Takashi Iitsuka’s Super Organic Battle Action Adventure

The young filmmaker Takashi Iitsuka (飯塚貴士, b. 1985) wowed Nippon Connection 2012 with the international premiere of his short film Encounters (エンカウンターズ, 2011).  The half hour action adventure action figure drama has previously screened at festivals in Japan such as the Sendai Short Film Festival and the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Encounters uses neither stop motion animation nor any CG effects.  It is purely old school live action puppet action – a technique which Iizuka has christened “Super Organic Battle Action.”  Using handmade action figures and monster puppets, Iizuka carefully manipulates the characters either by hand or fishing wire.  The result is a loving send up of the great monster movies of Ishirō Honda (Godzilla, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Mothra vs. Godzilla).  The campiness of the film and the use of marionette effects recalls the “supermarionation” techniques employed in the UK cult classic Thunderbirds (Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, 1965-6).

The story centers on two buddies, Max and John, who have taken a trip to the countryside to help Max get his mind off his girlfriend troubles. Just as the countryside and a chance encounter with a friendly stray dog named Kifune seem to be lifting Max’s spirits, a furry super-monster crashes into the scene and has a confrontation with some armed forces.  The story then spirals into a pastiche plot line that throws in all the elements typical in a Japanese scifi action adventure: a mad scientist, fear of robots, love and friendship conquering all, and so on.

Talking to Iitsuka at Nippon Connection, I discovered that he did indeed play alone with action figures a lot as a kid.  He was an only child and did not have the means to buy too many toys.  He had a hero figure in Ultraman but lacked monsters – a problem he remedied by creating his own monsters using PET bottles.  His aim with Encounters was to transfer the fun and spontaneity of such child’s play into the film. 

His eyes lit up with delight when I mentioned the Thunderbirds and he added that he was also a big fan of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-8), a dark scifi “supermarionation” also by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.  In terms of action films, in addition to being inspired by the Ultraman franchise, Iitsuka is also a big fan of The Delta Force movies starring Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin.  This would explain his choice of Waffen Film Studio for the name of his one man production company.  “Waffen” is German for “weapons”. 

All levels of production were done by Iizuka himself: cinematography, editing, sound, music, set building, costumes and special effects.  He made about 5 or 6 sets and manipulated the figures either marionette-style using fishing wire (which you can cheesily still see in some frames) or by hand (but without the hands being seen).  For one sequence, for example, he built the set on top of the bathtub so that he could manipulate the figures from underneath.  Some of the figures and sets were made using materials that he already had but others were built with supplies from the hobby shop.  Some of the most interesting designs were done using papercraft and based on photographs Iitsuka took himself. 

Iitsuka even does all the voices including a falsetto for Max’s girlfriend in a flashback sequence.  The subtitles are kind of odd – at times very inspired – as when a wordy curse in Japanese is translated to English simply as “Jesus!”  At other times the English subs are awkward and badly spelled  –  but that just adds to the fun. The subtitles, which were done by Naoki Suzuki of the Sendai Short Film Festival, complement the kitschiness of the film and the quirkiness of the Japanese dialogue.   Iitsuka designed the dialogue as a spoof of the unusual Japanese dub s done on Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Shazzan (1967-9) and The Fantastic Four (1967-9) when they were first imported to Japan.

See opening to Japanese dub of Shazzan here, and The Fantastic Four here:

The film was shot on a Sony Video Z5J and edited using Abobe Software, Premiere, Aftereffects, etc.  Iitsuka told me that he hopes that people will get a message of hope from the film.  He is working on his next Super Organic Battle Action Adventure and was planning to explore German hobby shops for materials after the festival.  An art school grad, Iitsuka has a natural eye for framing - doubtless honed by years of TV watching.  The concept could easily have turned out completely schlocky, but I found the result brilliant.  I hope that Iitsuka’s Encounters obtains the cult following that it deserves, and I look forward to seeing where his imagination takes him to next.  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

You can follow Iitsuka on Twitter (JP only)
A 20 minute cut of the film is available on imdb (JP/EN)

Postcard (一枚のハガキ, 2010)

Kaneto Shindō’s film Postcard (Ichimai no Hagaki, 2010) opened Nippon Connection 2012 last Wednesday night.  The 100 year old director, who was mentored by legendary filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, has said that it will be his final film.  Postcard features a strong female lead – a common feature of Shindō’s films – a resilient peasant woman named Tomoko Morikawa (Shinbou Ōtake).  In order to emphasize Tomoko’s emotional and physical strength, Shindō shows Tomoko ably carting water to her home using a shoulder pole.  This motif recalls Shindō’s classic film The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima, 1960) which tells a similar story of a rural family struggling to survive on a tiny island.

Tomoko does not live on an island but she is similarly trapped by circumstances of fate.  Women living in rural Japan during World War II may just as well have been living on islands for their choices were limited.  Tomoko has been living a meagre existence with her husband Sadazo (Naomasa Musaka) and his elderly parents (Akira Emoto and Mitsuko Baisho).  They were poor but happy for 16 years until Sadazo is called up into military service.  Sadazo is then one of the unlucky chosen by the drawing of lots to be shipped off to Manila.  On the eve of his departure, Sadazo shares a poignant postcard from his wife with his bunk mate Keita Matsuyama (Etsushi Toyokawa).  Sadazo has been unable to bring himself to reply to the postcard because he knows that anything he writes that is personal will be censored by the military.  He predicts that Matsuyama will be more likely to survive the war on home front duty and gives the postcard to Matsuyama for safekeeping, asking him to take it to Tomoko after the war and tell her that he received it.

Order now:

Postcard (Ichimai no Hagaki)

In structuring the film, Shindō has tried to find a balance between tragedy and comedy.  Indeed, tragedy upon tragedy befalls poor Tomoko in the first half of the film to the point that it almost becomes farcical.   Matsuyama himself also returns home to find his life is a tragi-comical disaster.  Matsuyama’s arrival on Tomoko's doorstep with the postcard shifts the balance towards comedy and romance with Ren Osugi putting in a terrific comic performance as a married man who desperately wants Tomoko to become his mistress.

As a female spectator I had mixed feelings about the film at first because for the first half it felt like yet another drama that romanticizes the self-sacrificing wife.  Tomoko is willing to not only do hard labour, but also to marry her brother-in-law in order to fulfil her duties to her husband’s family.  I was won over in the end by the realistic touches in the film.   Shindō has not cast the film with starlets but with mature actors who bring a lot of authenticity to their roles.  Although the string of tragedies Tomoko has to endure seems over the top to us today, such tragedies were sadly all too common in wartime Japan.  Shindō does not romanticize Tomoko’s life, he rather lays it bare.  From sex as a chore to preparing meagre meals with leftover scraps, Tomoko holds her head up high and survives all that life throws at her.

The most touching part of the film is the knowledge that for his final film, Shindō has chosen to tell his own story.  He too was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy.  Of the 100 men he served with, 60 were indeed chosen by lottery to serve on a ship and died when their ship was attacked by a submarine.  30 men were selected to serve on a submarine and were lost, and another four were selected to act as machine gunners on freight ships and were also killed.  Shindō was one of six men selected, like Matsuyama, to clean the Takarazuka theatre and they were the only ones from the 100 to survive the war.  "I have always had the souls of the 94 with me and have made them the theme of my existence," said the director when promoting the film at a press conference (source: Mark Schilling).  It is fitting that a director who has dedicated his career to facing injustice full on should end his career with a tribute to the memory of those men whose sacrifice gave us the gift of his talents as a director and screenwriter.  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Help Jeff Chiba Stearns complete his documentary Mixed Match

The Canadian animator Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the inventive documentary One Big Hapa Family (see my review) is raising funds on IndieGoGo to complete his latest film Mixed Match - a documentary designed to raise awareness about the need for more mixed race bone marrow and cord blood donors.  The sooner this documentary can get the message out to the wider community, the more lives will be saved.  The IndieGoGo campaign ends in 33 hours and your help is desperately needed.  Go to IndieGoGo to learn more and DONATE NOW!!

If you cannot donate money, you can help by getting the word out.  I also recommend putting yourself on the national bone marrow registry so that you can help save lives.  See the bottom of this post for information on how to do this for Canadians and Americans.

In the words of the filmmakers:

The Story

Mixed Match is an inspirational, emotional, and evocative feature-length documentary that explores the need to find mixed ethnicity bone marrow and cord blood donors to donate to multiethnic patients suffering from life threatening blood diseases such as leukemia.  This live action and animated film is a dramatic journey focusing on the main characters’ struggles to survive against incredible odds. 

The documentary will lead the viewer through the lives of young patients and families struggling to overcome life-threatening blood diseases.  While presenting medical concerns, Mixed Match will be a character-driven documentary that will highlight a number of exceptional, courageous, and inspiring participants. The film will follow recently diagnosed multiethnic patients in search of donors, some of whom must struggle to hold on to hope through countless rounds of excruciating chemotherapy as they spend months searching for a match.  A patient who is in remission after a successful stem cell/marrow donation will also be documented.  Another patient’s story is told through his surviving family members, as he was not able to find a suitable marrow match and, as a result, ultimately succumbed to his illness.  Lastly, the documentary will feature a joyous and heartfelt reunion between a donor and patient after a successful transplant, as the two meet for the very first time.  

Mixed Match is an important human story told from the perspective of youth who are forced to discover their identities through their deadly illnesses and how their mixed backgrounds threaten their chance at survival, thus highlighting why in this day and age, knowing our history and cultural heritage still matters.

The film is being produced by Meditating Bunny Studio Inc. (www.meditatingbunny.com), working very closely with Mixed Marrow (www.mixedmarrow.org).

The Impact

Race and ethnicity play a critical role in finding a marrow match for those suffering from fatal blood diseases. It is a lesser-known fact that in order for a marrow or stem cell match to occur between a patient and a donor, genetic markers on cells must line up.  Because these markers are inherited from parents, their children are a blend both of their parents’ markers.  Thus, for mixed patients, their mono-racial parents and relatives will not likely be a match, and their siblings only hold about a 1 in 4 chance of being a match. Many markers on the cells are specific to certain ethnic groups so multiethnic people have a difficult time when their tissue typing has unusual or uncommon combinations.  To put this in perspective, if your background is Egyptian, Japanese, and Russian, there is a likely chance that only another person with a similar ethnic blend could be a possible donor if you are diagnosed with leukemia.

Mixed Match addresses the fact that every year over 30,000 people in North America are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Currently, in the US, of the 7 million registered bone marrow donors and 100,000 cord blood donors, less than 3% are multiethnic.  This statistic, although proportionate to the population of mixed people in the country, poses a substantial challenge to a mixed patient given the endless variety of possible genetic combinations in the registry.  Finding a multiethnic marrow match in the public registry has been compared at times to “finding a needle in a haystack” or “winning the lottery.”  Therefore, this is a very timely and important issue. 

According to the 2010 US Census, the number of people who associate with having more than one ethnic background has increased by almost 50% since 2000.  Despite the rapid growth of the multiracial population in almost all reaches of the world, many people do not realize the risks that lie ahead for mixed people with blood diseases, and the hardship that comes with an almost endless search for a donor match.  

In Canada, there are only 1,694 searchable registrants identifying as multiethnic out of the over 277,000 that are currently on Canada's stem cell Network according to OneMatch.  We need to increase this number to help save lives. 

With this film, we are setting out to achieve two goals:

Spread awareness of the challenges and complexities faced by mixed people with blood diseases.

Encourage all people from all backgrounds to join the bone marrow registry and donate core blood to increase the likelihood of finding multiethnic marrow matches.  There are some rare cases where mixed people find matches from monoracial or people of different mixes so it's important to have everyone's support!

Other Ways You Can Help

Another great way to help us complete this movie would be to spread the word about this fundraising to your friends and acquaintances, as well as visiting the Mixed Match page (www.facebook.com/mixedmatch) and clicking the like button so we can keep you updated on our progress.  Of course we encourage you to join your national bone marrow registry and hopefully help save a life.  Please check out www.blood.ca (OneMatch) in Canada andwww.marrow.org (Be The Match) in the US for more info on how to register.  

Check out a CBC radio interview where Jeff, the director, talks about the importance of making Mixed Match at this link: http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/featured-guests/2012/03/29/jeff-chiba-stearns-documentary-mixed-match/