Animation Scrap Diary + Live Painting Animactions!! (2004)

Although this fabulous box set only came out in 2004, it is already out of print and only available via second hand dealers. For just over a decade now the renowned psychedelic artist and experimental filmmaker Keiichi Tanaami (田名網 敬一, b. 1936) and graphic designer and animator Nobuhiro Aihara (相原信洋, b. 1944) have been collaborating together on animation projects. They both teach at Kyoto University of Arts and Design　(here's a photo of Aihara teaching a course last year), and have close ties with Image Forum in Tokyo.

Disc One: Animation Scrap Diary

This disc features Tanaami and Aihara’s “animation battles”, which Benjamin Ettinger of Anipages describes as a “rather original shiritori-type collaborative process wherein each takes turns at the canvas, drawing over or erasing what the other has just drawn -- a tense artistic confrontation made possible by the trust they've built up over their long friendship.” Tanaami and Aihara both make animation the old-fashioned way: hand-painting or sketching each individual frame and photographing them onto 16mm film. It is clear that Tanaami and Aihara share a passion for the surreal and the subversive, and they have bonded over their meticulous attention to the minute details of their craft. Each still frame of a Tanaami or Aihara film could easily hang on its own on the wall of a modern museum of art. 

While Tanaami and Aihara have complementary styles, spectators familiar with their work will have no problems distinguishing who did which section of the films. The motifs of Tanaami’s paintings (goldfish, figures with enlarged heads,noses, ears, eyes, sexual organs, etc.) are also present in his animations. Aihara, who began in commercial animation, prefers intricate patterns of lines and shapes. The films feature original soundtracks by experimental composers.

Films featured include:

Scrap Diary (スラップ・ダイアリー, 2002)

I would hazard an educated guess that this frame is by Aihara

and there is no mistaking Tanaami's drawing style

sound design: Takashi Inagaki (稲垣貴士)

Fetish Doll (2003)

 sound design: Agata Morio (あがた森魚)

Landscape (2004)

 sound design: Kuknacke

10 Nights‘ Dreams (夢10夜, 2004)

sound design: Kuknacke

Puzzle of Autumn (秋のパズル, 2003)

sound design: Kuknacke

The disc also features a solo work by Aihara, Memory of Red (2004), which has a dragonfly theme. The film stands out for its use of crayon/pastel  rubbing to add texture to the images.

 sound design: Aki Nagane

Disc Two: Live Painting Animations!!

This is a documentary of a live animation battle between Aihara and Tanaami that took place on the 10th of March 2004 at EX’REALM in Tokyo. The room is in darkness and each artist wears a white boiler suit and baseball cap and uses fluorescent paint on the black canvas. Shot from five different camera angles, and using dissolves and superimposition to speed up the passage of time, each of the five documentary clips lasts about half an hour. A fascinating glimpse into the artistic process of the artists.

Music: Moodman

Director: Naohiro Ukawa (宇川直弘)

The boxset includes a booklet with biographical information and details about the inspiration and making of the films. Also included are a poster designed by Aihara and a poster designed by Tanaami.

Filmography of Tanaami/Aihara Collaborations 

2000 Yami no Kokyū ・Yume no Inei

2001 Fū no Kokyū

2002 Scrap Diary

2002 Running Man

2003 Fetish Doll

2004 Landscape

2004 Yume 10-ya

2005 Trip

2005 Madonna no Yūwaku

2006 Noise

2007 Issun Bōshi (Inch-High Samurai)

2008 Chirico

2008 Paradise for Eye

Please support these artists by purchasing their work:

Tokyo Loop

Animation

TANAAMISM DVD-BOX

Special Interest (Keiichi Tanaami)

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Man Eater Mountain (灰土警部の事件簿人食山, 2009)

 Man-Eater Mountain (Hitokui-Yama/人食山, 2009) is an experimental kamishibai film written, produced, and painted by Naoyuki Niiya (にいやなおゆき, b. 1963 in Okayama Prefecture). Niiya also does the benshi (narration) performance accompanied by Takeshi Tsunoda on shamisen, and with a guest singing and voice acting performance by experimental animator Tetsuji Kurashige (倉重哲二) of KTOONZ in the role of the girl Haruko. The sound editor was Takuro Kouichi.

The film advertises itself as a “kamishibai animation”, but even Niiya himself admits in the prologue that this is no animation in the truest sense of the word because there no illusion of movement is created by the images. Instead, the story is presented visually in a series of hand-painted images that have been edited on the computer where dissolves, pans, zooms, and so on were added for dramatic effect.

Kamishibai (紙芝居) is a traditional paper drama that can be traced back for centuries in Japanese cultural history. The tradition of kamishibai underwent a revival in the 1920s when gaito kamishibai (paper drama storytellers) would ride from village to village to entertain children. Traditional kamishibai stories consist of 12 to 16 sturdy cards with illustrations that face the audience and the text of the story on the back. They are quite a common way of storytelling in Japanese nursery schools and Kindergartens (read more about them here).

As the title suggests, Man-Eater Mountain is no children’s tale, but rather a gruesome tale which the prologue tells us is based on a folk legend about a police detective who is investigated a series of murders of women from a village at the foot of Hitokui-Yama (Man-Eater Mountain). Niiya’s adaptation of the tale embraces both traditional storytelling methods (the benshi-style narration, the style in which the story unfolds) with modern touches (the costumes of the main protagonists, the use of cellphones). 

Artistically there is no denying Niiya’s skill as a painter. His ink brush paintings are beautifully rendered with meticulous attention to detail. The dreamscape mushrooms and the bird soaring through the sky were moments that really captured my imagination with their beauty. The story belongs to the tradition of ghost stories and horror stories in Japan that seem to be rooted in a fear of female sexuality. The graphic horror sequence of the second half of the film features grotesque phalluses and breasts, which one also finds in the art of many contemporary male artists such as Yōji Kuri, Keiichi Tanaami, and Takashi Murakami. 

As a female spectator, I found the grotesque orgy of the second half of the film to be an excessive violation of the senses. The concept of female sacrifice to mountains, particularly volcanoes, has often been exploited in Hollywood films, but I had not seen it in a Japanese context before. In ancient Japan, there were tales of hitobashira (human pillars) in which women were buried alive at the base of a building site in order to safeguard the building in the future against enemy attacks or natural disasters, but as far as I’m aware there is no evidence for this happening in reality. Niiya’s film is rife with Freudian symbolism, and the film seems to be an expression of horror for horror’s sake.

Naoyuki Niiya creates his animated movies independently laboring over a period of several years for each film. He teaches at Musashino Art University and also works as a curator, promoter of live events, and a commentator.

Update: Making of clip can be seen here.

This film screened at Nippon Connection 2010 on a double-bill with films by Tokyo Zokei University students.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Tora-chan, The Abandoned Kitten (すて猫トラちゃん, 1947)

At the peak of his career, Kenzo Masaoka (政岡 憲三, 1898-1988) was sometimes referred to as the Japanese Disney because of the high quality of his work and their broad appeal to young audiences. Masaoka was unable to attain the international renown of Disney due to difficulties in securing funding for his work, wartime constraints (artistic, financial, and lack of access to film stock), and ultimately his early retirement due to problems with his eyesight.

Sute Neko Tora-chan (Tora-chan, The Abandoned Kitten, 1947) was Masaoka’s third to last film: the first in a series of three films featuring a little tabby cat in the lead role. ‘Tora’ is Japanese for tiger, and ‘chan’ is an affectionate diminutive. The film begins on a snowy Christmas day with a choir singing about the arrival of snow as a group of four kittens dance around a giant Christmas tree. As Tora-chan’s bell falls of his neck and a female calico kitten ties it back onto him, the story shifts into a flashback to tell the tale of when Tora-chan joined the family. 

 Sunflowers used as seasonal reference at beginning and end of flashback sequence

The season of the flashback is suggested as summer by the prominence of sunflowers in the mise-en-scene. A mother calico cat is out for a walk with her three very young kittens when they hear Tora-chan mewling. The mother cat distributes milk from a bottle amongst her own little ones then takes Tora-chan onto her lap and gives him some milk as well. She then decides to bring him home with them. Tora-chan tries to fit in with the family, but the older sister, Mika-chan, is jealous and does everything she can to spoil his fun. The mother cat moves to protect Tora-chan from her jealous fits and Mika-chan decides to run away.

The family frantically searches for Mika-chan around the house, but brave Tora-chan takes it upon himself to run after her with a bottle of milk in his hands. Along the way he and Mika-chan encounter many dangers and adventures, and she continues to be resistant to his attempts to bring her home again. After he saves her on more than one occasion, he finally convinces her to come home with him. He is also welcomed back into the family and the scene flashes forward again to the Christmas scene with Mika-chan and Tora-chan looking out the window together at the wintery scene from the warmth of the family home.

 The cats' home is made out of old cartons,

which no doubt would have resonated with children of the

late 1940s who were often living in shanties due to the

destruction of Japanese cities during the war.

The animation is of a very high quality with great attention to detail, beautiful transitions between sequences, and a lovely soundtrack. The dialogue is almost entirely sung and has an operatic quality to it, similar to the Vera Lynn or Edith Piaf style of singing that was popular in Europe during the war. I would imagine that the theme of this film struck a chord with children in cinema audiences of the time, appealing as it does to the numerous children who had lost fathers or were orphaned during the war. Sute Neko Tora-chan promotes the idea that families should open their arms and welcome into their families children who have less fortunate circumstances than themselves.

 Tora-chan and the calico kittens dancing around 

the Christmas tree in the opening sequence.

Apart from the Japanese lyrics, and the features of the characters’ faces that have much in common with Japanese illustration for children of the early part of the 20th century, the film actually looks very ‘Western.’ I suspect that the choice of Christmas, a popular American movie theme, was deliberate in order to avoid problems with the American Occupation censors. The Americans forbade the use of traditional Japanese folktales in animation at this time because of the way in which they had been manipulated for propaganda purposes during the war (esp. Momotaro).  Masaoka had run into troubles with censors during the war for Spider and Tulip because it did not address wartime concerns. It would have been unthinkable for him to use Christmas as a motif five years earlier because American customs were suppressed by the wartime regime. By choosing a Western theme, the film likely avoided trouble with the new breed of post-war censors entirely.

Not only had Christmas not yet become as popular a romantic motif as it is today in Japanese pop culture, but also the use of sunflowers to indicate summer during the flashback is highly unusual for a Japanese film. Sunflowers are native to Cental America, not Japan. As Masaoka studied traditional Japanese painting in Kyoto, in which seasonal imagery play a particularly important role, the choice of sunflowers also stands out as a Western touch. Masaoka was also educated in Western painting under the Paris-educated painter Seike Kuroda (黒田清輝, aka Kiyoteru Kuroda , 1866-1924) – where he likely would have studied artists like Vincent van Gogh. This suggests to me that Masaoka’s choices of Western visual imagery were very deliberate. In Japanese films, summer is usually indicated by the singing of cicadas. Flowers associated with summer in Japan would more likely be lotus flowers (hasu) or morning glories (asagao) - while they do fight off a chicken at one point with lotus leaves, the flowers are not prominent in the film.

 Kittens pressing their faces up to the window

to look at the snow in the final sequence.

Comparing Masaoka to Disney, I would say that his animation equals Disney’s in terms of level of visual sophistication. If Masaoka had had access to funding on the scale of Disney’s I have no doubt that he would have produced work equal to films like Snow White. The choice of kittens for the film may have been influenced by the 1935 Disney short Three Orphan Kittens (part of the Silly Symphonies), which I have heard was a favourite film of Masaoka’s contemporary Kon Ichikawa (市川 崑. 1915-2008). 

It is also interesting to note that the film is shot in black and white, when Disney films had been in colour for over a decade by this time. Even after the war, film stock as scarce in Japan, and I am sure that colour stock would have been nearly impossible for filmmakers to get their hands on at this time. The first colour film (as in using colour stock – films were of course hand-tinted in the silent period) in Japan as Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell in 1953. Not even Kurosawa made films in colour until 1970. 

In conclusion, I would like to give a special mention to the composer of the musical score for Sute Neko Tora-chan - it is beautifully composed and performed.  The "yokatta ne" refrain at the end is particularly catchy and has stayed with me all week.  The composer, Tadashi Hattori (服部正, 1908-2008), was an accomplished composer who scored many films of the 1940s and 1950s as well as doing classical and operatic compositions.   He is perhaps most famous for his Akira Kurosawa scores such as The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945), No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and One Wonderful Sunday (1947).  He also composed scores for numerous other Toho Studios films by such directors as Mikio Naruse, Ishiro Honda, Tomu Unchida, Kon Ichikawa and Teinosuke Kinugasa.

This film is available on Anido’s DVD Kumo to Tulip: The Works of Kenzo Masaoka, which one can order through their webshop.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010