If
you believe in the Rabbit, it means that you’ll believe anything.
If
you don’t believe in the Rabbit, it means that you wouldn’t believe anything.
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Once
we called the noble, profound and mysterious existence The Great.
We have moved
with the time, our thought and consciousness has changed.
And yet what makes us
still keep calling it The Great?
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The Great Rabbit
(2012) marks a new development in the career of animator Atsushi Wada, for it is the first time that he has made an
international co-production. It is a
co-production between CaRTe bLaNChe
(who also represents artists like Keiichi
Tanaami, Keita Kurosaka, and
other CALF animators among many
others) and the French production company Sacre Bleu
who specialize in short films.
At
Nippon
Connection 2012, Wada explained that it was also the
first time that he had ever used a sound designer – in this case Masumi Takino who has also done the
sound for Ryo Okawara’s latest film A
Wind Egg (Kara no tamago, 2012) which is screening this
week at Annecy.
Wada told us he was a bit shy initially for it turns out that for many
of the sound effects in his films, he strips off and uses his own body (ie. for
the sounds of slapping, etc.).
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The
film opens with a cubby boy in a tight close up, panting with exertion, who carries
a giant, ball-shaped egg. When a hand stops him to
push the egg, he covers it with his shirt.
He pauses to interact with a weasel who
has rubbed up against his leg like a cat.
Suddenly a bird swoops down and removes the boy’s shirt and the egg
falls silently to the ground. He looks
around as if to see where the egg has fallen, sighs deeply and bends to remove
his shorts, his flabby tummy bouncing gently as he does. He then carefully wraps his shoes up in his
shorts and tosses them away from himself.
A
rabbit sits on an alter munching on something.
Indecipherable whispers, almost guttural in nature can be heard.
A
human-rabbit hybrid stands on a chair with a small, shirtless boy holding the
chair steady as a queue of chubby boys – reminiscent of the queue of salarymen
having their noses examined in Wada’s Day of
Nose (2005) – with giant ball-like eggs approach to have the egg
inspected by the humanoid rabbit. Once
the rabbit-man has touched the egg, the chubby boys tuck it under the shirts
– the same routine that opened the film but this time in a long shot.
The
rabbit-man touches his rabbit ears and we hear a humming. Cut to CCTV footage of a typical urban
alleyway with a time code in the top left corner. A figure can be briefly glimpsed carrying a giant egg. A new angle of the playground
shows that it is the weasel, with the giant egg tucked on his back held by his
tail. In the third shot, the weasel and
his egg are captured in a net on a grassy field. His captor is a boy sitting on a tree branch,
much like the one in In a Pig’s Eye. The
boy licks his lips as though anticipating a feast. He takes the struggling weasel out of the
net, then takes his place inside the net, mimicking the weasel’s movements.
A
panting boy walks by with crumbs or shards of some kind on his shorts. A mother bird with her brood tucked in a
shirt is abruptly taken from her perch by a giant boy with glasses and the
chicks are made to poke at the bottom of the boy in the net. The boy falls free of the net to land on the
ground next to two small animals staring silently and one of the giant
eggs. He picks up the egg and there is a
swish pan to the queue in front of the rabbit-man.
Incoherent
whispering, a chubby boy a cloth wrapped over his face gestures and moves
strangely, like a blind man trying to find his way through an unfamiliar room.
The
rabbit sits at the altar, chews benignly.
Or is everything as it seems? The
frame is rewound and played back slowly and we see hands pushing the weasel
inside of the rabbit’s mouth. A chubby
boy with a remote control looks at the TV image off camera and whispers to
himself, looking around him as if concerned that someone is watching his every
move as well.
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There
is an irony in calling a rabbit “great” for a rabbit is really such a benign
creature. As herbivores, they do not
really pose a threat to anyone except for the fact that they notoriously
reproduce at a rapid rate. At Nippon
Connection 2012, Atsushi Wada told us that he
randomly chose the rabbit as a central symbol for this film because he started
making The Great Rabbit during the
year of the Rabbit.
From
a Buddhist perspective; however, nothing is random and it is significant that
Wada chose a rabbit as the central animal in this film. To be sure, Wada has shown in previous films
to be drawn to animals that are quiet and move in subtle ways. Because he has often used sheep in previous
films, I was reminded in The Great Rabbit
of the idiom “the wolf in sheep’s clothing,” for although the rabbit appears to
sit and do nothing, except perhaps be worshipped, in the slow motion playback
we realize that appearances can be deceiving.
The
visual reference to Wada’s earlier film Day
of Nose with the men queuing for inspection emphasizes the theme of societal
pressures on people to follow the dictates of the ruling elites. This is heightened by the suggestion that Big
Brother is watching our every move through the use of CCTV footage to capture
the weasel stealing an egg. In the wake
of 3/11, The Great Rabbit reads like
a warning for us not to follow in the dictates of the government or to believe
everything we see on the news. We must
follow Atsushi Wada’s example of looking at the subtle clues of movement and
gesture, and question the validity of what the powers that be are telling us.
As
Atsushi Wada explains: “A situation of disobedience stands only when there is a
relationship between a person who forces somebody to obey and a personal who
obeys him/her. Nowadays, the status of
relationships between superiors and inferiors, good and evil, aristocrats and
commoners is less visible, and it’s becoming more difficult to judge what is
right or wrong. Sometimes we even don’t
know what we are forced to obey.” The Great Rabbit is Wada’s expression of
this ambiguity.
When The Great Rabbit won the
Silver Bear at the Berlinale earlier this year, the jury commented: “This
dreamlike film uses a unique, surreal language to tickle our unconscious while
showing us the confusion of the modern world in animated form. Using a delicate
hand drawn style, Atsushi Wada decodes reality with absurd sequences of
characters caught in time.” (source)
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012
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7'10"/colour/stereo/2012
Production
: Sacrebleu Productions, CaRTe bLaNChe
Sound
Design: Masumi Takino
Colour
Design: Misa Amako
Direction,
Script, Editing, Voice, Animation: Atsushi Wada
To
support this animator, please order his DVD: Atsushi Wada Collected Works 2002-2010.
If you live in the Tokyo area, be sure to check out the screenings of The Great Rabbit this summer at Image Forum.
This film screened at:
This film screened at:
