Yoji Kuri’s Love (愛, 1963)

I think that it is safe to say that Freud would have had a field day with the animated shorts of the grandfather / bad boy of Japanese alternative animation Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928). His black, and often bawdy, sense of humour pervades the mood of most of his films.  In his 1963 film Love (愛, 1963), a big woman with prominent breasts breathily gasps the word “Ai” (Love) repeatedly as she chases a man who is much smaller than her. The woman is depicted as being so desperate for love that she even embraces trees in frustration. In contrast, the man seems repulsed by her attention and races to keep himself out of her clutches. 

Examples of the woman dominating the man in Love

In one moment, the woman clutches the man as if he were an infant or a ragdoll and he transforms into a giant drop of water in order to slip from her grasp and escape. The man also chants the word “Ai” but in a less passionate, more matter-of-fact manner. The couple play a kind of hide-and-go-seek amongst a row of trees. The woman chases the man with a net as if he were a butterfly. Once captured, she consumes him whole, only to have him come out the other end and escape again.

She chases him through a gallery lined with portraits of the man and through an empty café with identical tables. Their chants of “Ai” are sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted at top volume, increasing in tempo and desperation. The woman’s arms stretch out to an impossible length in order to grab the man again. In another scene, he stands on all fours like a doll on a leash and eats his food on the floor.

Order the Collected Works of Yoji Kuri

The chase grows increasingly desperate with the woman beating the man into submission with a baseball bat, reducing him to a stuttering idiot in their shared bed, and putting a leash on him and taking him on a walk. The ends with the soundtrack fading out as the man leads the woman into the horizon like a dog on a leash.

This animated short is based on a poem by Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川 俊太郎, b. 1931) with music composed by Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, 1930-96). Takemitsu is perhaps best remembered today for his composition of soundtracks for the films of great directors like Akira Kurosawa (Ran, Dosdesukaden), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes), and Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kaidan, Samurai Rebellion) and for his significant contributions to aesthetics and music theory. I am a fan of Takemitsu’s early experimental period, and his anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (experimental workshop) had a profound impact on the animator Yōji Kuri, who has used experimental composers like Takemitsu extensively in his films.

Examples of Kuri's use of Japanese cloth/paper in Love

The soundtrack of Love does not fall into the category of “music” in the classical sense, but in the postmodern sense of creating music using unconventional techniques and instruments. The recorded voices (H. Mizushima and Kyōko Kishida) have been distorted using a synthesizer. Sometimes the voices draw out, like a record playing at the wrong speed, or at other times they playback at pitches impossible for the human voice to attain. The tempo and volume is varied in order to create tension.

Love demonstrates the misogyny that is a prevalent theme in Kuri’s work. He frequently depicts women as either obese or having exaggerated or grotesque features. The portrayal of a large woman dominating a small, seemingly helpless man is a common motif in his work. The film unambiguously suggests a fear of female sexuality and a man’s fear of being controlled or dominated by a female partner.  Kuri emphasizes the feeling of entrapment through his use of perspective with the long labyrinthine art gallery, row of trees, and long arcade.  Kuri's depiction of "love" is claustrophobic and abusive.

Love is a fine example of Kuri’s characteristic minimalistic animation and illustration style. The characters are drawn in a clean, minimalistic style reminiscent of the work of New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg. Kuri’s illustration style is antithetical to the popular manga and anime styles of the day. The film is, however, given a Japanese aesthetic through Kuri’s choices of cloth and paper cut-outs: the pattern behind the title card and the pattern used on the tables in the café and on rooftops are all very typical of traditional Japanese paper and cloth patterns.

Kuri’s films Love, Clap Vocalism, The Chair, and AOS were joint winners of the Noburō Ōfuji Award in 1965 along with Tadanari Okamoto’s film A Wonderful Medicine. In fact, this review is part of Nishikata Film Review’s  2011 Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Woman who stole fingers (指を盗んだ女, 2010)

The animated shorts of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984) all share a feeling of melancholia. Each film also has a discomforting element to them. In The funeral (2005) there are the non-threatening wraiths that appear on the wall when the grandmother is reciting her tales. The sense of unease is much stronger in Night lights when the moth lands on the baby’s sleeping face. In MAGGOT, the unease increases dramatically at the disturbing sight of a lonely child playing with maggots and a dead rabbit. Woman Who Stole Fingers raises the ante to the level of deeply disturbing by taking on the subject of child abuse.

The film opens on a dark room and child reading a book at a desk. The child is small and hunched, dwarfed by the large, bare space of the room. The scene is quiet, with only the sounds one would associate with an urban home: the slight hum of traffic, the shuffle of movement, the squeak of the chair as the child tips back in it, and the sound of wind rustling the curtain.

Suddenly, the child rises from the chair and walks to the curtain, his movement leaving behind traces as he goes – a characteristic feature of paint-on-glass technique. When he draws open the curtain, there is a startling figure of a woman who tilts her head and looks at the child with a slightly wild look on her face. A close up on the boy’s face reveals a hint of his wide-eyed panic, but the horror of what is to come is not yet fully apparent.

Outside the house, the female figure stands peering into the window as the wind bends the trees with its gusting force. She turns on the water hose to spray the garden. In the next sequence, the boy seems to drag the woman into the frame across the grassy lawn. She has a look of shock on her face as he hops over the garden fence. A close up of her face shows her angry eyes and clenched jaw. One has the sense that he has disobeyed her will in some way.

There is a slam of a door and the child lurches wildly into the frame as if the female figure has dragged him inside and thrown him into the room. He thuds against the wall and writhes there helplessly. The footsteps of the woman approach and he cowers down as if expecting to be struck by her. She stops, towering above him and takes his hand.

She waves her hand over his as if she is performing a magic trick. The boy’s fingers wiggle and break free from his hands, metamorphosing into wriggling larvae which she seems to place in the folds of her skirt. The boy is left with a stump for a hand. The woman then repeats the process with his other hand and his feet. Without his toes, the boy careens the ground like a rag doll and lands with a thud, the female figure standing ominously over his limp body.

The woman leaves and the boy struggles to upright himself with the support of the wall. Agony is written on his face but he utters not a sound. He sits quietly near the corner of the room which is devoid of toys or any other traces that anyone lives in the space. He tries to crawl and stand but falls flat on his face. The female figure walks through the grass and gazes in the window as if checking up on him. 

In the next scene, the woman kneels next to the boy with a smile on her face. The scene looks for a fleeting moment like a loving moment of a mother reassuring her child, but then her hand slides up his arm and the image cuts away to piles of larvae falls to the floor with dull plopping sounds. The woman then picks up a giant larvae as if it were an infant in her arms – presumably all that is left of the boy and strokes it gently.

Apart from pulling and shoving, the film actually has very little violent action in it. Instead, the animation uses symbolism to express the psychological impact of abuse. The transformation of the boy’s digits, and then his entire body into an insect in its larval stage expresses the fear, helplessness, revulsion, and confusion that a child feels when abused by a loved one. The fact that the Shiroki has chosen the larval stage of development is significant because abuse forces a child to remain in a place of helplessness and dependence instead of being given the support he needs in order to grow up into a mature adult. The site of the boy pathetically trying to manoeuvre his truncated body across the room expresses the psychological horror of abuse in a way rarely seen in animation.

The Woman who stole fingers is Saori Shiroki’s graduate work from the Tokyo University of the Arts' Graduate School of Film and New Media. It has a very subtle soundtrack - clearly the best soundtrack of any of her films thus far - thanks to the sound design of Karuhiro Miyaoka. Shiroki herself wrote, directed, painted, and edited the film. It was produced by Koji Yamamura.

This is the final installment in a series of four posts examining the work of Saori Shiroki. To read more, click on titles in the filmography.

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”)

Saori Shiroki’s MAGGOT (2007)

A house stands against a pitch black sky surrounded at the end of a field of tall grass.  The house is surrounded by a tall, imposing wall. Suddenly, there is a movement in an upper storey window and a young boy escapes the house down a rope. As he exits the gate, he crouches down and begins to hop like a bunny rabbit down the path. He pauses for a moment, kneeling in order to pick up something small and put it in a jar, and then he continues to hop down the path.

In the next moment, we see that he is chasing little maggots as they crawl about under the light of a street lamp. He follows the little white worms to the base of the streetlamp and they lead him to a cardboard box. Opening the box, he discovers the carcass of a rabbit, its stomach wide open as if it has been disembowelled in a lab experiment.

In the reverse shot of the boy’s reaction to his discovery, we suddenly find ourselves back in his room. He delightedly pulls out the rabbit, holding it up in his arms as if he were a child discovering The Velveteen Rabbit at Christmas. He lays the rabbit on a table and gets out his jar of maggots and pours them into his gaping belly then sews up the rabbit. The maggots begin to devour the flesh of the rabbit, causing its surface to writhe. The boy widens his eyes in wonder and delight.  He embraces the rabbit, as if in a scene out of a storybook and a tear falls from his eye. In the final shot of the film before the credits, a maggot falls, replicating the moment of the tear, against a black background and crawls off screen.

I first saw MAGGOT as part of the CALF Animation Special at Nippon Connection 2011. It was the only film on the programme that was completely silent. There was some unease in the audience because we thought there was a technical problem, but the lack of a soundtrack was an intentional decision on the part of the animator Saori Shiroki. I contacted her to find out why she decided to leave the film silent.

The first reason is that she was concerned that the music would distract or mislead the audience in their interpretation of the film. Shiroki experimented with several different options for the sound design of the film, but none was satisfactory. Using realistic sounds of the maggots would distract from mood of the piece as the boy himself is the emotional centre of the film. Shiroki explained to me that she felt there would be no music in the boy’s head because he is so intently concentrating. She wanted to create the impression of the child as an innocent and adding music may have taken away from the impression she wished to create.

The second reason relates to Shiroki’s love of silent movies. Of course, silent movies were never really completely silent as they had musical or benshi accompaniment, but silent movies do draw our attention to the importance of sound in a film. Particularly, how the accompaniment can alter our interpretation of the film. Shiroki’s passion for silent movies also explains the colourless nature of her films. Instead, she  is drawn to the stark contrasts of black and white composition. The absence of colour means that the textures of the brush strokes are central to creating mood.

For me, MAGGOT gives the impression of a lonely child. In order to interact with the world, he must escape from the confines of his room. There is something so tragic about the innocent delight he takes in collecting the maggots and holding the rabbit corpse in his arms. It makes such a contrast with the classic children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit in which the velveteen rabbit first competes with other toys for his boy’s affection and then seeks to become real through love. MAGGOT is this story in reverse: the boy appears to have no toys and seeks to bring to life a real rabbit that has been killed. It’s a heartbreaking series of images and not for the faint of heart. . . nor the weak stomached.

This is part three in a four part series examining the work of Saori Shiroki (銀木沙織, b. 1984). Click on titles in the filmography to read more.

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”)