Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art

As part of its Canadian Spotlight, the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival hosted an evening with renowned NFB producer Michael Fukushima on November 7, 2012 entitled Michael Fukushima: The Art of Producing Art.  The evening was moderated by Aram Siu Wai Collier and featured both conversations with Fukushima and a selection of films.  Fukushima notably worked with Koji Yamamura on Muybridge’s Strings (2011).  Other notable animated shorts that he has produced include Christopher Hinton’s Genie-award winning cNote (2005) and Ann Marie Fleming’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010.) The evening’s proceedings were uploaded onto YouTube.  I have summarized the proceeding below with some added context and links to related NFB content.

Original Programme:

Minoru: Memory of Exile (Michael Fukushima, 1992)

cNote (Christopher Hinton, 2011)

Flutter (Howie Shia, 2006)

Jaime Lo, small and shy (Lillian Chan, 2006)

Dimanche (Sunday, Patrick Doyon, 2011)

Due to technical difficulties they weren’t able to screen cNote (but you can watch it online here).  The evening began with Fukushima’s directorial debut Minoru: Memory of Exile.  Fukushima was very modest about his abilities as an animator, but this is a very impressive film which I have been meaning to write a review of for some time.  Fukushima’s proposal for this film is what brought him to the NFB in 1990.  His invitation was thanks to what he called “a whole series of wonderful serendipitous convergences.”  His proposal landed on producer William “Bill” Pettigrew’s desk at around the same time that he was asked to look into funding projects that addressed the internment of Japanese living on the west coast of British Columbia during the Second World War.  This followed in the wake of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s historic apology to Japanese Canadians on September 22, 1988 and the compensation offered to victims of the internment.  The redress included funds for educational materials.

 

Minoru: Memory of Exile by Michael Fukushima, National Film Board of Canada

Minoru: Memory of Exile is an animated documentary about Fukushima’s father Minoru and his experiences during and after the internment.  It took about two years to make this 18 minute film which was handmade and shot on film.  It won a couple of awards including Best Short Documentary at the Toronto Hot Docs festival in Toronto in its inaugural year.  At the time, the genre of animated documentary was a new form.  Fukushima himself had actually conceived of the film as a completely fictional animation but during the development process, it became clear to Fukushima and Pettigrew that in order to make the story more poignant, it needed to have more of an element of the real.  

Pettrigrew had himself started out at the NFB as a documentary filmmaker with films such as Kuralek (1967), Oskee Wee Wee (1968), Epilogue (1971), and The Vinland Mystery (1984) and recognized the potential of bringing animation and documentary together.  It had never occurred to Fukushima before that one could “marry documentary and animation” so this was a significant moment in the creative process for him.

The producer David Verrall helped Fukushima edit his film.  Verrall produced more than 240 films during his NFB career including Bob’s Birthday (Alison Snowden and David Fine, 1993), When the Day Breaks (Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, 1999), Village Idiots (Rose Newlove, 2000), Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004), The Danish Poet (Torill Kove, 2006).  Through his experiences with Verral and Pettigrew, Fukushima “came to realize that being a producer is more than just being a manager” and said that he thought that “it was at that moment that the seed was planted” for his trajectory to becoming a producer.

I was surprised to learn that Fukushima was initially resistant to the idea of making Minoru the film more personal because “It was still raw.  I honestly didn’t think I could do it.  .  .  to give justice to the story.  .  .”  He had only just recently discovered the story of his father because of Minoru Fukushima’s receiving of a compensation package from the government.   This had prompted his father to tell him the story.  Fresh out of college and with no experience with documentary filmmaking, Fukushima was concerned about how to tackle the subject matter.  At the time there was a huge debate in the documentary community about “veracity” with people asking “Who gets to tell stories?” and it seems that Fukushima was very sensitive about this.  In the end, Pettigrew recognized the potential for how Fukushima as an artist could make the important story his father had to tell much more accessible and poignant for audiences while at the same time being “very subversive.”  Fukushima credits Pettigrew with teaching him that “animation has a way of sneaking up on audiences and catching them unawares, and having a greater impact because of that.”

After Minoru, the Reel Asian audience watched Flutter (Howie Shia, 2006) and Jamie Lo, small and shy (Lillian Chan, 2006).  Jaime Lo came out of the Talespinners Collection which was an initiative designed to encourage young, relatively inexperienced animators who reflect Canada’s ethnic diversity to make animated films for children.  First the NFB took the “safe route” of optioning a number of children’s books by non-white authors to adapt.  Fukushima produced one of this first batch of films and while he was pleased with the result felt that they could push it further and suggested putting out a call for proposals from young filmmakers about the minority experience in Canada.   It was through this they discovered great talent like Lillian Chan and Jonathon Ng.  They produced some terrific films for kids that were not necessarily about “being Asian” or “an ethnic minority” but were rather “coloured by their experience of being Asian.”

Flutter by Howie Shia, National Film Board of Canada

Fukushima was introduced to Howie Shia by the Hothouse emerging filmmakers programme for which Shia had made the great short short animation Ice Ages (2004).  Shia came to Fukushima with the idea behind Flutter: a boy that just “runs and runs and runs.”  It turned into what Fukushima calls a “beautiful, elegiac poem about search; about love; about how.   .  .  you just have to dive into life and life takes you.  .  .”  The film went on to win the Open Entries Grand Prize at the Tokyo Anime Awards in 2007 – the first animation produced outside of Asia to do so.

Asthma Tech by Jonathan Ng, National Film Board of Canada

After the films were screened Lillian Chan and Jonathan Ng – director of another great Talespinners film called Asthma Tech (2006) – joined Fukushima on the stage to discuss Fukushima as a producer.  Ng was concerned that he might end up becoming too “gushing” about Fukushima.  He praised him as behind different from other producers because he has a knack for understanding the needs of the director.  In Ng’s case, he likes to be left alone during the creative process and he was appreciative of the fact that Fukushima gave him “a lot of leeway,” which is quite remarkable as Ng did not have a lot of experience as an animator at the time.

Collier asks if this hands off approach is something Fukushima tailors to specific animators or if it is his “style” as a producer and Fukushima says that to him “getting engaged on a filmmaker’s personality and their working style is fundamental to being a good producer for me.  It’s a relationship.  With animation it can be a 2, sometimes 3 year relationship and it’s pretty intimate.” Because of the deep emotional investment that he has as a producer, it’s important to Fukushima that he find animators with whom he can foster a good working relationship.   He sees no point in badgering an artist like Ng, who prefers to be left alone, when that won’t bring any results.  He also mentioned that he enjoys picking apart films and discussing them, but finds that it isn’t always productive or useful.  It sounds like a very delicate process. 

Jaime Lo, small and shy by Lillian Chan, National Film Board of Canada

Lillian Chan said that she moved to Montreal to work on Jaime Lo, small and shy and that Fukushima warned her at the outset that production meetings can sometimes involve tempers and people walking out of the room and that that was okay and a normal part of the process.  Chan was surprised to realize that it could be “that intense of a process.”  She doesn’t recall having any shouting matches with Fukushima herself, but she remembers that initially the story for the film wasn’t fully fleshed out and she was given several months just to work on the story.  She really respects Fukushima for giving her the time that she needed to get to the right space with the film on her own.  Fukushima would give her a critique of the film that would identify very precisely what the problems were with the film, but would not tell her how to solve the problem.  She wanted definitive answers for her problems, but Fukushima instead offered suggestions, encouraging her to problem-solve issues on her own.  This forced her, Chan explained, to come to terms with her own creative process.

Chan asks Fukushima how he finds it different working with young filmmakers like her and Ng as opposed to more experienced filmmakers as she imagines that this would be a different experience.    Fukushima claims that there is often very little differences working with a veteran as opposed to an emerging filmmaker as long as the framework of the roles of producer and director have been set up clearly from the beginning.   He addresses the fact that it is not only a two way relationship but a three way relationship which includes institution of the NFB.  The NFB is “a very scary beast for veteran filmmakers and it must be terrifying for younger filmmakers.”  The most important thing for Fukushima is establishing his relationship with the filmmaker.  He sees his role as not only an advocate and champion of his artists, but also someone who will challenge them artistically.  The only difference is that veteran filmmakers tend to have greater self confidence and a greater sense of what will work and won’t work for them artistically.

The final film of the evening was Patrik Doyon’s Oscar nominated film Dimanche (2011).  Like Ng, Doyon was not classically trained as an animator, but rather had training in illustration.  He also came into contact with Fukushima through the Hothouse project.  After Hothouse, Doyon approached the NFB with a proposal about life as a child in rural Quebec .  It ended up being a co-production with the French language ONF studio (the French branch of the NFB).  Dimanche won Doyon the 2012 Jutra Award for Best Animated Film.  Many people at the NFB pushed it as a children’s film, but Fukushima obviously thinks that it is more than that.  They pushed the NFB to send it to the Berlinale where it won a prize, which led the NFB to get behind the film even more.

Unfortunately they seem to have run out of time at this point in the evening.  I had been looking forward to hearing to listening to Fukushima talk about his transition from director to producer.   He seems to have a close relationship with Reel Asian however and there was a suggestion that they would invite him back at some point in the future.  I was impressed by Aram Siu Wai Collier as the moderator for the event.  He asked very thoughtful and engaging questions.  With the online availability of these superb short films plus the video record of the event, it was the next best thing to being there in person.  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン, 1983)

The popular mediums of the comics and animation sometimes get dismissed as mere amusements for children, but they can also be powerful tools for expression and education.  For the mangaka Keiji Nakazawa, his manga serial Barefoot Gen (はだしのゲン/Hadashi no Gen, 1973-74) was his method of coming to terms with his experiences of the atom bomb and his continuing bitterness as a hibakusha with postwar politics in Japan (Learn more in Asai Motofumi’s interview with Nakazawa in Japan Forum).

Nakazawa’s manga has not only educated generations of post-war Japanese about the bombing of Hiroshima from a child’s perspective, but it has also inspired other artists to follow in his footsteps and harness the power of the comics format to give voice to the unspeakable.  Most notably, Art Spiegelman has cited Barefoot Gen as having had a significant impact on him during the making of Maus (1991).

Madhouse’s 1983 adaptation of Barefoot Gen under the direction of Masaki Mori remains true to the message of its source material in its unflinching portrayal of the devastation wrought by the atom bomb on the people of Hiroshima.  Like other classics of the anti-war genre – Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita’s Pica-don (ピカドン, 1978) and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓/Hotaru no Haka, 1988) – the story is powerful because it portrays the inhumanity of war from the perspective of its most innocent victims: children. 

The iconic Genbaku Dome during the blast

Gen is a grade school boy who lives with his father, heavily pregnant mother, older sister, and bratty younger brother in the summer of 1945.  His father is a wheat farmer but despite good crops, they have fallen on hard times because no one can afford to pay them for their produce.  This is a great story for teaching students because it smashes a lot of widely held myths about the Japanese blindly following the will of their leaders during the war.  As was true of Nakazawa’s own father, Gen’s father holds dangerous left-wing views that could get him into trouble with authorities:  he is against the war and Japan’s policies and boldly prophecises to his sons that Japan will lose this war. 

Suspense is built in the lead up to the dropping of the bomb through repeated false warning trips to the air raid shelter, and the father’s growing suspicion that the fact that other major cities are being bombed more often than Hiroshima is a bad sign.  The anime intersperses the emotional personal drama of Gen, his family, and neighbours with sequences with an impersonal documentary narration that tell us the facts about the war and what the armed forces are doing.  Thus, we know that the Enola Gay is coming before the characters do themselves.  The bomb is even shown from the perspective of the Enola Gay as it falls silently onto the city.

The “pica” of the flash is depicted in black and white – as was in the Kinoshitas’ depiction of the same moment.  The “don” of the explosion is horrific in its detail, drawing on both photographic evidence of the destruction and the colours and style of the grotesque in Japanese traditional and modern art.  The  immediate devastation and its aftermath are depicted in gruesome detail: people stripped of their skins, dead and dying infants, people driven to insanity by what they have witnessed, maggots and flies feeding on both the living and the dead.  Man’s inhumanity to man is laid bare in all its horror and agony. 

Hiroshima Castle being destroyed by the blast

Gen and his mother desperately try to save their trapped family from the fire engulfing their home without success.  The two are left to struggle on their own with Gen aiding his mother as she gives birth in the ruins of their once beautiful city.  Despite suffering from malnutrition themselves, Gen and his mother never lose their own humanity.  They try – often in vain – to help others who are suffering and even adopt a young orphaned boy called Ryuta whose cheeky ways reminds them of Gen’s  lost litrle brother Shinji. 

One of the reasons that the story of Barefoot Gen is such a successful narrative is that it refuses to fall into the easy traps of anti-Americanism or over-sentimentality.  As equally as powerful as the anti-nuclear bomb message, the film also raises criticisms of the Japanese themselves which were core messages of the original manga.  The inadequate aid that was sent to Hiroshima following the attack, the suppression of survivors stories for years after the war, and the widespread discrimination against the hibakusha (被爆者/atomic bomb survivors).

Gen and Ryuta reflected in Seiji's tear

This last theme is personalized through the story of Seiji, a survivor who comes from a well-to-do family.  Gen and Ryuta take to the streets in search of work in order to get enough money for milk for the baby and they are hired by Seiji’s brother to look after him.  Seiji is covered in maggots and flies because no one in his family will touch him themselves and the family has been unable to find anyone with the stomach to handle the job of picking the maggots off of his skin.  Gen and Ryuta are desperate for money and put up not only with the stench but with the abuse of Shinji who calls them “vultures” and resents his situation.  In a remarkable scene, Gen and Ryuta are able to connect with Seiji on a human level and we learn that Seiji’s pain at being shunned by his family like a leper outweighs the physical pain of his bomb injuries.  His gratitude at these two young boys for teaching him that he can still feel real human affection is depicted movingly with an image of Gen and Ryuta reflected in a large tear falling from Seiji’s eye.

Gen recalls his father

The original Barefoot Gen manga is quite a long series – the current American English edition at Last Gasp has 10 volumes, so a feature film cannot possibly encapsulate Nakazawa’s exploration of the long term effects of the bombing of Hiroshima on its victims.  There is more tragedy before the film ends but it still manages to leave the door open to optimism for the future.  In spite of many people claiming that it will take 70 years for grass to grow again in Hiroshima, the boys discover that wheat has begun to sprout again.  Gen recalls his father once advising him and Shinji to learn from the example of the wheat (mugi):

Its life begins in the coldest season of the year.

The rain pounds it, 

the wind blows it. . .

it’s crushed beneath people’s feet

but still, the wheat spreads its roots and grows.

It survives.

Learn from it boys.

Grow big and strong and let nothing beat you down.

Hadashi no Gen DVD (JP only)

Barefoot Gen won Masaki Mori the coveted Noburo Ofuji Award for innovation in animation in 1983.  The success of the film led to a sequel a few years later, Barefoot Gen 2 (Toshio Hirata/Akio Sakai, 1986) which picks up Gen’s story three years after the war and examines the long-term consequences of the bomb.  Both films were rereleased on DVD with subs by Geneon in the US but are currently only available second hand.  The French box set is also out of print, but it is available here in Germany: Barfuß durch Hiroshima - Film 1 & 2 (OmU) [2 DVDs] [Deluxe Edition].  This edition has  German, French, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Danish and Finnish subs.  The Japanese release also has no English subs.

Last year a documentary was made about Nakazawa's life called Hiroshima Through the Eyes of Barefoot Gen.  Here's an excerpt:

©cmmhotes 2012

Click here to learn more about the Noburo Ofuji Award Winners.

Obāchan’s Garden (おばあちゃんのガーデン, 2001)

When sansei Canadian filmmaker Linda Ohama set out to make a film that would celebrate her grandmother’s life on the eve of her 100^th birthday, she had no idea just how far her journey would take her.  On the surface, there was more than enough material to make a feature-length documentary for her obāchan (grandma) had lived an extraordinary life in Canada.  Yet during the filming of Obāchan’s Garden (2001), the Murakami family discovers that the matriarch of the family has been keeping a painful secret about her early life in Japan for over 70 years.

Asayo Murakami (1898-2002) was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima Perfecture in 1898.  Her parents had named her Asayo because she was born in early in the morning (asa).  For her Canadian family, Asayo’s story began in 1924 when she came to Canada as a “picture bride”.  A man named Murakami had selected Asayo’s photograph as a potential future wife and paid for her journey to British Columbia.  Unfortunately, upon meeting Mr. Murakami, Asayo immediately rejected the possibility of marrying this short statured man.  She worked for three years in a fish cannery and picking strawberries to pay the man back the $250 dollars he had spent on her. 

Not long after this a matchmaker introduced her to the fishing boat craftsman Otokichi Murakami (of no relation to the man she had turned down) – a tall widower with two young children.  Asayo agreed to this marriage and the couple settled in the village of Steveston, which today belongs to the city of Richmond, British Columbia.  They went on to have 8 children of their own and Asayo was known locally for her wide social circle and her beautiful flower garden.  While most women filled their gardens with more practical crops of fruit and vegetables, Asayo preferred flowers – a sentimental preference which was connected to her private sorrows.

Like the other Japanese families living in coastal British Columbia, the Murakamis were forced to leave their home during World War II and were relocated to a sugar-beet farm in Manitoba.  After the war restrictions were lifted, the couple joined their eldest daughter and her family on their potato farm in Rainier, Alberta.  These were difficult times for the family  – the grandfather missed making boats and Asayo missed her garden  –  but they were resilient folk and persevered in the face of hardship.

Linda Ohama pieces together the life of her obāchan like a quilt.  Fragments of recollections by obāchan herself, Ohama’s mother and siblings, Ohama’s daughter, and other friends and relatives are woven together with a collection of family photos, archival footage from Japan and Canada, and dramatic reenactments of the past with the filmmaker’s cousin Natsuko Ohama playing obāchan in her younger years.  Docudrama elements in documentaries are a common, and sometimes controversial, feature in Canadian documentaries and may not be to everyone’s taste – but as the Murakami family had to leave everything behind when they left Steveston, the reenacted sequences bring colour and life to the home that obāchan loved best outside of Onomichi.

The film keeps coming back to one of obāchan’s prized possessions: a beautiful photograph of two smartly dressed little girls.  The secret that obāchan has kept for all these years is that before she came to Canada she was married to a man from a prominent family called Ishibashi.  For reasons that are unclear, around the time of the Great Kantō earthquake, Asayo was divorced from her husband and he took their daughters to live on the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.  Asayo has been unable to trace her children, but has always believed that they were safe because they lived near the emperor and his family.   

The discovery of obāchan’s secret changes the course from a mere celebration of Asayo’s life to a quest to find out what happened to these two long-lost daughters.  At this point, according to the director's online diary, Ohama brought the National Film Board of Canada on board to help with funding and she set off to Japan with her mother and daughter – the first time the three women have been to visit obāchan’s family there.  It is a complicated journey, with many unexpected twists and turns, but it certainly makes riveting viewing.

Also interwoven with the story of obāchan is the story of her former home in Steveson.  The Murakami home and boat works, where they lived from 1929-1942 were the only buildings belonging to the Japanese to survive into the 1990s.  As they prepare for obāchan’s birthday, the family are involved in the restoration of the property which is now a part of the Britannia Heritage Shipyard Site in Richmond.  The film also documents the family’s restoration of the garden, which they plant according to obāchan’s instructions in preparation for the opening of the Murakami Visitor Centre in May 1998.

Is Linda Ohama able to track down obāchan’s daughters and is it possible for frail obāchan to travel to British Columbia from her nursing home in Alberta to see her garden in its restored glory?  You can enjoy the emotional ending of the film yourself on the NFB website:

Obachan's Garden by Linda Ohama, National Film Board of Canada

Since making this documentary Linda Ohama (リンダ・オオハマ/official profile) has developed strong ties between Canada and Japan.  She is currently in Japan on a lecture tour and is active in Tohoku region recovery efforts through her Canada-Tohoku-Japan Cloth Letters project.

To learn more about obāchan read:

Asayo Murakami: The Last Picture Bride and The Story of Ms. Asayo Murakami by family friend Kojiro “John” Iuchi