Hiroco Ichinose’s quirky animated shorts have been delighting festival audiences since
2006. The Last Breakfast (2006), Ha・P (2008), and Cow’s Day (2009) combine stylistic sparseness with a touch
of the surreal much like the films of her mentor Taku Furukawa.
Her most recent independent work, Two Tea Two,
has a very tactile feel to it, with its inky lines drawn on a textured
paper. An alarm clock rings, awakening a
long-haired woman with an angular face sleeping naked in her bed. She tilts her head and contorts herself into
a round shape, as if stretching her body awake.
She rushes off-screen and we hear a door close. She reappears again in a loose fitting
dress. The sound suggests she is now on
a public street and we see her gaze in a window, her face reflecting in a
window as if she were a two-headed creature as she observes a cup of tea.
Cut to the woman seated in a low
chair, her body oversized and contorted, as she tries to drink from her tea
cup. She looks up and a lovely short
sequence unfolds in which we see traces of the world outside the café window –
black ink on yellow paper. A shadow of
another female figure appears outside the window looking in at our
protagonist. Two women or the woman’s
face reflected in the window? She tilts
her head inspecting the reflection of herself.
When she straightens, her mirror image remains contorted. She pokes the contorted mirror image of
herself and the mirror image rounds into her chubby form again, knocking the
lid off the sugar dish as she floats to the other side of the table. A small insect spreads its wings and scurries
past the sugar dish.
We now have two identical women – or
the same woman reflected – sitting in low chairs facing each other, with the
coffee table hidden under the tangle of their long legs in high-heeled shoes. They stare at each other, steaming tea cups
in their hands. In a split screen, the
mirror image appears to speak to her original.
The woman with her bare shoulders above the red dress now stands in a storm, her long black hair streaming to the side in
the wind. A second head and long neck
appear – a two headed woman staring at the audience. She then curls herself into a ball and floats
away.
Back in the café, the winged insect wanders
around a stray sugar cube on the table.
It splits in half then reforms before munching on the sugar cube. The chubby version of the woman jumps past
the cashier with a chink of change hitting the counter, then sheds her clothes
as she jumps off screen. A door squeaks
as it closes on the vignette. The alarm
clock rings as the end credits roll. The
animated short finishes with a reprise of the city setting and the woman
jumping to the coffee table in her two-headed form.
For me, Two Tea Two captures the ambivalent relationship many women have
with their bodies. Rationally we may have
come to terms with our physical selves, but first thing in the morning,
pre-tea/coffee and depending on what phase of lunar cycle it is, our bodies may
feel heavy and bloated. Looking bleary
eyed in the mirror or at one’s reflection in a café window first thing in the
morning, it is not unusual for a woman to search her own face as if it were a
stranger’s, trying to reconcile our external selves with our internal selves.
I love the little touches in this
animated short of the action of city life passing by in fragments, and I
identify with the feeling of being elephantine and klutzy in a tiny café. This is a nice film to watch together with Aico Kitamura’s Getting
Dressed (2010) as both films explore the relationship between a woman’s
physical self and her state of mind.
Hiroco Ichinose (瀬皓コ, b. 1984) is, together with her husband Tomoyoshi Joko, one half of the creative animation team Decovocal. She is
a graduate of the animation department of Tokyo Polytechnic University, where
she has taught part time since 2009. In
addition to her independent animated shorts, Ichinose has worked on commercial
animation including the Rita and Whatsit
and Bee TV animated TV series.
