Nishikata Film Review

05 June 2011

Saori Shiroki's Night lights (夜の灯, 2005)

The rooftops of a darkened city, a couple walking by a lone streetlight on an otherwise darkened street, an old man rocking in a creaky chair in the corner of a room lit only by the moon or the streetlight entering through the window.

The old man appears to be waiting for something. His fingers drum on his knee. He rises from the rocking chair and paces the shadowy room with the floorboards creaking under his feet. He reaches up and fumbles in the dark turning on the overhead light to reveal a baby crib. A close up on the baby sleeping, with its mouth agape. A moth flutters about the room and old man tries in vain to bat it away. His skeletal hands put a blanket on the baby. The moth still flits about until it lands on the baby’s face. A reverse shot reveals the old man’s shocked face, and then we see that the moth has moved to cover the baby’s face as if like a mask. An exhalation from the baby causes the moth to fly away again and we see a series of short reverse shots of the faces of the man and the baby.

The scene is interrupted by a display of fireworks over the rooftops of the town – which has a distinctly eastern European look to it. The old man now sits in the rocking chair with the infant and we hear the sound of someone returning to the dwelling and see the shadow of a figure entering the room. No words are exchanged as the smiling mother picks up the baby and takes it with her to the next room and we hear the sound of a television being turned on. The moth returns and sits on the windowsill next to the man. He captures it and puts it on his own eyes – smiling for the first time as if he too were a child. The moth escapes and flies out the window to land on the streetlight.

I first encountered Saori Shiroki’s Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 2005) when it was posted on YouTube in 2009 as part of Yokohama ArtNavi’s feature on young animators. At the time, the film did not make as much of an impression on me as say Atsushi Wada’s Day of Nose (鼻の日, 2005), Ryo Ookawara’s Animal Dance (アニマルダンス, 2009), or Ayaka Nakata’s Cornelis (コルネリス, 2008). The main reason for this is that the extremely low resolution version of the film on YouTube (240p) does not do the film justice at all. The low resolution blurs the careful paint strokes that make up each image. Each sequence of the film is like a moving painting, rendered using a paint-on-glass technique. The distinctly eastern European look of Night lights recalls the films of the most famous practitioner of paint-on-glass Aleksandr Petrov.

Aleksandr Petrov's paint-on-glass film The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992). I was reminded of this film by Shiroki's use of the streetlight in Night lights

One of the most striking aspects of Night lights is Shiroki’s symbolic use of the moth. Insects are frequently used in Japanese art. In animation their appearance can be as innocuous as being a sign of summer – as in the case of cicadas in films like My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). Or they can take on a much more darkly playful and mysterious role as in the art of Akino Kondoh.

Shiroki is using the moth as a kind of mask. When the moth is on the face of the baby – it looks like a sinister death mask, with the dark circles on the wings resembling strange eyes. But when the old man places the moth on his own face, it takes on a more playful meaning, suggesting youthfulness. The moth, like the butterfly, is an insect symbolically associated with the soul and reincarnation – the interplay between the moth and the old man and the baby suggest this association of the moth with the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is a beautiful and hauntingly rendered animation that reminds us that life can be as fragile as the fluttering wings of the moth.

This is the second of a four-part series examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984). To read more, click on the titles in the filmography below.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Filmography

2004　Fumoto no Machi (麓の町, 6‘15“)
2005　Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 3‘45“)
2005　The funeral (1’53”)
2007　MAGGOT (2’45”, silent)
2010　Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女/Yubi wo nusunda onna, 4’15”)

03 June 2011

Saori Shiroki's The funeral (2005)

This is the first in a series of four posts examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984). Shiroki began making animation while a student of painting at Tama Art University. She continued her study of animation with the graduate programme at Tokyo University of the Arts where students receive guidance from a number of top animators including Koji Yamamura and Yuuichi Itoh (i.toon animation).

I first encountered Shiroki’s work when her film Night Lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 2005) was selected by Yamamura to be featured on the Yokohama ArtNavi. Like Yamamura, Shiroki’s work has been influenced by European and North American independent animation. She uses a paint-on-glass technique reminiscent of the films of Aleksandr Petrov and Caroline Leaf. This direct, under-the-camera technique involves a process in which artwork is continually being destroyed as new artwork is created. When properly executed, the technique has the effect of being a kind of painting in motion.

A scene from The Street which captures a similar mood as The funeral

My first impression of The funeral (2005) was that it begs comparison with Caroline Leaf’s The Street (NFB, 1976) which also concerns itself with the death of a loved one. Both animated shorts use paint-on-glass animation to evoke the complex emotions associated with mourning. Based on a story by Mordecai Richler, The Street is narrated using voice actors. In contrast, Shiroki has chosen a much more impressionistic approach. There is no dialogue or narration, only the melancholic music composed by Shirou Murakami.

Hunched mourners walk along a desolate path, presumably on their way home from the funeral (left image). In the home, a woman sits at a table with her head bowed, another person sits alone huddled in the corner while a female figure peer s in the doorway to check up on him. An elderly woman recites tales of the past and two male shadows appear on the wall: wraithlike creatures bringing her stories to life (right image). After the loss of a loved one, our memories sometimes become cloudy and we remember only series of impressions or images of the event. Shiroki’s use of paint-on-glass, a technique which leaves traces of the movements that have gone before still on the screen, adds to this impression of memories blurring together in one’s memory and also expresses the sorrow of the event.

The funeral is an evocative, beautifully realized film and quite sophisticated for such a young animator. My only regret was the film was only two minutes long. Despite the sorrowful subject matter, I could have watched the delicate flow of images for many more minutes.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

The next post in this series: Night Lights

Filmography

2004　Fumoto no Machi (麓の町, 6‘15“)
2005　Night lights (夜の灯/Yoru no hi, 3‘45“)
2005　The funeral (1’53”)
2007　MAGGOT (2’45”, silent)
2010　Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女/Yubi wo nusunda onna, 4’15”)

30 May 2011

The Ghibli Museum Library

As collectors of animation on DVD well know, Japan is one of the best countries in the world to find beautiful editions of rare world treasures. In fact, you are more likely to find more Eastern European animation on DVD in Japan than in the home countries of the artists themselves, let alone elsewhere in Europe or North America. The down side is that the Japanese releases tend to only have only Japanese subs or dubs, yet many fans of animation are simply so grateful just to be able to see these great classics at all that they collect these editions anyway.

One company that has been instrumental in giving new life to world animation classics is Studio Ghilbi. The animators at Studio Ghibli are known for their admiration of American, Canadian and European animators – in particular Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata are known to be big fans of the work of German-Canadian animator Frédéric Back (b. 1924) who won the Academy Award for Animated Short film in 1982 for Crac! and again in 1987 for The Man Who Planted Trees. You can read about Miyazaki’s views on other animators in my recent post Hayao Miyazaki’s Taste in Animation.

A number of years ago Studio Ghibli began a partnership with Disney and Cinema Angelica to create the Ghibli Museum Library (三鷹の森ジブリ美術館ライブラリー /Mitaka no Mori Jiburi Bijutsukan Raiburarī). They have used this label to release subbed/dubbed DVDs of world animation classics from Dave Fleischer’s Mr. Bug Goes to Town (USA, 1941) to John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s Animal Farm (UK, 1954). The label also represents modern animation classics including the works of Nick Park and Michel Ochelot. They event support theatrical releases of great world animation in Japan – most recently Sylvain Comet’s The Illusionist (UK/France, 2010).

Studio Ghibli has also acquired the distribution rights to anime classics that Miyazaki, Takahata and other Ghibli animators worked on before the formation of Studio Ghibli. Some of these feature on their Ghibli Classics label, but the Ghibli Museum Library umbrella includes the theatrical feature of Anne of Green Gables and the first TV series of Lupin III.

Here are the highlights of the collection. Clicking on the images will take you to cdjapan where these titles are available for international purchase:

Japanese Animation

Anne of Green Gables - the Path to Green Gables