Towards the Rainbow (虹に斑って, 1977)

The great puppet animator Tadahito Okamoto (岡本 忠成, 1932-90) was at his most prolific during the 1970s, sometimes creating two or even three short films per year.  The most beautiful of these is Towards the Rainbow (虹に斑って/Niji ni Mukatte, 1977): a story of love conquering all odds.  The 18 minute short is adapted from the folk tale Futari ga kaketa Hashi (ふたりがかけた橋) by Etsuo Okawa about two young lovers separated by a river. 

The story is narrated by screen legend Kyoko Kishida, who lent her voice to numerous puppet animations by both Okamoto and his friend and colleague Kihachiro Kawamoto.  The story is interwoven with the music of folk singer Kōhei Oikawa, who adapted the story Futari ga kaketa Hashi into song for the film.  Okamoto had used Oikawa once before for the music for Praise Be For Small Ills (南無一病息災, 1973).

Okamoto sets the scene with an ancient, creased map of two communities in the mountains that are separated by a fast flowing river.  The divided communities feud with each other with the young boys calling names and throwing rocks at each other across the deep gorge.  A young girl on one side of the river collects flowers which she offers the boys on the other side of the river as a gesture of goodwill, but she is cruelly struck down by stones.  A young boy tries to stop his older peers from continuing to throw stones at her and is struck down himself. 

From that moment on a friendship blossoms between the girl and boy.  One day, he brings her a present in a basket which he tries to send to her side of the river along a rope, but some boys tear the rope out of her hands and the basket washes away in the river.  In spite of all these obstacles, their love for each other only grows stronger.  When the boy grows into a young man, he braves the terrible current of the river with his raft to visit his love on her side of the river.  Their love seems impossible for both are bound by responsibilities to their own families and communities. 

The young man decides to build a bridge across the river and sets to work with supporters from his village.  However, the river is too strong and knocks the bridge down.  In her distress over the seeming impossibility of their romance, the woman falls into the river and the young man rescues her.  As she lies in shock in his arms, the couple sees a magical display of white cranes forming a bridge over the river and the woman experiences a vision in which she dances on a rainbow joining the two communities.  This vision inspires them with the idea of building a new kind of bridge that does not need a support beam.  The tale promotes the value of devotion, dedication, and perseverance.

Towards the Rainbow is a truly spectacular stop motion animation.  The puppets were handcrafted out of wood and cloth and the misty backgrounds and sets – which are similar to those used in Okamoto’s previous film The Strong Bridge (ちからばし, 1976)  – have been made with an eye to historical accuracy.  Okamoto is said to have done extensive research about how such bridges were designed and constructed in the period in which the film is set.  The attention to detail practised by Okamoto and his puppet and art designers can be seen in everything from the men having stubble on their faces after a long day of work to the use of a professional choreographer to assist with the young woman’s dance on the rainbow in the dream sequence.

In the opening sequence the young girl is shown picking flowers in a field of higanbana or red spider lilies – which fans of Japanese cinema will recognize from Yasujiro Ozu’s film Equinox Flower (彼岸花/Higanbana, 1958).  Higanbana – which also appear on the cover of the original storybook – usually bloom around the autumn equinox near countryside graveyards and are associated with the journey of the soul into the next world.  It is clear that the bridges being built in Towards the Rainbow, are not just literal but spiritual as well.  The film comes full circle, beginning and ending in autumn with the narrator declaring that the young heroine in her bridal garb is more beautiful than the autumn leaves.

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Director

Tadanari Okamoto 岡本忠成

Original Story

Etsuo Okawa 大川悦生

Screenplay

Kunpei Nagakura 永倉薫平　

Yoko Higashikawa 東川洋子　

Tadanari Okamoto 岡本忠成

Animation

Seishiro Fujimori 藤森誠代　

Hirokazu Minegishi 峰岸裕和　

Hiroshi Taisenji  奏泉寺博　

Tokiko Ōmukai 大向とき子　

Yumiko Yoshida 横田由美子

Art Design

Takashi Komae 小前隆　

Masami Tokuyama 徳山正美　

Chizuko Makisaka 槇坂千鶴子　

Minoru Kujirai 鯨井実

Puppets

Sumiko Hosaka 保坂純子　

Yoshiko Kumahiko 阿彦よし子　

Sumie Ishii 石井寿美恵

Cinematography

Minoru Tamura 田村実

Editor

Naoko Aizawa 相沢尚子

Sound

Isamu Koufuji 甲藤勇

Narration

Kyoko Kishida  岸田今日子

Choreography

Saburō Satō 佐藤三郎

Music 

(composition/performance)

Kōhei Oikawa 及川恒平

Musicians

Paper Land  ペーパーランド　

Shuji Honda 本田修二　

Makoto Kouda幸田実　

Masayuki Nakatomi 中富雅之　

Kifu Mitsuhashi 三橋貴風 (shakuhachi)

Credits courtesy of Animations Wiki

Towards the Rainbow won Tadanari Okamoto his 5^th Noburo Ofuji Award at the 16^th Mainichi Film Concours.  This review is part of Nishikata Film Review’s  Noburo Ofuji Award Challenge.

text © Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Zipangu Fest 2011

Zipangu Fest gets underway tomorrow night in London and runs until the 24^th of November.  It is the first UK-wide festival devoted to Japanese film.  The festival bills itself as a showcase for the best of cutting edge and avant-garde Japanese cinema.  Last year’s inaugural festival took place at various venues around London’s East End before travelling to regional events in Bristol, Leeds, Coventry, Nottingham and Newcastle in the UK, and further afield to Tallinn, Estonia.  This year's festival is packed with cinematic gems both new and old.

Animation and Experimental Films

My favourite parts of the festival programme this year are the animation and experimental film events.  There are two screenings celebrating the work of Takashi Makino: Enter the Cosmos and Seasons Inter View.  Makino is one of Japan’s top experimental filmmakers.  His colourful abstract works take spectators on a journey of the senses.  Makino will be in attendance for the latter of the two screenings. 

Some brilliant animated shorts will be featured in the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits screening including works by Ryu Furusawa, Ryo Hirano, and KTOONZ.  I highly recommend the work of Image Forum graduates Nasuka Saito and Mana Fujii, whose works I ranked as the best of the Dome Animation special at Nippon Connection 2010.  

Julian Ross has curated a special event for Zipangu called Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I and II + Cat Soup which will present a spectrum of experimental works past and present.  It is a strong programme which will be topped off by a screening of Tatsuo Sato's Cat Soup (2001) with live accompaniment by premiere noise-rock band Bo Ningen. All proceeds from this event with go to disaster relief efforts in Japan.

Documentaries

The festival will open with the stunning new film KanZeOn (Neil Cantwell, 2011), a mystical journey from the timeless to the modern that examines the role of sound in Japanese Buddhism. This screening includes a discussion with special guests Neil Cantwell, Tim Grabham, and ta2mi led by Lucia Dolce, the director of the Centre for the Study of Japanese Religion at SOAS.

In the wake of the March 11 disaster in the Tohoku region of Japan, Zipangu has introduced a Nuclear Reactions programme featuring Hitomi Kamanaka’s documentaries Ashes to Honey (read review) and Rokkasho Rhapsody (read review) - both of which I recommend highly.  In addition, Zipangu is screening Shinpei Takeda’s moving road-trip documentary Hiroshima Nagasaki Download, in which two college friends interview atomic bomb survivors living in North America.  There will be a Q+A with the director after the screening.  Hiroshima Nagasaki Download will be preceded by The Student Wrestler (Yumehito Imanari, 2010) which was the winner of the audience award at Image Forum 2010.

Other docs on the programme include We Don’t Care About Music Anyway (Cédric Dupire/Gaspard Kuentz, 2009) about  Tokyo’s avant-garde noise music scene and horror meets J-pop in Shirome, a mockumentary that involves director Koji Shiraishi luring prepubescent idol band Momoiro Clover into a supposedly haunted abandoned school – the result lies somewhere between the Blair Witch Project and the X-Factor.

Rare Films

The Zipangu Retro programme will feature a rare screening of the 1959 docudrama Lucky Dragon No. 5 directed by one of post-war Japan’s most important independent film makers, Kaneto Shindō.  It tells the story of the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb catastrophe that exposed a Japanese fishing boat crew to radioactive fallout.  

Another rare film being screened as part of Zipangu Retro is a 1930s ghost story The Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen (Kiyohiko Ushihara, 1938).  Subtitled especially for Zipangu Fest and never seen before in the UK, this gem is one of Japan’s few surviving pre-war horror films.

UK Premiere of Abraxas 

UK fans of Japanese cinema should also be sure to check out the UK premiere of the much-lauded feature film Abraxas, which tells the story of a punk musician turned Buddhist monk.  Abraxas was a surprise hit at the 2011 Sundance Festival and was well received at Nippon Connection 2011.  Read Marc Saint-Cyr’s review of the film to learn more.

Zipangu Fest 2011 – celebrating the best of cutting edge and avant-garde Japanese cinema – will be held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Café Oto from November 18th to 24th, before moving to venues around the UK. The festival will showcase a selection of Japan’s finest features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films.  For full details visit: http://zipangufest.com.

Paper Films (Le cinéma sur papier / ペーパーフィルム, 2005)

With the aid of computers, mainstream animation has become more and more complex over the years as each studio tries to outdo the other with eye-popping 3D effects.  While the renowned animator Taku Furukawa has always been open to tinkering with new technologies, at heart he has always recognized the value of animation in its most basic form of putting pen to paper and drawing a series of images.

Furukawa’s 2005 animated short Paper Films (Le cinéma sur papier / ペーパーフィルム, 2005) harkens back to his exploration of early animation in his 1975 award-winning film Phenakistiscope (Odorokiban/驚き版).  In Phenakistiscope, he imitated the 19th century circular spinning toy of the same name.  With Paper Films, he takes animation back to its even more ancient form of a horizontal sequence of images that depict stages of motion.

 The illusion of motion is demystified in Paper Films as Furukawa first shows the paper pictures that make up his animation on a gallery wall, before setting them into motion.  A row of just over half a dozen images of a sun pop up and down like ponies on a carousel.  Furukawa then moves the camera in to capture just one of the animated images to reveal that instead the pupils of the green-nosed sun are actually people. 

This pattern of showing the miniature images in a row then moving in closer to reveal a surprise repeats throughout the film.  In one instance we see what looks like a couple consuming a heart-shaped cake, but when the camera moves in closer we see that it is no ordinary couple but a centaur and a mermaid.  Another sequence appears just to be that of a crescent moon lying down, but then the camera moves in closer to reveal a naked woman popping out of the moon like Momotaro from the peach.

Paper Films is a useful film for teaching students the principles of animation and the significance of perspective in animation.  When seen in an animated sequence onscreen, some series of images give the impression of horizontal movement.  However, when the camera focuses on just one of the series the movement appears to be vertical: a Humpty Dumpty figure wearing an anti-war slogan on a T-shirt is not really moving sideways, but plummeting onto a row of tanks like a bomb; a car that looks like it is moving from left to right is actually moving from the distance into the foreground; and so on.

As ever, Taku Furukawa is having fun with animation and he playfully drops references to historical antecedents that shaped both his artistic aesthetic and his sense of humour – everything from Muybridge to the Marx Brothers.  The playful nature of the film is emphasized by the lyrical score by his daughter Momoko Furukawa (official website) and Akihiro Yoshida.


The title of this film is occasionally rendered as "Paper Film" because of the ambiguity of the katakana English title.  I chose the plural "Paper Films" for the title because that is how it appears in the opening credits of the film.  The plural makes sense because the 6'21" short is actually made up of many seconds long animated short films.  

Paper Films appears on the Anido DVD Takun Films 2.