Pieces (おまけ, 2003)

Like his predecessor Tadanari Okamoto, Kōji Yamamura (山村浩二, b. 1964) is an animator who constantly experiments with new methods and ideas. Pieces (おまけ/Omake, 2003) is one of Yamamura’s lesser known films but one of his most fun. This animated short really expresses Yamamura’s love of exploring the possibilities that animation has to offer an artist interested in pushing the boundaries of his medium as a form of expression.

Pieces is not a story but a playful series of nine vignettes that incorporates visual gags, 19th century animation technology, and surrealist humour. Yamamura’s clever use of repetition and variation makes the film as a whole very dynamic.

Vignettes #1, #5, and #9 feature a typical Yamamura character with a comically oversized head and a carrot nose accompanied by his tiny dog. These three vignettes have the same kind of humour and absurdity as the great French master Jacques Tati. Each vignette becomes more and more absurd. The first employs toilet humour, the fifth sees it raining under rather than on the man’s umbrella, and the final one plays with perspective and has a surprising ending which sees the man almost consuming his dog.

Vignettes #1-9, in order of left to right, up to down

Vignette #3 plays with shapes with a sequence of images in which a bird dives into the sea to catch fish is inverted into the surprising shape of a man in a bowler hat. #7 is a delightfully surreal vignette in which a headless man screws what appears to me an empty bowl onto his head, but it turns out to be a light bulb.

Vignette’s #2, #4, #6 and #8 are interpretations of the phenakistoscope – an early animation device that used the principle of the persistence of vision to create an illusion of motion. The phenakistoscope uses a spinning disc attached to a handle. I give a more detailed explanation of the device in my review of Taku Furukawa’s Phenakistoscope (驚き盤/Odorokiban, 1975) – a brilliant animated tribute to the device which won Furukawa the Special Jury Prize at Annecy in 1975. Although briefer than Furukawa’s film, Yamamura’s short phenakistoscope sequences are dazzling in their attention to detail. He used an image from vignette #6 as the front cover of his book Welcome to the World of Animation (アニメーションの世界へようこそ, 2006).  All in all, Pieces is a short and sweet visual treat fans of indie animation shouldn't miss out on. 

If you are in the Tokyo area, be sure to check out Yamamura's latest work in the Muybridge's Strings Road Show (until October 7th at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)

To see Pieces for yourself and to support this indie artist order: 

Atamayama - Koji Yamamura Sakuhinshu

from Japan (JP/EN) or from the States:

Shigeru Tamura’s Top Animated Films

The fantastic world of Shigeru Tamura’s illustrations and animations is a curious combination of science fiction landscapes with 19th and early 20th century characters that look more European than Japanese. When I looked up Tamura’s response to the Laputa 150 poll, I half expected the list to include a lot of Eastern European animation because the young boy in URSA minor BLUE is called Yuri. While the list does include Yuri Norstein’s celebrated classic The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), Tamura’s list actually reveals his fascination with a wide spectrum of animation styles.

Tamura lists 15 animation favourites in no particular order. He clearly loves early animation such as Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the early Felix the Cat series, and Betty Boop’s comical outing as Snow White (1933). He also displays a fondness for classic animation series such as Mickey Mouse when he was at his best in the 1930s and the Tex Avery classics (Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, et al.).

As Tamura works mainly with hand drawn and computer animation, I was surprised to see such a variety of stop motion animation on his list. From the pioneering stop motion work in the original King Kong movie to the surreal worlds of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988), the Brothers Quay's Street of Crocodiles (1986) and the bolexbrothers’ The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993), Tamura clearly has an admiration for innovative filmmakers. It’s particularly interesting to note his choice of Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out (amusingly called “Cheese Holiday” in Japanese) as a favourite rather than Nick Park’s more polished later Wallace and Gromit films. A Grand Day Out is pleasingly rough around the edges and has a more outlandish plot than the others.

What distinguishes Tamura’s own work for me has always been his bold use of colours and his fantastic imaginary worlds. I can see how the psychedelic colours of Yellow Submarine (1968), the imaginative worlds of Fantastic Planet (1973) and Laputa: Castle in Sky (1986), and the poetic splendour of Night of Bald Mountain (1933) would appeal to Tamura’s poetic sensibilities. If you haven’t seen the films and series on Tamura’s list, I highly recommend seeking them out.

Gertie the Dinosaur

(恐竜ガーティ, Winsor McCay, 1914)

Felix in Hollywood (1923)

Early episodes of the classic Felix the Cat series

(１９２０年代頃の猫のフィリックス, produced by Pat Sullivan, c.1920s)

The classic series ran from 1919-36

Paramount Pictures (1919-1921)

Margaret J. Winkler (1922-1925)

Educational Pictures (1925-1928)

The Band Concert (Wilfred Hand, 1935)

Mickey Mouse Series 1935-1939

(１９３５年-１９３９年頃のミッキーマウスシリーズ, Wilfred Jackson/David Hand/Walt Disney)

Snow White (Betty Boop Series)

(ベティの白雪姫, Dave Fleischer, 1933)

Night on Bald Mountain

(禿山の一夜, Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve, Alexandre Alexeieff/Claire Parker, 1933)

Happy Go Nutty (1944)

The works of Tex Avery

(テックス・アヴェリーの一連作品, 1942-1958)

Hedgehog in the Fog

(霧につつまれたハリネズミ, Yuri Norstein, 1975)

Street of Crocodiles

(ストリート・オブ・クロコダイル, Brothers Quay, 1986)

Alice

(アリス, Jan Švankmajer, 1988)

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

(天空の城ラピュタ, Hayao Miyazaki, 1986)

Fantastic Planet

(ファンタスティック・プラネット, La Planète sauvage, René Laloux, 1973)

Yellow Submarine

(イエロー・サブマリン, George Dunning, 1968)

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out

(ウォレスとグルミット チーズホリデー, Nick Park, 1989)

The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

(親指トムの奇妙な冒険, Dave Borthwick, 1993)

King Kong

(キングコング, Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

To support this independent artist you can order his work at cdjapan:

Ginga no Sakana - URSA minor BLUE (JP only)

URSA minor BLUE (soundtrack on CD)

URSA minor BLUE (銀河の魚, 1993)

Shigeru Tamura’s animated short URSA minor BLUE (銀河の魚/Ginga no Sakana, 1993) begins with a simple scene that could be right out of an Ernest Hemingway novel: a grandfather fishing with his grandson. The grandson, Yuri, is quite able with the hand-thrown harpoon and he soon catches an impressive fish for their supper.  As they return home with their catch, Teshikai Utollo’s otherworldly music hints that all in this world may not be the same as in ours. The grandfather sends Yuri to find tomatoes for dinner and we discover that they have an indoor rain forest complete with a lemur-like creature whose eyes shine like headlights. The tomatoes that Yuri picks seem to pulsate with a strange light.

While the grandfather comically burns their dinner, Yuri ascends to the observatory above their home. Looking through an unusual telescope he discovers that the constellation of Ursa Minor appears to be missing a star. The pair set off in their rowboat again to try to find out what is going on. They pass through a talking forest and a rocky area with mythical flying beasts. Along the way, a walking and talking building approaches them and voices his concern that stars seem to be missing from the Milky Way. They reassure him that they are going to investigate and return the Milky Way to its original state.

As they head out over what appears to be open sea, Tamura (たむら しげる, b. 1949) shifts to an overhead perspective and we then realize that Yuri and his grandfather do not live in our world but rather above it. The sea that they are rowing across is the atmosphere and they are able to look down at a world that resembles ours. As they journey out into the universe, they witness a giant fish unlike any they have ever seen.  They come to a place where giants who seem hewn from rock appear to be forging stars on giant anvils and are greeted by the wizard who lives there. They soon learn that a giant fish has been eating the stars and the wizard presents Yuri with a magic harpoon and sends him on a mission to try to catch the fish in order to return the Milky Way to its normal state. Hence the Japanese title Ginga no Sakana, or Fish of the Milky Way.

The grandfather also refers to the Milky Way by its colloquial name Ama no gawa (天の川), or River of the Heavens, which suggested to me that Tamura was influenced by mythology in his creation of his fabulous world. In East Asian mythology it is said that the Milky Way resembles a kind of silvery river and mythological stories developed around this impression. The most famous is that of the stars Vega and Altair, who were said to be lovers (named Orihime and Hikoboshi in Japanese) separated by the Milky Way who could only meet once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month – a day celebrated in many parts of Japan as Tanabata (七夕/the evening of the seventh). The mythology surrounding the Milky Way has inspired much great literature – most famously Kenji Miyazawa’s Night of the Milky Way Railroad, which Tamura references by having a train pass under Yuri and his grandfather as they row across the sky. 

(Learn more about Anime Adaptations of Kenji Miyazawa)

As the English title suggests, colour is an important element of Tamura’s work. The predominant colour in this film is blue, but there are also wonderful scenes of green and orange when they visit the wizard. This style of filling the screen with bold colours is characteristic of Tamura’s aesthetic. His manner of completely filling the screen with colour reminded me of two younger animators: Tomoyoshi Joko – who also made a wonderful little film involving anthropomorphic buildings called simply Buildings (2008) – and Oscar winner Kunio Katō.  .  .  although Katō uses a more muted palette to fill the screen than the cheerful colours of Shigeru Tamura.

URSA minor BLUE won the Noburo Ofuji Award in 1993 and is available on DVD. The DVD extras include a music section where Teshiaki Utollo explains the motivations behind his expressive soundtrack, an illustration gallery, storyboards, layouts, interviews about the production with Tamura, Utollo, and producer Mitsuo Shionaga, and trailers for Tamura’s other animated works a piece of PHANTASMAGORIA (1995) and Glassy Ocean (1998). The soundtrack for URSA minor BLUE can also be purchased separately.  Check out more of Tamura's illustrations on his official homepage.  

Ginga no Sakana - URSA minor BLUE (JP only)

URSA minor BLUE (soundtrack on CD)

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

text © Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011