Nishikata Film Review

14 September 2011

Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund, Part I

Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa at Japan Media Arts Festival Dortmund
Dortmunder U, September 11, 2011

Introduction

On Sunday, September 11th, I took the train up to Dortmund to see the Proto Anime Cut and Japan Media Arts Festival exhibitions at the Dortmunder U. The Proto Anime Cut: Spaces and Visions in Japanese Animation exhibition is sponsored by the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) and features the original artwork of Hideaki Anno, Hiromasa Ogura, Takashi Watanabe, Koji Morimoto, Haruhiko Higami, and Mamoru Oshii. I will write up a review of this exhibition and the accompanying bilingual (DE/EN) publication in the near future. The exhibition runs until October 9th.

The Japan Media Arts Festival exhibition, also sponsored by HMKV runs until October 2nd. You can read more about the programme in my earlier post. I will also be writing reviews of some of the exhibitions and short films later this month.

The highlight of the festival was Sunday’s Film Talk with Masaaki Yuasa. It followed a screening of the first three episodes of Kaiba (2008) and was followed by a screening of Mind Game (2004). The festival will also be showing all 11 episodes of Tatami Galaxy (2010) on Sunday, September 18th. Tatami Galaxy won the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival 2010 as did Mind Game in 2004. Kaiba received an Excellence Prize in 2008.

The film talk with Masaaki Yuasa was conducted by the event curator Stefan Riekeles with simultaneous translation through headphones by two translators in a booth. It reminded me of watching a session of the Canadian parliament. I found it all a bit awkward and prefer the more personable style of translation done at Nippon Connection. The Germans have a very strong dubbing culture and I often find English documentaries that have been dubbed on TV impossible to understand because the English track is usually left so loud that it competes with the German overdub and becomes an unintelligible jumble to me. At times during Sunday's film talk hearing German and Japanese simultaneously became overwhelming, so I may have missed out on some of the nuances and details of the conversation. The following is my impression of the proceedings – with additional information (ie. full titles, years of release, full names, etc.) and observations.

Part I: How did Yuasa get started in animation?

Masaaki Yuasa (湯浅政明, b. 1965) loved anime as a child. He was so wild about one particular TV series that he drew pictures of it and put them up all over the house. I did not hear him name the particular TV anime series he was referring to, but I know from past interviews with Yuasa that he was a fan of Doraemon, Obake no Q-Taro and Hana no Pyun-Pyun Maru as a child. Yuasa noticed pretty early on that drawing was his forte, but when he reached his teenage years he apparently thought that he would have to give up watching anime for more grown-up pursuits. This all changed when Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト, Leiji Matsumoto, 1977) came to the cinemas and he noticed that adults were standing in line to see the film. This was the moment – Yuasa would have been aged 14 at the time – that he realized that anime could be for grown-ups too.

For those of you who don’t know, Space Battleship Yamato (aka Space Cruiser Yamato) was a feature film that was made by condensing Leiji Matsumoto’s 26 episode run of Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト, Leiji Matsumoto, 1974-75) on Yomiuri TV to feature film length. The film was more successful than the TV series and in fact even beat Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) at the Japanese box office.

In his teens, Yuasa started watching more and more anime at the cinema instead of just on TV. This got him interested in pursuing a career in the animation industry. Although I did not hear him mention it on Sunday, Yuasa has in the past often cited Hayao Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (ルパン三世カリオストロの城, 1979) and the TV series Golden Warrior Gold Lightan (黄金戦士ゴールド・ライタン, Koichi Mashimo, 1981-82). In particular, the work that Takashi Nakamura did on Gold Lightan – which was also to influence the work of Kōji Morimoto – was hugely impactful on Yuasa in his teenage years.

Despite his obvious interest in anime, Yuasa’s parents put pressure on him to do a university degree. In order to appease them, he took a degree in oil painting in the Department of Fine Arts of the Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka. Immediately upon graduation, he sought a job drawing for Asia-dō (亜細亜堂) in Saitama because he was a great admirer of their work. In the 1980s, Asia-dō worked on a number of great series including Doraemon and Manga Nippon Mukashi-Banashi.

Part II: Masaaka Yuasa’s Early Career in Animation

To see more photos from this event, see my Google Plus profile or the Nishikata Eiga Facebook page.

Order works by Masaaki Yuasa:

MIND GAME (English Subtitles)

Kaiba 1 [DVD+CD]

The Tatami Galaxy Vol.1

13 September 2011

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.