Midori-ko (緑子, 2010)

The grotesque, painterly animated works of Keita Kurosaka (黒坂圭太, b. 1956) unfold in surprising and unusual ways. The first surprise in Kurosaka’s long awaited film Midori-ko (緑子, 2010) is the cute, brightly coloured style of the opening scene. As if watching an NHK children’s animation, we are introduced to young kawaii Midori-chan and learn that she loves to eat vegetables. Meat repulses her, for she cannot bear to think of the suffering of animals.

Midori-chan wishes on a star to be transported to a land of vegetables, and soon the watercolour blue sky with yellow blotchy stars transition into a more ominous land of shadows. We are introduced into a kind of post-apocalyptic Japanese city where a now grown Midori sells vegetables from a stall and lives in a strange ramshackle residence inhabited by mutant people – some seem more human than others. Under her building runs a river of waste where manure is manufactured. The building also contains a sentō (public bath) which promises cleanliness and relaxation but often contains surprise visitors of an old man and a fish.

Other strange inhabitants of the building include a quartet of humanoid figures whose heads have been replaced by symbols of the five senses: a hand, an eyeball, an ear, a mouth, and a snout. They first emerge from their laboratory and are involved in the creation of an unusual vegetable shaped like nasu (Japanese eggplant).  In unusual circumstances, the nasu ends up being thrown through the window into Midori’s room. When she tries to examine it with a scalpel, it resists as if it were more animal than vegetable. She soon discovers that it has a face that resembles an infant, and soon it transforms into her nasu-baby: Midori-ko. Midori becomes quite protective of Midori-ko as it becomes clear that it is under threat from other residents of the building.

In terms of the storyline, the film suggests a theme of exploring the reasons for human existence. Humanity has long struggled with the question of what separates us from other forms of life on this earth. Now more than ever, we are re-examining our role of consumers of the wondrous bounty the planet earth has to offer us. Midori-ko offers a bleak perspective of human existence in a world in which one needs to consume or be consumed.

Midori-ko is much longer than Kurosaka’s earlier films, which is due in large part to the fact that the film has much more narrative and dialogue than these works. As Jan Švankmajer, who who was an early role model for Kurosaka, explained when speaking of his 132 min. long feature film Little Otik (Otesánek, 2000): 

Storytelling, whatever the story, has its own laws. It differs from recounting a dream (as in Něco z Alenky). Similarly, when you start using conventional dialogue, you've got to realise that the film will be longer. A film told through dialogue (without a narrator) always works in a roundabout way, which requires time; figurative speech—the language of pictures and symbols—is more direct and consequently shorter.” (Source: Kinoeye)

Concentrating too closely on the storyline while watching Midori-ko is a mistake for Kurosaka considers himself more of a painter than an animator. He studied figure and still life painting at Musashino in the late 1970s and upon graduation in 1979 spent two years in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts studying oil painting. For Kurosaka, animation has been a tool of adding motion to his paintings.

My biggest problem as an artist was finding a form of artistic expression that would have the same effect as music, but in the realm of painting - the impact of sharing the same time space and physical space among a large number of people. That just happened to turn out to be video, and in terms of specific technique within that framework, animation, but for me animation has never been anything but an extension of my painting work. My films started out abstract, but after a few films they began to evolve in a more concrete direction, until eventually there were even what you'd call dialogue and stories starting to appear in the films, and eventually even characters. So on the surface, my films began to look more and more like what you'd typically call 'animation films', but it feels really off and wrong when I hear people call me an animation artist.  (Kurosaka interviewed by Kiroki Kawa, 2006, Source: Anipages)

The grotesque recurs as a theme throughout Kurosaka’s work. In Midori-ko these takes the form not only of fleshy, unusually shaped characters, but also in surprising and often downright disgusting incidents. For example, after a choking incident, Midori comforts the nasu-baby, but the tender scene suddenly turns horrific as Midori-ko lets loose a torrential bowl movement. In interviews, Kurosaka has said that when he depicts something grotesque, that he doesn’t want the audience to be disgusting. The more revolting the image, the more beautifully he tries to render it (Source: Anipages). Depending on the scene, I found Kurosaka’s use of the grotesque by turns beautiful, horrible, and amusing.

Midori's face compared with a cropped image of  Girl at a Window (Rembrandt, 1645)

Some of the more beautiful moments in Midori-ko reminded me of famous works of art. When Midori is flying down the hill on a motorized contraption in an early scene, the close up profile of her cherubic face reminded me of a Rembrandt portrait, it was so finely rendered. In reading up on his career, I chanced to discover that one of Kurosaka’s early films Metamorphosis Works No. 5 (1986) is actually an exploration of the inner world of Rembrandt. (Source: AWN)

There are times in the film when Midori seems unsure of herself, but on the whole she is presented as a strong, assured female presence. Her strong, direct stare into the camera in one scene reminded me of the wary gaze of the painter Berthe Morisot in Édouard Manet’s portrait of her. The delicate use of shade and light on her face and her full lips only strengthened this impression.  While I do not know that these two portraits directly influenced Kurosaka, I believe that his education as a painter has strongly impacted his style as an artist.

Midori's face compared with a cropped image of  Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (Manet, 1872)

Some of the most humorous moments in the film came when the 5 senses without their masks on, or the 5 senses with old man (Neptune?) and the fish wrestle orgiastically together. In each instance, there comes a moment when they stop suddenly and strike a pose reminiscent of the twisted tangle of limbs and snakes in the famous statue of Laocoön and His Sons.

Laocoön and His Sons comparison

Midori-ko is a multilayered film that requires multiple viewings to truly appreciate the details that has gone into it. After all, Kurosaka spend 10 years creating this masterpiece, one screening of the film can hardly do it justice. I've now watched it twice and feel like I am only scratching the surface of the depths of meaning in the film.  I do hope that Mistral Japan will take this opportunity to release a box set of Kurosaka’s complete works on DVD so that his fans can truly savour his oeuvre as a whole.

For more information, see the official website.  The only animation by Kurosaka that I know of on DVD is his contribution to Winter Days.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Selected Filmography

1984 Metamorphosis Works No. 2 (変形作品第2番, 23’)

1985 Metamorphosis Works No. 3 (変形作品第3番)

1986 Metamorphosis Works No. 5 (変形作品第5番, 28’)

1988 Sea Roar (海の唄, 30’)

1989 Worm Story (みみず物語, 15’)

1990 Personal City (個人都市, 25’)

1991 Haruko Adventure (春子の冒険, 15’)

1992 Box Age (箱の時代, 26’)

1994 ATAMA

1997 Flying Daddy (パパが飛んだ朝)

2003 Winter Days (冬の日, Section 23)

2006 Agitated Screams of Maggots (Dir en grey music video)

2010 Midori-ko (緑子, 55’)

Nippon Connection 2011

Steps (Tochka, 2010)

The animation team Tochka (Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno) are famous for their PiKA PiKA or “lightning doodle” animation technique. In the course of their career they have actually practiced a wide range of stop motion animation techniques. In my review of their CALF DVD Tochka Works 2001-2010, I pointed out that the “Jumping” section of their film PiKA PiKA in Yamagata (2008) uses a pixilation technique similar to that used in Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952). It was with great delight that I discovered during the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection that Tochka was continuing to experiment with this technique.

Pixilation, a term attributed to NFB animator Grant Munro, is a technique in which live actors are animated frame-by-frame together with inanimate objects. Takeshi Nagata told me that for Steps (2010), they took their inspiration from the Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra film A Chairy Tale (1957) in which Jutra has an encounter with a chair that refuses to be sat upon.

Jutra and the chair in a stand off in A Chairy Tale

a similar stand off in Steps

In Steps, we are presented with an empty room with a checkerboard floor pattern and a lone bulb hanging from a cord on the ceiling. Slabs in the formation of steps slide out of the walls, through the room, and back out the opposite wall. The opening sequence ends with the door opening, the steps sliding in with PiKA PiKA lights spelling out the title in the air and a PiKA PiKA stick figure running through the frame.

A salaryman sleeping in his pajamas slides in through the open door and is soon resting on a bed of slabs, with his clothes on a rack nearby. The PiKA PiKA stick figure jumps on his face and soon the man and the stick figure are engaged in a slap stick routine in which the man’s clothes slide out of his reach, and the stick figure taunts him and they fight with each other.

In the next scene, the man returns, as if from work, into the empty room. The PiKA PiKA stick figure slides in slabs and shapes them into steps that the man climbs until he has to duck his head because he is too close to the ceiling. The stick figure first tries to knock him down, then shoves the man – still atop a pile of slabs – out the door.

Tochka’s Steps not only borrows the A Chairy Tale’s pixilation technique but also matches it in its playfulness and innovative design. There are some key differences between the films. In A Chairy Tale, the chair itself was given human attributes: provoking Jutra then later trying to win his affection back again. In Steps, the interplay is between the actor and an animated human stick figure drawn in the air with light. The inanimate objects such as the coat rack and the steps do not acquire any human attributes. Instead, it is suggested that their movement is manipulated by the playful, scalawag PiKA PiKA figure.

Ghostly form of an animator briefly visible

Another big difference is that in A Chairy Tale, the way in which the chair has been animated remains invisible to the naked eye. No matter how much the viewer strains to see if there are strings attached to the chair, the illusion of movement is so complete that it really does appear as if the chair has indeed come to life and is moving of its own volition.

Not so in Steps, where the careful spectator can see the ghostly black figures of the animators in some of the frames. This is characteristic of the PiKA PiKA films, which seek to demystify the art of stop motion animation. It’s a postmodern twist on the NFB style pixilation in which it is not just about the illusion of movement but about our awareness of the hand of the animator(s) in the making of a stop motion film.

This added dimension would have been much clearer in the original presentation of the film which was as part of a video installation.  Exhibition visitors would have watched the film standing in the same room and looking through peep holes on the wall.  See Tochka's Flickr stream to get an idea of the exhibition space at Aichi Triennale 2010.

A brilliant little film, which makes me excited to see what new projects Tochka have up their sleeves. To learn more about Tochka and their PiKA PiKA workshops read about my observations of their Nippon Connection workshop in Frankfurt. The Tochka Works 2001-2010 DVD can be purchased from CALF or within Europe via BAA.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Nippon Connection 2011

Masaki Okuda’s A Gum Boy (くちゃお, 2010)

“Kucha kucha, kucha kucha. . .”, the opening credits of Masaki Okuda’s latest animated short A Gum Boy (Kuchao, 2010), begin with the sound of someone chewing gum loudly and vigorously. The words on the screen themselves quiver and pulse to the rhythm, stretching out long like a wad of gum being pulled out from the mouth and snapping back into shape like an elastic band.

The screen flickers like an old silent movie as a young boy’s voice begins to narrate his story. Sitting in the school cafeteria, the boy talks spiritedly about how he has no friends because he irritates the other children when he chews his food with his mouth agape. Even his teacher tells him off for his rude table manners. Changing his chewing habit is impossible for him, the boy declares, for how can he change the way he is? The grey palette reflects the boy’s foul mood as he waits impatiently for school to end so that he can chew his beloved gum.

The children are now outside releasing helium balloons into the sky, but the boy refuses to let his red balloon go. He imagines the balloon flying up into the sky encountering numerous flying objects along the way. The school bell rings and the scene changes from grey to warm tones as the boy races outside to finally chew the gum that awaits him in his pocket. As he chews his gum, he smiles for the first time and sings about chewing his gum.

Suddenly, holding on tightly to the balloon, he is swept away into a sea of cars, through the sights and smells of the city, and an imaginative montage of other locales. The boy’s chanted story gets progressively faster and louder as he is swept up into a raging storm and the balloon pops and he is catapulted back into reality. Alone and bewildered on the road home from school, he watches regretfully as his balloon floats away into the sky.

Note the grey of the school scenes vs the colour of the after school scenes

I first encountered Masaki Okuda’s work in 2009 when the short that he co-directed with Ryo Ookawara and Yutaro Ogawa Orchestra (オーケストラ, 2008) was featured on the Yokohama Art Navi by Koji Yamamura. Orchestra is a very sophisticated film for student filmmakers, capturing with a minimalistic,  abstract black-and-white drawn animation the dynamism of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra performing a symphony by Beethoven. Last year, I was blown away by Oogawa’s Animal Dance (アニマルダンス, 2009) – it even made my list of the Best Japanese Animated Shorts of 2010. As with Orchestra, Animal Dance reminded me of the way in which animation pioneer Norman McLaren paired music and animated movement together in his hand painted films.

A Gum Boy has much in common with Animal Dance in that they both exploit the ability of animation to poetically interpret music through moving images. A Gum Boy adds the dimension of words to his soundtrack, but this is no ordinary dialogue. The story is recited in the sing-songy way of children’s rhyme punctuated by a dozens of onomatopoetic phrases. Recited in the voice of a young boy, it has the energy of a rakugo performance and is accompanied by a shamisen. The story tears along at a rapid pace and in a whirlwind journey through a child's imagination.

The style of storytelling combined with the layered textures of each individual frame reminded me of Koji Yamamura’s animated rakugo classic Mt. Head (頭山, 2002) and his exploration of the imagination of children in Babel's Book (バベルの本, 1996). In fact, Masaki Okuda (奥田昌輝, b.1985), a native of Yokohama and a Tamabi graduate, pursued his graduate degree at Tokyo University of the Arts where Yamamura teaches. Yamamura’s influence can also be felt in Okuda’s use of abstract elements and depth of frame, but these his influence merely adds polish to Okuda’s very distinctive storytelling style. The text was written by Okuda himself and uses a repeat and variation style common in oral storytelling and in music. The music was composed by Daisuke Matsuoka. The song is by Yushiro Kuramochi and the shamisen is played by Kohdai Minoda.

I saw this film during the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection. Of the new films that I saw at the festival, A Gum Boy stood out as one of the best of the bunch. Visit Masaki Okuda’s official blog here (JP) to find out which festival A Gum Boy will be playing at next.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Filmography

2007 The Garden of Pleasure (快楽の園)

2008 Orchestra (オーケストラ)

2010 A Gum Boy (くちゃお)

Nippon Connection 2011