Nishikata Film Review

16 January 2012

Mirai Mizue’s Tatamp (2011)

“One living thing. One sound. Becomes chaos. Becomes melody.”

“This living thing has one sound but a thousand forms.”

Mirai Mizue continues his experimentation with music and movement in his latest “cell animation” Tatamp. Not to be confused with the animation technique of “cel animation”, Mizue’s unique style of “cell animation” is hand-drawn and coloured on paper then scanned onto the computer for editing. The name refers to the fact that the creatures that he draws resemble amoeba and other minute organic creatures one might find under the lens of a microscope.

As the onomatopoetic title Tatamp suggests, sound designer twoth (aka Shinichi Suda) employs a number of different percussive sounds (shakers, synth, snare drum, etc.) in this piece in addition to harp, whistle, loon calls and other experimental noises. As with Jam (2009), the film begins in a minimalistic fashion with one sound being represented by a moving shape or shapes. The cells splash onto the screen and disappear like fireworks exploding in the sky. The appearance and movement of the shapes is directly related to the timbre and duration of each sound.

The more full the soundtrack, the more full the screen is with shapes, and as the tempo increases, so too the movement of the shapes. The score follows a pattern of rising and falling with the screen alive with abstract shapes and a chaos of movement at each peak. The grand finale is an explosion of colour and movement with the individual “cells” layered densely on the screen. Another fantastic film from Mizue in the tradition of visual music.

Learn more about Mirai Mizue and order his DVD from CALF. The DVD is also available from British Animation Awards.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Lord of Chaos: The Cinema of Sono Sion (2011)

Lord of Chaos: The Cinema of Sono Sion

Il signore del chaos: Il cinema di Sono Sion

In December, the 29th Torino Film Festival (TFF, 25 November – 3 December 2011) honoured Sion Sono by featuring his oeuvre in their Rapporto confidenziale (Confidential Report) section. This annual programme aims to take note of emerging auteurs, genres, and other trends in international cinema.

In honouring Sono, TFF describes him as an “eccentric and mesmerizing Japanese poet, novelist and director” whose works had never before been screened in Italian cinemas. They go on to call him a “visionary” and a “provocative and dynamic filmmaker. . . [who] mixes mixes psychoanalysis and Grand Guignol, melodrama and pop culture, horror and politics, serial killers and dark ladies.” (source)

In addition to presenting almost all of Sono’s films, TFF teamed up with the Italian blog Sonatine: Appunti sul cinema giapponese contemporaneo (Sonatine: Notes on contemporary Japanese cinema) to publish a book of essays and film reviews called Il signore del chaos: Il cinema di Sono Sion (Lord of Chaos: The Cinema of Sono Sion).

The book is edited by Dario Tomasi and Franco Picollo and features the writing of not only the editors but also Claudia Bertolè, Matteo Boscarol, Luca Calderini, Giacomo Calorio, Emanuela Martini, Grazia Paganelli, and Fabio Rainelli. The cover features a photograph of the director taken at TFF. The book includes a complete filmography with titles in Japanese/romaji/English/ Italian

For non-Italian speakers, I recommend checking out the Sonatine website using Google Translate. As Italian sentence structure is very similar to English it is quite readable – unlike the bizarre world of Google JP to EN!! Check out the following reviews on Sonatine:

1984 Rabu songu (Love Song)

1985   Ore wa Sono Sion da! (I Am Sono Sion!)
1986   Ai (Love)
1986   Otoko no hanamichi (Man's Flower Road)

1988   Kessen!Joshiryō tai danshiryō (Decisive Match! Girls Dorm Against Boys Dorm)
1990   Jitensha toiki (Bicycle Sighs)
1992   Heya (The Room)

1997 Keiko desu kedo (I Am Keiko / It's Me Keiko)
1998 Dankon - The Man (Dankon: The Man)

2000 Utsushimi (Utsushimi)

2002 Jisatsu sākuru (Suicide Club)

2005 Yume no naka e (Into a Dream)
2005 Kimyōna sākasu (Strange Circus)

2006 Hazard (Hazard)

2006 Noriko no shokutaku (Noriko's Dinner Table)

2006 Kikyū kurabu, sono go (Balloon Club).

2007   Exte (Exte: Hair Extensions)
2009   Ai no mukidashi (Love Exposure)
2009   Chanto tsutaeru (Be Sure to Share), 2009

2010 Tsumetai nettaigyo (Cold Fish)

2011 Koi no tsumi (Guilty of Romance)

2011 Himizu (Himizu)

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

13 January 2012

Yuri Norstein’s Animation Top 20 (2003)

The great Russian animator Yuri Norstein (aka Yuriy Norshteyn, b. 1941) is widely admired in Japan by both mainstream and independent animators alike. His works The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and The Tale of Tales (1978) topped the Laputa Top 150 Japanese and World Animation poll done in 2003. His work is so beloved that even his unfinished adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat entered the list at #92. Norstein himself participated in the 2003 poll and his picks are listed below.

But first, a bit of background information:

Yuri Norstein has close ties to the Laputa International Animation Festival. The festival began in 2000 and semi-annually presents the Yuri Norstein Award (ユーリ・ノルシュテイン大賞) – with, I believe, Norstein himself acting as the head of the jury. The prize was jointly awarded in its inaugural year to Hiroyuki Tsutita for his film Mutate and to Hiroshi Okuda for Prisoner. Oscar-winner animator Kunio Katō won the Yuri Norstein Award twice: first in 2001 for The Apple Incident and again in 2004 for The Diary of Tortov Roddle. Hosokawa Susumu won the award in 2005 for Demons and Yusuke Sakamoto won in 2006 for The Telegraph Pole Mother. In 2008, the award was given to a non-Japanese for the first time. Latvian animator Vladimir Leschiov took the prize for Lost In Snow. It was my understanding that the award would be given out again in 2010, but I have been unable to find any evidence of this happening – though they did show a retrospective of Norstein’s works at the festival that year. The next festival will have an activist theme as they put out a call for “Fukushima Animation” last autumn. It is unclear when the 11^th festival will take place.

2007 saw the establishment of the Laputa Art Animation School – a “small school” where they teach the art of making animation by hand (puppet, cutout, drawn, etc.). The school creation is credited to Norstein’s insistence that Japan needed its own school of animation in the vein of the great Eastern European centres for training animators. The school even uses Norstein’s iconic hedgehog as their logo. At Laputa, indisputed masters of the art of animation including Fumiko Magari and Sumiko Hosaka – puppet masters who worked for Tadanari Okamoto and Kihachirō Kawamoto – and the avant-garde legend Yōji Kuri teach students the tricks of the trade.

There are no surprises in Yuri Norstein’s top 20. He lists a cross-section of some of the very best in world animation with nods to both early animation pioneers (Ladislaw Starewicz, Alexandre Alexeieff, Claire Parker, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Norman McLaren, David Hand, Jiří Trnka) and terrific contemporary work (Nick Park, Aleksandr Petrov, Michael Dudok de Wit). He even gives a nod to his Japanese hosts in recognizing the work of Osamu Tezuka and Kihachirō Kawamoto. If you were teaching a course on world animation of the 20^th century and could only show 20 films – this list would suit nicely. Though you would be hard-pressed to find a copy of Frantisek Vystrcil’s The Place in the Sun.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012