Nishikata Film Review

20 June 2010

Tyo Story (上京物語/Jyōkyō Monogatari , 1999)

Japan-Woche Mainz 2010 gave me the opportunity to watch Taku Furukawa’s Tyo Story (Jyōkyō Monogatari, 1999) for the second time. I first saw it at Nippon Connection in 2008, but as it does not appear on Takun Films, Anido’s DVD of Furukawa’s collected works (1968-1990), one has to rely on festival screenings to see it again.

‘Jyōkyō’ means ‘to go to Tokyo’ and Jyōkyō Monogatari is an animated adaptation of Yasujiro Ozu’s famous Tōkyō Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953). I suspect the English title "Tyo Story" is a play on Toy Story (1995). John Lasseter was a guest at Hiroshima 1987, and is known to be a huge fan of Japanese animation - and Taku Furukawa is famous for his playful attitude towards animation.

Furukawa employs his familiar doodling style drawn animation, which is influenced by the style of his mentor in the 1960s Yōji Kuri and the New Yorker caricaturist Saul Steinberg, to depict an older couple on the train to Tokyo to visit their children. In addition to being a humorous take on an Ozu story, Furukawa also gives a nod to silent film comedies, but using a rollicking score similar to that played during silent movies and using bilingual (Japanese / English) title cards to impart story information.

During the train ride, Furukawa gives us the back story of the family through the techniques of flashback and montage. The father looks at the wedding photo of his daughter, which triggers a photo montage of her life from birth through to the present. The same is repeated with the couple’s son. The memories are bitter sweet, and Furukawa employs visual gags to elicit laughter from the audience.

Once in Tokyo, the story follows its expected path with the parents finding, as they did in Tokyo Story, that their children’s lives are too busy to fit any quality time in with their parents. The modern distraction is of course the keitai denwa (cell phone). There is an amusing sequence in which every time a keitai goes off, the character whose phone it is buzzes just like their phone. Other modern touches include the grandsons playing violent computer games and ignoring their grandparents, and instead of making a home cooked meal their daughter-in-law orders in pizza.

Tokyo is shown to be a much noisier place than the seaside town where the couple live. The noise culprits include traffic, people, crows, and even a noisy jidouhanbaiki (vending machine) that calls out ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ after every transaction. For a laugh, Furukawa even has the Roadrunner call out ‘meep meep’ before being chased along the overpass by Wile E. Coyote. Just as in Tokyo Story, the grandparents eventually are left to fend for themselves going on a tour of Tokyo. But then being modern grandparents they also go bowling, rock it out at a Rolling Stones concert (Furukawa’s exaggerated caricatures of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are particularly amusing), and go to Tokyo Disneyland.

On the surface, Furukawa’s film appears to be a tongue-in-cheek critique of the superficiality of modern urban lifestyles. Yet, unlike Tokyo Story, the story has a surprise twist at the end which is very amusing.

Japan-Woche Mainz 2010 is also screening Furukawa's recent work Paper Film (image above) on Wednesday evening, but unfortunately I will not be able to attend due to scheduling conflicts.

Taku Furukawa (古川タク, b. 1941) is one of the best known independent animators in Japan and has worked as an experimental animator, teacher, and mentor for over 40 years. His films range from an intricate tribute to the 19th century animation device the Phenakistiscope to early computer animations on the Mac, to humorous narrative shorts like his contribution to Tokyo Loop in 2006. Over the years he has contributed numerous animated shorts to the NHK’s Minna no Uta series. He won the Special Grand Jury Prize at Annecy in 1975 for Odorokiban and his manga The Takun Humor won the Bungeishunjū Manga Award for 1978. He lectures regularly at universities and art schools.

Filmography

1964 Zuraw (16mm, time)
1966 Red Dragonfly (Aka tombo, 35mm, time)
1968 Oxed-Man (Gozu, 16mm, 4‘)
1970 New York Trip (16mm, 5‘)
1972 Head Spoon (16mm, 5’)
1975 Nice To See You (silent, 3’)
1975 Beautiful Planet (Utsukushii Hoshi, 35mm, 5’)
1875 Phenakistiscope (Odorokiban, 35mm, 5’)
1977 Coffee Break (35mm, 3’)
1978 Motion Lumine (Mōshon Rumine, 16mm, 3‘)
1979 Comics (Komikkusu, 16mm, 3’)
1980 Speed (35mm, 5’)
1980 Sleepy (35mm, 6’)
1982 Calligraphiti (Karigurafitii, 35mm, 5‘)
1983 Portrait (16mm, 5‘)
1985 The Bird (Tori, 16mm, 3’)
1985 Mac the Movie (16mm, 3’)
1987 Play Jazz (16mm, 5’)
1987 Direct Animation (35mm, 1’)
1990 TarZAN (35mm, 6’)
1992 From Heart to Heart (Ishidenshin, B-cam SP, 5’)
1999 Tyo Story (Jyōkyō Monogatari, 35mm, 13 min.)
2003 Winter Days, part 31 (Fuyo no hi, collaboration, 40’)
2006 Hashimoto (contribution to Tokyo Loop, 2’57”)
2009 Takuboda (video, 3’, Noriyuki Boda adaptation of a Furukawa film)
2010 Paper Work

Tokyo Loop

Animation

"Tokyo Loop" Soundtrack

Animation Soundtrack

19 June 2010

On a Wednesday Night in Tokyo (2004)

Last night at Japan-Woche Mainz 2010, I also enjoyed the short On a Wednesday Night in Tokyo (2004) by German filmmaker Jan Verbeek. The film documents the open doorway of a crowded train at Shibuya Station. During the five and a half minutes of the film, more and more people gently push their way on board the already impossibly full train. Most of the people have passively disinterested expressions on their face. Watching this with a German audience was a particularly enjoyable experience because people gasped with astonishment as more and more people appeared and push their way on board. Packing a train like sardines into a tin is commonplace during the morning and evening rush hours in Japan, but not as extreme here in Europe.

In order to intensify the experience, Verbeek switches from the sound of the station platform to the sound of flies and then to a synthesizer soundtrack. I found that the music heightened the anticipation of seeing just how many people could possibly fit onto the train before it departed. As the train nears its capacity, Verbeek moves the camera closer to the people and captures for the first time a break in the impassive faces: a woman grimaces with discomfort as a man presses into her. Finally, one of the white-gloved station staff appears to help cram the people into the train car so that the doors can close. He is joined by some other assistants and they push the people and tug at the doors until the train is ready to depart. The audience laughed at the sight of the young uniformed men saluting at the train left the station…. another sight one does not see here in Germany.

This documentary short was beautifully conceived and shot. I imagine that Verbeek chose the evening to shoot because in the morning the platforms are so crowded that he would not have been able to have such a clear shot of the doors. I wonder if he managed to do it all in one take or if he shot several sequences and then chose the best one of the lot. One effect that I found particularly fascinating was when the people walking by on the platform appeared to be superimposed. I’m not sure what technique Verbeek used to do this, because the people in the background stayed the same, but it looked great and contributed well to the general atmosphere of the film. It was also a nice touch that when the train left the station, the hiragana station identification sign was in frame so that the audience could identify the location where it was filmed. The film captures the essence of this moment in a Japanese commuter’s life with an artful documentarist’s eye.

If you are interested in seeing this film, the artist has kindly uploaded the video onto his website here.

Hand Soap (ハンドソープ, 2008)

The blemished face of the main protagonist.

I had the great pleasure of finally watching Hand Soap (2008) by Kei Ōyama (大山慶, b. 1978) last night at Japan-Woche Mainz 2010. The 16 minute short animation has been making the rounds of European festivals this spring. It showed at Oberhausen (29 April – 4 May) where the film won a prize, it was part of the official selection at Animafest in Zagreb (June 1-6) and most recently at Annecy (7-12 June).

With Hand Soap, Ōyama’s longest film to date, he presents a dark vision of adolescence and family life. The film opens with the main protagonist, an adolescent boy whose face is covered in pimples, standing against a wall with bullies throwing tomatoes at him. He trudges home from school to a bleak apartment building where life is not much better than at the school. His sister does not greet him when he enters the apartment and just gives him a malevolent stare, and at the dinner table his family watches television instead of engaging in friendly conversation. Alone in his room after dinner, he does his science homework and draws his own face on the diagram of a dissected frog. This is followed by a surreal dream sequence which includes the dissected frog with sketched on face coming to life and dancing. The film ends with the boy looking out his window as snow begins to fall on the apartment buildings and over his school. The film begins and ends with the wall of the school ground where he gets bullied by classmates.

Kei Ōyama's homepage emphasizes his use of

fingerprint scans to create texture in his films

Although the film does have narrative elements to it, it is really a poetic film best understood through the visual and aural metaphors that Ōyama employs. The texture of surfaces is a particularly important aspect of an Ōyama film, which he creates by scanning surfaces such as his own flesh. His use of scanned fingerprints in particular takes on special meaning as the boy’s hands are frequently given close ups: the hand pausing on door knobs as if reluctant to enter rooms, hands being washed, and hands doing homework.

When a person is living in difficult circumstances with people, the senses often get heightened to an extreme extent. Thus in Hand Soap, small sounds like the buzz and flicker of the heater being turned on take a huge significance in the soundtrack. At the dinner table, the boy indicates his annoyance with the TV being on by plugging his ears with his fingers, and we hear what he hears as he plugs and unplugs his ears.

The ugliness of the setting and the characters is grey-hued and exaggerated to reflect the boy’s unease with his life. Every wrinkle on his parents’ faces is exaggerated by shadows, his father snores, his mother has an unsightly wart on her face, the boy’s own face is covered in painful-looking pimples. Ōyama engages the senses of the spectator by showing us things that will make us share the boy’s discomfort: a close-up of the father licking the mother’s wart, an extended close-up of the boy popping a pimple, a nightmarish image of his bullies with what appear to be internal organs in place of their heads.

To be sure, Kei Ōyama’s films are never easy to watch, but they are strangely compelling and are difficult to turn away from in spite of the disturbing images and often painful subject matter. His films focus on the minutiae of daily life with its little grievances made large on screen – things we notice but rarely talk about. The key metaphor of the film – hand soap and the washing of the hands – for me represents the boy’s hope that he may someday be able to wash away the currently intolerable state of his life and escape the uncomfortable miseries of adolescent life. The clean, white snow falling on the grungy grey neighbourhood also seems to carry with it the hope of change in the boy’s life.

Hand Soap will be competing at the International Animation Festival Hiroshima in August, and according to Ōyama's blog, he plans to also bring the film to Ottawa in October.

Kei Ōyama Filmography

2000 Nami (8mm, 3’), co-directed by Go Shimada, Izu Satoh, and Izumi Kojima

2003 Usual Sunday (Itsumo no Nichiyoubi, video, 7’), co-directed with Yu Hirata

2004 The Thaw (Yukidoke, video, 7’)

2005 Consultation Room (Shinsatsu Shitsu, video, 9’)

2006 Anizo (video, 30”)

2006 Yuki-chan (contribution to Tokyo Loop, 35mm, 5’)

2007 SMAP x SMAP (15”)

2008 Hand Soap (16’)