisingly one young child does the best job of doing absolutely nothing) while others fidget and move about. Some seem to have come prepared with things to occupy themselves with, while others only have the chair to interact with. The junior high school teacher inexplicably takes off his clothes down almost to his skivvies then gets dressed again.

This kind of film is, in my opinion, experimental film at its best: when an everyday situation is turned made extraordinary and the spectator has to re-evaluate something that they take for granted. Although the film is over 40 years old now, it still seems very contemporary. Some would say that people find waiting even more difficult now than at any time before because the young generation with their keitais (mobile phones) and iphones don’t know how to ‘do nothing’. It would be interesting to do this same experiment with today’s generation. Would all the subjects just text message their time away? To answer the question in the title card “What would you do?” I just thought about what I do in waiting rooms or on trains: I always have a book with me so I would be reading and crossing and re-crossing my legs.

What would YOU do with your 15 minutes?

Yoji Kuri Sakuhin shu


This review is part of Nishikata Film's 2011 Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Noriaki Tsuchimoto: The Life of a Documentary Filmmaker

June 24th of this year marked the first anniversary of the death of leading documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto (土本典昭, 1928-2008) . Tsuchimoto’s career was marked by a willingness to take risks with politically sensitive causes. He was best known for his series of films examining the impact of Minamata disease: the notorious mercury poisoning scandal that rocked post-war Japan.

Born in Gifu prefecture in 1928 but raised in Tokyo, Tsuchimoto joined the Japanese Communist Party while studying at Waseda University in 1946. He began working at Iwanami Film Studios in 1956 where he learnt filmmaking and got to know other documentary filmmakers such as Kazuo Kuroki and Shinsuke Ogawa. His career was shaped in part by the cinematographer Seiji Yoshino who served on the board at Iwanami. Initially, Tsuchimoto worked on promotional films, but then made his first foray as a director with his film Aru Kikanjoshi (An Engineer’s Assistant, 1963). Important works in his career included Chua Swee-Lin (Exchange Student, 1965) about the prejudice felt by a Malaysian-Chinese student at a Japanese university, Paruchizan Zenshi (Prehistory of the Partisans, 1969) about student extremists, Minamata: Kanja-san to sono sekai (Minamata: The Victims and Their World, 1972), and Umi-tori shimokita hanto hamasekine (Stolen Sea: Shimokita Peninsula, 1984) about a traditional community threatened by commercial interests.

In 1989, Tsuchimoto went outside of Japan to make the film Afghan Spring (1989) in collaboration with Hiroko Kumagai and the Afghan filmmaker Abdul Latif. This film looked at society and politics in Afghanistan as the Soviets were withdrawing from the region. The film has become an invaluable artifact of a culture and community later destroyed by the Taliban.

In his later years, Tsuchimoto devoted much of his time to writing and political activism. He continued to bring awareness to the victims of Minamata with a 1996 exhibition called Minamata-Tokyo which gathered over a thousand photographed of the suffering victims of this dreadful disease. Tsuchimoto’s works shocked audiences with their subject matter and his compassion for the people he profiled was self-evident.

A documentary about his career entitled Cinema is About Documenting Lives (映画は生きものの記録である 土本典昭の仕事) was produced by Toshi Fujiwara in 2007. Here is the trailer:

The National Film Center’s exhibition includes photographs and mementos owned by his family, friends, and peers. A documentary on his life will be screened in the small auditorium. Throughout the summer Tsuchimoto’s films will be screened at NFC, and there will also be three events with guest speakers discussing his life and career. The exhibition opened on June 30th and will run until the 30th of August. For more information, visit the NFC's website.

Events:

Date: Saturday, July 11th
Guests: Motoko Tsuchimoto (Noriaki Tsuchimoto's wife), Kenji Ishizaka (film scholar)

Date: Saturday, August 1st
Guests: Hideyuki Nakamura (Professor, Faculty of Psychology, Rikkyo University)

Date: Saturday, August 22nd
Guest: Ryutaro Takagi (Film producer, former President of Seirinsha)

Mo Hitotsu no Afghanistan- Kabul Nikki 1985 nen (Another Afghanistan: Kabul Diary 1985) / Japanese Movie