Image Forum Festival 2011

It is time once again for the Image Forum Festival to get underway. The festival is jam-packed with alternative animation and experimental films from Japan and around the world.  It opens in Tokyo this weekend and will travel to other cities across Japan throughout May and June.

Tokyo 　

29 April – 8 May 2011 (Shinjuku Park Tower)

29 April – 7 May 2011 (Image Forum Cinematheque)

Kyoto

4 – 10 June 2011 (Kyoto Cinema)

Fukuoka 

 1 – 5 June 2011 (Fukuoka City Public Library)

Yokohama  

10 – 11 June 2011 (Yokohama Museum of Art)

Nagoya 

15 – 19 June 2011 (Aichi Arts Center)

Some of my favourite artists have their latest works screening in the first few programs including Mirai Mizue, Taku Furukawa, Hiroco Ichinose, Keiichi Tanaami + Nobuhiro Aihara, Naoyuki Tsuji, and Kazuhiro Goshima. Mirai Mizue will also be at Nippon Connection (hope to see you there!), Anifest, and Stuttgart this week and next.

Here is a taste of the screening programs:

Program A: Japan Animation Panorama 

MODERN by Mirai Mizue

Tatamp (Mirai Mizue /video/6 min)

MODERN (Mirai Mizue / video/7 min)

SPONCHOI Pispochoi (pecoraped / video/6 min)

TWO TEA TWO (Hiroco Ichinose / video/3 min)

Hana no Hanashi (はなのはなし/Taku Furukawa / video/6 min)

Watashi no Konseki (私の痕跡/Daisuke Nagaoka / video/4 min)

many go round (Yoshihisa Nakanishi / video/6 min)

Omokage (おもかげ/Maki Satake / video/6 min)

Holiday (ホリディ/Ryota Hirano / video/15 min)

Inugoya no Bouken (いぬごやのぼうけん/Hiroyuki Mizumoto / video/22 min)

Program B: Tricky Image

Inkblot #2 by Yuiko Matsuyama

Grass/Sleep (Kazuhiro Goshima/ video/10 min)

Kitsunebi (狐火/Yuki Tsuchiya/ video/30 min)

EXIST (Tetsuka Niiyama/ video/2 min)

INKBLOT #2 (Yuiko Matsuyama/ video/10min)

Exchange (遣取/Moeka Komuro/ video/10 min)

telescope (Katsunori Mizuno/ video/15 min)

Program C: Kehai no Eiga

Kaze no Sei by Naoyuki Tsuji

Dareka ga iru dareka ga iru dareka ga iru

(誰かがいる 誰かがいる 誰かがいる/

Akira Hoshino + Shinatsu Yokomizo +Hirotade Suzuki /8mm/25 min)

EDEN(Shinya Isobe/16 mm/15 min)

FANTÔME(Yo Ota/16 mm/8min)

Wind Spirit (風の精/Naoyuki Tsuji/16 mm/6 min)

Inner Child (内なるこども/Aimi Tanaka /8 mm/18 min)

Program D: Chōichijō no Eiga

Dreams by Tanaami + Aihara

Tokyo Three Dimensional Suite 

(東京浮絵百景/Kazuhiro Goshima / video /15 min)

Subete wa hon (総ては本/Sakumi Hagiwara / video /15 min)

Risan no uta (離散の歌/Hōshu Kurokawa / video /37 min)

garden (Ryohei Shimada / video /9 min)

DREAMS (Keiichi Tanaami +Nobuhiro Aihara / video /6 min)

Three Rooms by Takashi Ishida

. . . and much, much more, including the latest work by one of my favourite installation artists Takashi Ishida. The piece is called Three Rooms (三つの部屋) and is screening in Program I: Hikari no naka de (In the Light). Check out the Image Forum Festival 2011 website to learn more.

World Film Locations: Tokyo

I heard from Chris MaGee of Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow that the book he edited, World Film Locations: Tokyo, is now available for pre-ordering on Amazon.  It is part of a new Intellect Books series called World Film Locations which plans to examine cities from around the world as movie locations. The first wave of releases is set for late summer and in additon to Tokyo will also include Los Angeles, London, and New York. Join the World Film Locations Facebook Page to keep up to date about these books' release dates and future installments in the series.

World Film Locations series will explore and reveal the relationship between the city and cinema by using a predominantly visual approach inspired by The Big Picture magazine’s ‘On Location’ feature.

Alongside short bite-sized texts about carefully chosen film scenes, each book will be illustrated throughout with evocative movie stills and be complimented by short but insightful essays about themes, ideas and key historical periods relating to each individual city.  (source)

Of the 50 film scenes examined in the Tokyo book, I choose the images and did the write ups for 5 films:

Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad 

(東京オリンピック, Japan, 1965)

Wim Wenders's Tokyo-Ga 

(東京画, Germany, 1985)

Dorris Dörrie's Enlightenment Guaranteed 

(Erleuchtung garantiert, Germany, 1999)

Kentaro Otani's Nana 

 ( ナナ, Kentaro Otani, Japan, 2005)

Tomoyasu Murata's Nuance

 (ニュアンス, Japan, 2006)

It was a lot of fun working on this book because I got to write about such a variety of film styles from documentary to popular feature films.  Locations covered include the Tama River, the Koshu Kaido, Shinjuku, Yanaka Cemetery, and Tokyo Tower.  There are 6 images above because I also tie-in the Nana manga and anime in my write up about Nana.  Most of the films in the book are well known feature films, so it was really great of Chris to let me do one indulgent write up of an alterntive animation piece - Tomoyasu Murata's Nuance.  This short was Murata's contribution to Image Forum's Tokyo Loop (2006).  The book promises to be a visual feast for the eyes.

Here's the official blurb:

World Film Locations: Tokyo gives readers a kaleidoscopic view of one of the world's most complex and exciting cities through the lens of world cinema. 50 scenes from classic and contemporary films explore how motion pictures have shaped the role of Tokyo in our collective consciousness, as well as how these cinematic moments reveal aspects of the life and culture of a city that are often hidden from view. Complimenting these scenes from such varied films as Tokyo Story, You Only Live Twice, Godzilla and Enter the Void are six spotlight essays that take us from the wooden streets of pre-19th century Edo to the sprawling 'what-if' megalopolis of science fiction anime. Illustrated throughout with dynamic screen captures World Film Locations: Tokyo is at once a guided tour of Japan's capital conducted by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Samuel Fuller, Chris Marker and Sofia Coppola while also being an indispensible record of how Tokyo has fired both the imaginations of individuals working behind the camera and those of us sitting transfixed in movie theatres.

Pre-order today:

Tadanari Okamoto’s Home, My Home (ホーム・マイホーム, 1970)

Home, My Home (1970) was the first work of Tadanari Okamoto’s that I ever encountered. I arrived in Tokyo with my family in late 2004 – a few months too late for the National Film Center exhibition and retrospective of his career. Luckily for me, however, the paper sets and dolls from Home, My Home had been donated to the permanent collection at the NFC and were on display the first time I visited the museum.

Okamoto was famous for his constant innovations with animation techniques. Paper cutouts had been a popular medium in early Japanese animation. Cutout animation was cheaper and more time efficient than cel animation, so animators like Noburo Ofuji (1900-61) were fond of using this method. Cutouts also fit well with Japanese traditional paper traditions and patterned paper like chiyogami gave early films like The Village Festival (1931) a distinctive look. In this animated educational short for children, Okamoto takes the art of paper cutouts to another level by playing with depth of frame.  He preferred using an animation table which allowed him to add layers of depth on glass surfaces.

The film tells the story of a fox and a mole who are walking along and dreaming about their ideal home. The story is told by song – a popular format for children’s films in Japan. The catchy and amusing “Mogura to Kitsune to Akasakana” was composed by Seiji Yokoyama with lyrics by Yoshiko Kōyama. It is a duet between and male and a female with Kazuo Kumakura singing the story of the mole and Yoshiko Mari singing the story of the fox.

Tadanari Okamoto Sakuhin Shu Vol.1

Home, My Home appears on this DVD

The characters walk from screen right to screen left with the fox above ground and the mole digging along underground directly under the fox. The ground is a collage of the real estate pages of the newspaper. The characters and the sets are made of craft paper folded into three dimensional shapes. The puppets were made by Sumiko Hosada, a longtime Echo (Okamoto's animation studio) employee who has also made puppets for Kihachirō Kawamoto.

The dreams of the fox and the mole are indicated by the placement of a circle of coloured dots in the foreground of the image, creating a kind of blurry picture frame. They dream  of cute Western-style houses with a wife, son, and daughter living in comfortable middle class homes with Western-style kitchen, living room, bedroom, and a modern Japanese-style bathroom.

Depth of frame was achieved using an animation table.

The mole suddenly sneezes, which startles the fox above and causes him to fall down. This triggers their dreams to turn dark and they envision the destruction of their dream homes with a dump truck crashing into the fox’s house and a military jet knocking into the mole’s house. The family homes are then carted off by construction vehicles and replaced by modern raised highways and industrial buildings. The sequence ends with a kind of black smog blotting out the screen. The fox and the mole turn around and walk in the other direction and wonder if they need to move to outer space. 

The first time that I saw this film, I interpreted it as having an environmental message about the destruction of animal habitats à la Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994). Then I realied that the dreams that the fox and the mole have are not for animal dwellings but for idealized human homes. This suggests the film is really about deep-seated human fears about the effect that encroaching industrialization will have on their quality of life.

The design and execution of this animation is really top notch. The animation was executed by Hiroshi Tabata and Fumiko Magari. Two of the crew on this film, Sumiko Hosada (保坂純子) and Fumiko Magari (真賀里文子), are currently teaching puppet design and puppet animation at the Laputa Art Animation School.  Home, My Home and The Flower and the Mole (花ともぐら/Hana to Mogura, 1970) jointly won the Noburo Ofuji Award in 1971.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

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