Japanese Oscar Winners 5: Steven Okazaki

Steven Okazaki (b. 1952) is a sansei Japanese-American from California and has been nominated for four Academy Awards in his extensive career as a documentary filmmaker. Although he is the third generation of his family living in the United States, Okazaki’s films have been deeply influenced by the cultural identity of his ancestors. In particular, he is committed to educating young Americans about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as sharing important tales about the experiences of Japanese-Americans. His films reveal his passion for human rights (bomb victims, victims of oppression, minority rights, drug addicts, people infected with HIV), Asian cultures (Japan, Hawaii, Cambodia), and the diversity of American culture. 

Okazaki’s first Oscar nomination was for his feature film length documentary Unfinished Business (1985) which tells the stories of three men and how they were affected by the internment of Japanese citizens in the United States during the second world war. The subjects are three men who actively tried to fight their detention: lawyer Minoru ‘Min’ Yasui (1916-1986), sociologist and Quaker Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi (b. 1918), and welder Toyosaburo Fred Korematsu (1919-2005).

Japanese internment camps in America were also the theme of the documentary that won Okazaki his Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1990. Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo tells the story of the Causian wife of a Japanese man sent to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center for detainment. Estelle Peck Ishigo insisted on accompanying her husband to the internment camp and she documented her experience through her paintings and illustrations. Okazaki based his film on her art and her memoir Lone Heart Mountain. The film, narrated poignantly by Ishigo herself, uses documentary footage and her art work to tell the story. 

In 1982, Okazaki produced a short documentary about Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) called simply Survivors. This film was significant as being the first English language documentary of its kind to feature interviews with actual survivors themselves. Two decades later, as the 60th anniversary of the bombings approached, Okazaki became concerned that the attacks were being forgotten so he made a follow-up The Mushroom Club (2005). This won him his third Oscar nomination. In this film, Okazaki returns to Hiroshima to interact with hibakusha and to document their heartrending tales. One particularly touching interview is with Keiji Nakazawa (中沢 啓治, b.1939), the author of Barefoot Gen, about his lucky escape from death at the age of 6 in the blast that killed his father, brother and sister.

In recent years, Okazaki received an Emmy for White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007), an HBO special in which he interviewed 14 Japanese survivors and 4 American personnel related to the atomic bombings. His short documentary The Conscience of Nhem En (2008) was nominated for an Oscar last year. It is thematically similar to Okazawa’s other films, but this time he travels elsewhere in Asia to tell the stories of three survivors of the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison where thousands of Cambodians were imprisoned and killed in the 1970s.

For more information about Steve Ozamaki, check out his website at Farallon Films. There are samples and summaries of all of his films from his feature Living on Tokyo Time (1987) to his examination of how racism affects the lives of Asian American men in American Sons (1994). Really compelling stuff. Films may be ordered on DVD directly from the website.

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

Mami Kosemura's Comb (櫛, 2006)

I first encountered the work of Mami Kosemura (小瀬村真美) at the Nihonga Painting: Six Provacative Artists exhibition in Yokohama in 2006. Both an academic scholar as well as an artist, Kosemura’s moving paintings are layered with references to art history and they open up many interesting questions about the relationship between art and reality.

Kosemura’s installation piece Comb (Kushi/櫛, 2006) is one of two pieces based upon famous works by shin hanga artist Goyō Hashiguchi (橋口五葉, 1880-1921). Hashiguchi is particularly famous for his bijinga (pictures of beautiful women) shown in very intimate situations: nude in the bath, a woman with her shoulder bared while applying make-up, a woman getting dressed. His work is valued not only for its beauty, but for its rarity. Hashiguchi made only 16 woodblock designs before his tragic early death from meningitis. 14 of the woodblocks and many copies of the prints were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake two years after Hashiguchi’s death, making his work even rarer.

This animation installation is based on the woodblock print Woman Combing Her Hair (髪梳ける女, Kami Sukeru Onna, 1920). It depicts a beautiful, idealized woman combing her long, luxurious hair. She is dressed in a loose fitting yukata (cotton dressing gown) and appears serene and relaxed. The yukata is blue with a white sakura (cherry blossom) pattern with a red sash. There is a sensuousness to the woman’s pose and there is a voyeuristic element to the scene. The artist has given us an intimate glimpse into the minutiae of a woman’s daily personal grooming routine.

Mami Kosemura’s Comb gives a feminist interpretation of Woman Combing Her Hair. In the installation at Yokohama Museum of Art, the animation was installed in a wooden picture frame giving the effect of looking into a mirror reflection of the woman combing her hair (see a photograph of the installation here). The voyeurism of the original print is emphasized by the fact that in Kosemura’s Comb, we are only shown the bottom half of the woman’s face. She is rendered anonymous by a dark shadow cast over the top half of her face.

The positioning of the woman’s body mimics that of the original print, but some details have been slightly altered. The yukata has a more generic blue striped pattern, and the sash is pink. Although Kosemura has animated the woman to show the movement of her brushing her hair, the stop motion is not fluid but jerky. Kosemura’s technique is to take digital images of a posed model in costume recreating the Hashiguchi print. She then paints over the images and edits them on the computer. The resulting image looks like a moving painting. The effect is not to duplicate Hashiguchi’s print exactly, but to create a new work inspired by it. The end result looks less like a woodblock print and more like an oil painting in motion. Fine cracks have been overlaid on the image that create the effect of an aged painting. Unlike most Kosemura installations, this animation installation is silent.

Comb is a fascinating work that somehow manages to both make the subject more intimate while encouraging the spectator to view the piece with a critical eye. By animating the woman’s movement, Kosemura emphasizes the reality of the model. At the same time, the shadows over the woman’s face grant her anonymity and the jerkiness of the animation remind us that the woman is being interpreted by an artist’s hand.

Kosemura herself has described her methods as blurring the lines between ‘documentary’ and the ‘fictional’. In viewing a moving image, one has an impression of reality, but it has been mitigated by the painting and after effects added to the original footage. I’m not sure what she wrote originally in Japanese, as I could only find the English translation of her essay on her website, but it seems to me that the line Kosemura is blurring is between the photographed image and the painted image. Kosemura’s original image is not documentary because it has been posed, but the act of photographing her model brings her animated image closer to realistic movement than if she had drawn it. By using famous art as the basis for her animated installations, Kosemura is not only creating an original piece of art, but she is also offering up an interpretation of the art that inspired her own. The Yokohama exhibition also actively encouraged spectators to compare and contrast the works, renegotiating the spectator’s viewing experience of Hashiguchi’s print. There are so many layers to viewing an animation installation by Kosemura, with each work offering up fascinating new depths of interpretation of her unique animation techniques.

For more information about this artist, visit her website,  MIACA (Moving Image Archive of Contemporary Art), or the Yuka Sasahara Gallery.

Utamaro wo Meguru Gonin no Onna

Japanese Movie

Shinshaku Yotsuya Kaidan [Limited Pressing]

Japanese Movie

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010