Legend of the Forest (森の伝説, 1987)

Legend of the Forest (森の伝説/Mori no Densetsu, 1987) is Osamu Tezuka’s flawed, unfinished masterpiece. It took Tezuka and his staff more than a decade to complete the first and fourth movements of the piece. In 2008, there were rumors that Tezuka’s son Macoto Tezka (Black Jack, Akuemon) would finish the project but from what I understand, it is still a work in progress.

Emulating Disney’s Fantasia (1940), the animation was designed with a classical piece of music in mind: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony Op. 36 as performed by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra under conductor Kenichiro Kobayashi.  The story is an adaptation of a Tezuka manga called Musa the Flying Squirrel (モモンガのムサ, November 1971) which was #9 in his 1970s manga series Lion Books (ライオンブックス). Click here to see sample pages from this manga.

The film opens with the camera appearing to track forwards into a ghostly forest. The sense of depth of field and forward movement was likely accomplished by using a multi-plane animation table.  At the end of this sequence, the camera comes to a halt upon an illustration of a giant ancient camphor tree (kusu no ki). Such camphor trees are often seen in Shinto shrines throughout Japan, and the sacredness of these trees is very familiar territory to fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro (1988) where the giant Totoro lives at the foot of such a tree. In Legend of the Forest, the trees are threatened by the forces of modernity in the shape of a large, burly lumberjack. Birds cry out in protest and take flight, animals scurry down the tree in terror.

Note the human emotion of rage on the flying squirrel's face.

The emotion of the scene is increased through the camera panning over the illustrations and cuts to new illustrations and close-ups, for this sequence is not animated. It is a series of illustrations in the style of a children’s storybook (In fact, it reminded me of early to mid-20th century illustrated children's books set in nature like those of Robert McCloskey.) After the panic of the animals is established, the story focuses on a pair of flying squirrels (momonga) whose nest is in the tree that is being chain-sawed. The mother and father desperately try to rescue their tiny, hairless newborn babies one-by-one before the tree falls to the ground. The tension increases until the terrifying moment when the father squirrel loses hold of one of his infants and the baby falls to certain death.

The father’s squirrel’s rage following this moment seems to trigger the film’s transition from storybook montage to animation. Thus begins the film’s secondary layer of story: a journey through animation history beginning with a reference to the 19th century animation toys the Zoetrope and Eadweard Muybridge’s Phenakistoskope.

It is at this moment that the camphor trees come alive as well, with their bark making their faces look wizened and knots turning into eyes. It seems these benevolent trees were watching the flying squirrel family’s struggle and intervened to catch the infant squirrel, gently catching him on one of their leaves. The camphor tree holding the infant, drips some sap down to him in order to give him nourishment.

As the baby squirrel turns his head to drink, the scene moves again from illustration to animation, this time referencing the white on black of early chalk drawing animations of such animation pioneers as J. Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl. As the baby grows up, we are treated to a wide range of references to key moments in animation history from the early animation of Winsor McKay to Fleischer Studios and; of course, Disney.

Disney was perhaps the greatest influence on Osamu Tezuka and many other Japanese animators of his generation. In addition to the Fantasia influence that I mentioned earlier, Legend of the Forest also references early works by Disney and Ub Iwerks like the Alice Comedies (1923-27), Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (c.1927-28), and Plane Crazy (1928, the first Mickey Mouse picture). When the baby squirrel flies for the first time, the animation style of his flight references Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941) – including some rapscallion crows. There are many obvious references to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, et al., 1937) such as an old crone with an apple and seven dwarfs. The romanticizing of the squirrel’s romance with a purple female squirrel is straight out of Bambi (David Hand, 1942) – a film from which Tezuka also borrowed the theme of corrupt humans destroying innocent nature.

It is this borrowing from Bambi that causes the most flawed aspect of the film. The man vs. nature motif is very heavy-handed and goes to such extremes that it seems unlikely that the film will win over anyone to the cause apart from the already converted. The two main flaws are depicting all of humanity monolithically as a force of evil and destruction and the anthropomorphization of nature. It does nothing for the cause of environmentalism to depict animals of having such human emotions as anger, outrage, and vengefulness. The moment the baby squirrel, now grown, decides to exact revenge upon the lumberjack, the environmentalist message is lost. Following this logic, the only conclusion can be an apocalyptic war between humanity and nature in which everyone loses.

Interestingly, the natural world (and its fairies and other mythological creatures) are animated in a style associated with the cinema – the Disney styled in particular, whereas the lumber town and its inhabitants are depicted in the angular style associated with 1960s and 70s television series and commercials.

The visual concept of the film is certainly ambitious and deserving of the 1987 Noburō Ōfuji Award for excellence in animation. In addition to this the film was featured in Laputa’s selection of 30 Treasures of World Animation deserving of mention that were missing from their list of the 150 Best World and Japanese Animation. I look forward to Macoto Tezka’s completion of his father’s film to see how it fills out the story. The film in its current version is weighted very heavily in favour of American animation history and it will be interesting to see if the completed version fills in some of the gaps in the history of world animation.

As there seems to be a lot of misinformation about this film being cut-and-pasted about the web, I thought I would provide the complete credits for the film as they appear in the film itself:

Scenario, Storyboard + Design: Osamu Tezuka

Art Director: Masami Saito

Sound Director: Takashi Ui

Musical Score: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony Op. 36

Tokyo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenichiro Kobayashi

Key Animation:

Masateru Yoshimura

Junji Kobayashi

Shinji Seya

Toshi Noma

Teruo Handa

Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Yoshinori Kanemori

Shinichi Suzuki

Checking: Kaoru Kano

Illustration: Masaki Katori

Colour Design: Rika Fujita

Special Effect: Takashi Maekawa

Camera: Mushi Productions

Editor: Harutoshi Ogata

Producer: Takayuki Matsutani

Assistant Producer: Minoru Kubota

Director: Osamu Tezuka

Sequence Director: Takashi Ui

Order The Astonishing Work of Osamu Tezuka (USA)
The Experimental Films of Osamu Tezuka (OZ)

Order Osamu Tezuka Jikken animation sakuhin shu (JP)

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

text © Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Taku Furukawa “A Playful Heart” Exhibition: “From a Single Line”

A retrospective of the career of Japanese alternative animation pioneer Taku Furukawa has opened this week at the Kichijoji Art Museum in Musashino. Furukawa (古川タク, b. 1941) has worked as an animator, illustrator, teacher and mentor for over 40 years.  He has won many prestigious awards in his career including the Special Grand Jury Prize at Annecy (1975), the Bungeishunju Manga Award (1978) for his book The Takun Humor, and the Noburo Ofuji Award (1980). 

The exhibition is called Taku Furukawa “A Playful Heart” Exhibition: “From a Single Line” (古川タク展「あそびココロ」“1本の線から”). “From a Single Line” refers to his minimalistic line drawing aesthetic. Furukawa has cited the influence of renowned New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) on his trademark style. Furukawa was also influenced early in his career by his mentor Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928). Furukawa worked his way up at Kuri’s studio in the 1960s, eventually doing key animation on many important films such as AOS (1964) and Au Fou! (1965). In 1966, he ventured out as a freelance animator, eventually forming his own studio, Takun Box, in 1970.

The “Playful Heart” in the title of the exhibition refers not only to Furukawa’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humour in his art, but also to playful spirit with which he approaches animation. Handmade films like Nice to See You (1974) follow in the experimental traditions of animators like Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Oskar Fischinger. In Calligraphiti (1982), Furukawa even experiments with direct animation which involves drawing directly onto the film stock itself.

Furukawa’s most notable work combines his experimental tendencies with his playful sense of humour. In Phenakistoscope (Odorokiban, 1975), the film that won him the prestigious Special Grand Jury Prize at Annecy, Furukawa drew his inspiration from the 19th century pre-cinema device of the same name. Using frame-by-frame hand drawn animation techniques, Furukawa replicates the Phenakistoscope discs, animating all 18 stages of successive action at once. Some of the images he depicts are nods to the original subjects of the Phenakistoscope discs, such as a couple dancing, but he moves away from just recreating human movement into a realm of fantasy and the colourfully abstract: a skyscraper with looping freeways above it transforming into a tree, a bride and groom with their bodies elongating and shrinking like an accordion, a woman drinking soda through a straw whose head turns into a bubble that floats away. (Read my review of Phenakistascope to learn more and see same Phenakistascope illustrations).

Not only does Furukawa adapt old technologies to modern sensibilities, but when personal computers came on the scene in the 1980s he also demonstrated a willingness to experiment with new technologies. To the contemporary spectator, the playful doodle animation Mac the Movie (1985) seems unsophisticated to us today; however, it is significant as an early example of animation on an Apple Mac personal computer. The first Macintosh, with its groundbreaking graphics painting software program MacPaint, had only just been introduced the year before in January 1984. Furukawa highlights the playful nature of this experimental film by employing an equally lighthearted soundtrack: a synthesizer interpretation of ‘Singing in the Rain’. Qualities specific to this early personal computer technology include the flicker of the screen and the extra large pixel sizes. Play Jazz (1987) offers a more sophisticated early example of computer animation (I am guessing he did this on a Macintosh II because it’s in colour – the title may be a reference to Lotus Jazz), due in part to the advances in computer technology. The improvisational nature of the Matisse-inspired animation is reflected in the jazz music soundtrack. This combination of experimentation, improvisation, music and animation inevitably reminds one of Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s interpretation of Oscar Peterson’s jazz music in Begone Dull Care (NFB, 1949).

To learn morea bout Taku Furukawa, you can read my reviews of his films Speed, which won the Noburo Ofuji Prize for 1980 and Jyōkyō Monogatari (aka Tyo Story, 1999) - an animated reworking of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). He also made a number of shorts for the long-running NHK series Minna no Uta.

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In addition to showcasing a selection of Furukawa's animations, illustrations and drawings, this exhibition also features installations by Furukawa.  If you are not lucky enough to be in Tokyo for this event, you can support this artist by ordering a selection of Furukawa's works from Anido.  

Taku Furukawa “A Playful Heart” Exhibition: “From a Single Line”
古川タク展「あそびココロ」“1本の線から”  (English info)
July 9th – August 14th

Kichijoji Art Museum
FF Bldg. 7F, 1-8-16 Kichijoji Hommachi, Musashino-shi, Tokyo 180-0004
Phone: 0422-22-0385 Fax: 0422-22-0386

Sweet Silly Love Song (あまっちょろいラブソング, 2010)

Music is Naomi’s life. She stays up late at night composing “sweet silly love songs” on her guitar. Her music distracts her from her day job as a waitress in an Italian restaurant and even from enjoying sex with her boyfriend. However, her passion has yet to transform itself into success in the music industry and during the course of Sohkichi Miyata’s Sweet Silly Love Song (あまっちょろいラブソング, 2010) we will follow Naomi on her journey to decide whether or not to continue pursuing her music or to give it up entirely to follow a more predictable working class life.

Sweet Silly Love Song is a kind of a coming of age story. . . but for thirtysomethings rather than teenagers. Naomi – or Nao-chan as her friends call her – has reached that stage in life where her peers are starting to get married and settle down. For many of her friends, that has meant giving up their passion in life for a steady, salaried income. Her boyfriend, Kobayashi-kun, has sold his camera in order to afford business suits. Her school friend Ryoko has decided to turn a blind eye to her old boyfriend Takeda’s failings in order to marry and have children. Even her most loyal musical collaborator Hisao, the bass player in her band, is quitting music in a last ditch effort to try to regain the affections of his girlfriend Miyo.

Naomi’s story unfolds at an unhurried pace, with Miyata’s camera preferring to observe from a distance in a series of long takes with very few close-ups. The soundtrack is also quiet apart from Naomi’s haunting music. Each scene reveals another layer of depth to Naomi’s character: her generous spirit, her quiet determination, her acceptance of life’s trials. Is life really just “one disappointment after another” as Naomi fears, or can one break out of this downward spiral and find happiness?

Miyata’s script has a few minor weaknesses in it – like the lack of female confidantes and family in Naomi’s life – but on the whole the film is able to stay believable thanks to the unwavering performance of musician Naomi Oroji (follow her on Twitter) in the role of “Naomi”. The supporting cast are also strong including Takashi Yamanaka (Fish Story, Air Doll) as Kobayashi-kun and Katsuya Kobayashi (Running on Empty, Linda Linda Linda) as Naomi’s high school surfer boyfriend Arai.

Perhaps the strongest element of Miyata’s script is his use of trains as metaphors for the choices we have to make in life. Visually, this motif is in the film from the very beginning. It is foregrounded by a conversation that Naomi has with Hirano – the MC from Ryoko and Takeda’s wedding. Hirano has also had to put aside his dream of becoming a successful musician in order to get by in life, but he still clings onto the hope that one day he can make a success of his music. Our journey in life is like being on a “strange train” (変な電車/hen na densha), he explains. Naomi has the choice of staying on the more predictable journey through life, or she can choose to change trains and face the strange and wonderful challenges presented by following her heart.

This film was released in Japan in 2010 and had its international premiere at the Japan FilmFest Hamburg in May.  It is director Sohkichi's Miyata's third feature film after his award-winning Baka Vacance (バカバカンス, 2008) and Sebastian (セバスチャン, 2009).