Tough Guy! (2005)

In 2005, the animator Shintarō Kishimoto (岸本真太郎, b. 1966) wowed the Japanese animation community with his innovative comic short Tough Guy! (2005). The 7-minute 3DCG animation stars a praying mantis who seems to think that he is the insect version of Jackie Chan – pratfalls and all. 

The short consists of three vignettes.  In the first vignette, the praying mantis practises his butt-kicking martial art skills on a tin can with great finesse. In the next vignette, “Green Bullet” the mantis has a tussle with a butterfly and chases it down the street curb, up a lamp post and into the sky like a rocket.  On his descent he crashes into a man’s digital camera in a humorous sequence…. The butterfly, of course, flutters on its way unharmed by the ludicrous antics of the mantis.  The third vignette, “The Predator” has some impressive – and amusing – rooftop sequences which see the praying mantis’s antics causing people in the house to lose their TV reception.  He also has a tussle with a beetle that ends in another comic pratfall.

The most impressive sequences in the film are those in which the praying mantis interacts with real world objects (the digital camera) and people.  Kishimoto achieves a unique look for his film because of his blending of 3DCG with still images and live action footage.  It’s a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously as it tries to imagine a cityscape through the eyes of an insect.

Tom Sito, who was on the judging panel that awarded Kishimoto the Grand Prize at the Japan Digital Animation Festival (JDAF 2005), said that his fellow judge Mamoru Oshii “was impressed with how [Kishimoto] mixed digital animation with live action and photo stills to let us experience the world from the Mantis’ point of view.” Sito himself praised the film for its comic timing (Source: AWN).  The film also won the Noburo Ofuji Award.

According to his website, Kishimoto – who is a native of Yokohama – has worked for a range of clients from Kodansha publishers to Production I.G.  In addition to 3DCG, Kishimoto works as an illustrator (pen + ink, 3DCG, 2DCG), character designer, and manga artist.   You can follow him on Facebook. 

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

A low res version of the film is available on niconico.  You can also support this independent animator by ordering the film on DVD:

tough guys!

Animation

This film is part of my Noburo Ofuji Award series:

Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple (證城寺の狸囃子, c.1933)

In mid-October every year, local children gather at Shojoji Temple in Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture to dance and drum on their bellies like the legendary tanuki (racoon dogs).  The legend is of uncertain origin.  It is one of many legends found throughout Japan about the tanuki drumming on their bellies.  The locals say that this particular story of tanuki standing on their hind legs and drumming on their bellies developed from local villagers speculating about the unusual Buddhist music they could here coming from the temple.  The story became widely known in Japan because of the popular children’s song “Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple” (證城寺の狸囃子/Shōjōji no Tanuki-bayashi, 1925). The song began as a poem written by Ujō Noguchi (野口雨情, 1882-1945) in 1919 based upon materials he gathered during a visit that year to Kisarazu.  The composer Shinpei Nakayama (中山晋平, 1887-1952) set the poem to music in 1925.  (Source: Shōjōji Temple History)

In the early 1930s, animation pioneer Ikuo Ōishi (大石郁雄, 1901-1944) adapted Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple (c.1933) into a “record talkie” for the studio Banno Shōten (伴野商店).  Anyone who is a scholar of early cinema will tell you that the term “silent cinema” is actually a misnomer.  Silent films were never screened silently.  They always had some kind of sound accompaniment such as a piano, an orchestra, a narrator (benshi) and sometimes even recorded sound as in the sound-on-disc technologies such as Gaumont’s Chronomégaphone.  Some of the most delightful films of Japan’s “silent era” are the record talkies (レコードトーキー) that were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  The short animated films were a maximum of 3 - 6 minutes long – Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple has a running time of only 1’11” – and were designed to be played synchronously with gramophone records.  They often involve read-along text (The Village Festival and Song of Spring) and dancing characters.  The record talkies are an early example of the now ubiquitous “film tie-in” because people who enjoyed the film could also buy the SP record.

Lyrics

Sho-Sho-Shojoji, in the garden of Shojoji!

The moon, the moon is out!  Everyone, come out!

We’re all friends!  Friends, drum your belly!

Pom poko pon no pon!

Never! Never! Don’t let the monk beat you!

Come, come! Gather around!

Everyone, come out!

Sho-Sho-Shojoji, the bush clovers of Shojoji!

Look!  Look at the flowers in the moonlight!

We’re so excited!  Friends, drum your belly!

Pom poko pon no pon!

(Source:  Digital Meme DVD)

The sound recording was produced by Victor Records (ビクターレコード), a subsidiary of the American company whose Japanese branch (known today as JVC) formed in Yokohama in 1927 but severed ties with its parent company during the Second World War.  The recording features the voice of child star Hideko Hirai (平井英子, b.1918) – a popular singer who also sang Black Cat and Chameko’s Day.  The title screen introduces the animation as a “baby talkie” (ベビートーキー).   A “baby talkie” was actually a kind of gramophone crossed with a Zoetrope that appeared in Japan in the late 1920s as a kind of “home talking picture experience” (source: FIAF Symposium 2007).  You could watch an animation loop as your phonograph record plays.  I am not sure what the connection is to Oishi’s animation, but it is definitely something I plan to look into the next time I’m at the NFC.

Like the song itself, the animation is simple and repetitive.  In addition to the sweet, cheerful voice of Hideko Hirai, the song is orchestrated with a piano and other percussion instruments.  First a lone tanuki dances and drums on his belly.  He is then joined by more tanuki who join in the dancing and drumming.  As the song progresses, the tanuki continue to multiply and make patterns with each other as they dance.  There is a brief cutaway to the silhouette of a Buddhist monk drumming in the window of the temple – an allusion to the legend that the tanuki were inspired by the music of the monks of Shojoji Temple.  The short short ends with an iris out to an "owari" (the end) title card.

The song is short and sweet, but very catchy.  Here is some sheet music if you would like to sing along or play it yourself.  Fans of anime will recognize the “Pom poko pon no pon!” refrain from the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko (Isao Takahata, 1994) about tanuki in the Tama Hills fighting urban sprawl.  The “pom poko” in the title is a direct reference to the song “Belly Drum Dance at Shojoji Temple” and the song is sung, with new lyrics, at times of celebration in the film.  Just a cursory web search turns up many more shorts inspired by the song.  This simply executed animation even uses very similar imagery to Oishi’s film including an almost identical silhouette of a monk beating a drum.

Note 1:  there is some confusion over the exact date this film was released.  Digital Meme lists it as 1933, the National Film Centre as in the early 1930s, the imdb has it at 1935 and Wikipedia as 1931.  

 Note 2:  Hideko Hirai's name is credited as "Eiko Hirai" on the Digital Meme DVDs.  Although this is a logical error to make, her given name is actually read "Hideko".  Remarkably, she still seems to be alive at the ripe old age of 95.  Trivia:  Hirai retired from singing after her marriage to the composer Seiichi Suzuki (1901-80), who composed the soundtracks to many films including Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata (1943)  

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Read about other record talkies:

Black Cat (黒ニャゴ, Noburo Ofuji, 1929)

The Village Festival (村祭, Noburo Ofuji, 1930)

Song of Spring (春の唄, Noburo Ofuji, 1931)

The National Anthem: Kimigayo (国歌 君か代, Noburo Ofuji, 1931)

Chameko’s Day (茶目子の一日, Kiyoshi Nishikura, 1931)

Watakushiritori (わたくしりとり, 2013)

Kazuhiko Okushita (奥下和彦, b. 1985) first came to my attention in 2010 when his animated short The Red Thread (2009) was featured on the NHK’s Digista program.  My review of the film has actually become one of my most read posts of all time.  At first I thought this was due to people researching the East Asian belief in the “red thread of fate” aka the “red string of fate”, but then I found out that it is also the title of a bestselling novel by Ann Hood – also inspired by the same East Asian concept – which means I was likely benefitting from her popularity.  Someone also told me that “the red thread” idiom is used in Christianity to describe the belief that the Jesus Chris appears in every book of the bible either directly or indirectly. 

In his graduate film made at Geidai, Okushita continues to use his “thread” animation technique – drawing images as if they are made from one single piece of thread – but this time he uses many colours , not just red.  Watakushiritori (わたくしりとり, 2013) translates as “My Shiritori” with Shiritori (しりとり) being a word game similar to a word chain in English.  In the Japanese version of a word chain, one player says a word and the next player has to make a word using the final “kana” (syllable) of the previous word.  Koji Yamamura also used this concept in one of his early experimental shorts Japanese English Pictionary (ひゃっかずかん, 1989) – an influence which Okushita acknowledges an interview on the Geidai Animation 04Sail website. 

As I mentioned in my review of The Red Thread, Okushita’s thread concept reminds me of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s La Linea (1971-86) animations, which I loved to watch on TV as a child.  Watching Watakushiritori it occurred to me that although Okushita is employing a similar concept of a single line animation, the film has a very modern look to it.  Part of the reason for this is the thinness of the lines – which would not have been possible without computer animation technology because when shooting animation on film thin lines get washed out.  Think of the bold lines of Warner Brothers animation during its Golden Era.  I remember talking to Atsushi Wada about this at Nippon Connection 2012 when I asked him about his experience of making Concerning the Rotation of a Child (子供の廻転の事, 2004) on 8mm for his Image Forum Animation School project. This was a real challenge for Wada because he prefers to use very thin lines with drawn with a mechanical pencil (what they call a “sharp pencil” in Japan) which he then scans into the computer.  This was completely ineffective with 8mm so he had to make his lines bolder for this film.

Okushita’s work benefits from being designed on computer because he is able to achieve precise, elegantly drawn thin lines set in sharp relief against a white background. The complexity of his thread drawings – particularly in this film where he has to incorporate hiragana (Japanese cursive script) into the drawing – is really quite remarkable.  In the Geidai interview, Okushita said that trying to achieve single thread effect throughout the film was one of the three main challenges of the film.  He also had the challenge of finding words that would allow him to develop a storyline with Shiritori linked words.  This meant keeping a dictionary close at hand when writing the script. The third challenge fell to the composer Yuri Habuka and sound designer Masumi Takino, whom he asked to create a soundtrack which also incorporates a Shiritori motif.

In explaining the concept behind Watakushiritori, Okushita describes how he recalls the past in a series of connected “fragments of memory” and he wanted to recreate that reality in his animation.  The film begins as a typical day in the life, but it transforms into the tale of a relationship between a man and a woman and the rocky, unpredictable way in which it develops. The impact of the interwoven visual and thematic concepts in Okushita’s film is brilliant in its simplicity.  His animation appears uncomplicated and minimalistic, but behind the scenes it is evident that a lot of careful planning and design went into its execution.  Definitely a young animator to keep an eye on.

Watakushiritori appears on the Geidai Animation 4^th Graduate Works 2013 DVD.  The Red Thread is on Youtube.  Check out Okushita’s official website to see more examples of his art:  http://okushitakazuhiko.com/   

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013