Twelve Months (森は生きている, 1980)

Watching autumn slowly turn into winter here in central Germany, I got to thinking about Tōei Dōga’s delightful children’s anime Twelve Months (森は生きている/ Mori wa Ikiteiru, 1980) and managed to track it down as an extra on a DVD release of The Wild Swans (白鳥の王子, 1977).  It is wonderful to watch with children under the age of 10 because it is a reasonable length (about an hour long), has beautiful depictions of the forest and its wildlife, features great music, and teaches good moral lessons (it pays to be kind / greedy people will have their comeuppance).  The strongest element of this adaptation are the character designs by Osamu Tezuka. 

Twelve Months tells the parallel stories of two young girls of the same age, one poor and one rich.  Anja (Shinobu Otake) is an orphaned girl who lives in near poverty in rural Russia with her nasty stepmother and her equally unpleasant stepsister.  Her family forces her to do most of the hard labour of the house such as collecting wood from the forest for their fire.  Anja’s story crosses paths with that of the spoiled young Tsarina (Ai Kanzaki) when she encounters an elderly soldier in the forest in late December.  He helps Anja collect firewood, and she returns the favour by helping the soldier find the perfect fir tree for the Tsarina, who wants to decorate it in time for New Year’s Eve. 

Next, the Tsarina, who thinks that the whole world must revolve around her desires, gets it into her head that she wants snow drops for her New Year’s decorations. Unheeding of the fact that it is the wrong season for such flowers, the Tsarina sends out a proclamation informing her subjects that if one of them can bring her a basketful of snow drops she will reward them with a basketful of gold.  Anja’s greedy stepmother and stepsister desperately want the gold, and force Anja to go out alone into a blizzard in search of snow drops.  Just as it seems that she is about to freeze to death in the forest, Anja encounters the spirits of the twelve months around a campfire.  Because they have witnessed her kindness to the forest animals, they offer to help her as long as she promises never to tell anyone where she got the snow drops.  Keeping this secret will prove very hard due to the insatiable desires of the Tsarina.  Needless to say, as it is a fairy tale, the story resolves itself with everyone getting what they deserve.

The animation belongs to a series of fairy tale adaptations made by Tōei Dōga in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The series was called Sekai Meisaku Dōwa (世界名作童話), which has been variously translated as World Children's Classics and World Masterpiece Fairy Tales in English.  The series included The Wild Swans (1977), Thumbelina (1978), Swan Lake (1981), and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1982).  Twelve Months, also known as “The Forest Lives” / “The Forest That Lives” (direct translation of Japanese title), was adapted from the Samuil Marshak’s Russian fairy tale of the same name by Kimio Yabuki, Ikoku Oyabu and Tomoe Takashi.   Yugo Serikawa was the chief director, with Kimio Yabuki and Tesuo Imazawa acting as co-directors.  The animation was co-produced with the Moscow studio Soyuzmultfilm, who had themselves produced an acclaimed cel animation of Twelve Months in 1956 with the legendary “Patriarch of Soviet animation” Ivan Ivanov-Vano at the helm.  

The animation was done in Japan, but the music was composed by Vladimir Krivtsov and performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of A. S. Dmitriev.  Incidental music was also provided by Shunsuke Kikuchi.  The theme song Don’t Cry (泣かないわ/Nakanaiwa) is sung by Yoshiko Mari.  The song was not composed for the film but had been a hit for Junko Sakurada in 1976 with lyrics by Yū Aku and music by Kōichi Morita. 

For this review, I watched the German dub of the film, Anja und die vier Jahreszeiten (Anja and the Four Seasons), which was adapted by Andrea Wagner of ZDF, who did the German text for many anime films and series of the 70s and 80s from Vicky the Viking (1974-5) to The Wonderful Tales of Nils (1980-1) and Alice in Wonderland (1983-4).  The theme song has also been beautifully adapted, but instead of singing about restraining one’s tears, the uncredited singer sings about the four seasons.  I have searched high and low to find out who sings the song but have only found German message boards of people asking in vain about where they can buy the song.  It seems it was never released on CD. If any of my German readers recognize the singer, do let me know.  Here are the lyrics of the German theme song with my translations in square brackets:

Wolken ziehen 

Die Bäume werden grün 

Blumen blühen

Es ist Frühling

[Clouds drift by / the trees become green / flowers blossom / it is springtime]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

[Dear Seasons, we thank you for this lovely time of year x2]

Sonnenschein erhellt

Mit goldenem Licht die Welt

Wenn es heiß wird

dann ist Sommer

[The sun shines / with golden light upon the world / When the heat comes / it is summer]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Ohne euch wäre unsere Welt nie so zauberhaft und schön

Ohne euch hätten wir die Welt nie in voller Pracht gesehen

[Without you, our world would not be so magical and beautiful /

Without you, we would never have seen the world in all its splendour]

Wälder glühen

Im bunten Farbenkleid

Vögel ziehen

Es ist Herbstzeit

[The forest glows / in its colourful robes / birds fly by / it is autumn]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Leise fällt der Schnee

Und färbt die Erde weiß

Schnee und Eis

Bringt der Winter

[The snow falls softly / and colours the earth in white / snow and ice / bring the winter]

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Jahreszeiten wir danken für diese schöne Zeit

Ohne euch wäre unsere Welt nie so zauberhaft und schön

Ohne euch hätten wir die Welt nie in voller Pracht gesehen

Nur der Wechsel

Im Ablauf der Natur

Lässt uns glücklich sein

Und an der Welt uns freuen

[Only the changes / brought by Mother Nature / bring us such happiness / and such joy to be alive]

The German cast for Anja und die vier Jahreszeiten is not yet on Anime News Network, and were a bit tricky to find so I also cite them here:

Walter Reichelt (ältester Soldat / Elder Soldier) 

Madeleine Stolze (Anja) 

Gernot Duda (Februar / February) 

Inez Günther (Natascha /Stepsister) 

Horst Sachtleben (Professor) 

Ursula Mellin (Stiefmutter / Stepmother) 

Michaela Geuer (Zarin)

As I mentioned at the outset, this film is available in Germany as an extra on the DVD (Region 2) for The Wild Swans. This DVD has the German dub and the English dub but no subs. I have not found any other legit means of buying / viewing the film. Fans of the song “Nakanaiwa” can find it on Junko Sakura’s Golden Best album.

 Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Youth (青春 / Seishun, 2008)

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind.  .  .

For her first stop motion animation, the young puppet animator Aki Kōno (河野亜季, b. 1985) was inspired by the famous poem “Youth” by Samuel Ullman (1840-1924).  In the tradition of Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata” (1927) or Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (1916), Ullman’s “Youth” teaches a kind of Horatian Carpe diem philosophy on how life should be lived.

Ullman, a German Jew who immigrated to the United States with his family when he was a boy and served in the Confederate Army, is a rare example of a poet who is not that well known in the English-speaking world but has a high degree of fame in Japan.  His poem “Youth” was brought to Japan by General Douglas MacArthur, who kept a framed copy of the poem on the wall of his Tokyo office during the Occupation of Japan and regularly quoted the poem in his speeches. 

According to Margaret England Armbrester, a Japanese businessman by the name of Yoshio Okada read about MacArthur’s love of the poem in the December 1945 issue of Reader’s Digest.  He found the poem very moving and translated it into Japanese to display in his own office.  Through word of mouth, the poem eventually gained renown in the Japanese media and became quite popular (Samuel Ullman and “Youth”: the Life, the Legacy, 1993, p. ix).  The poem remains much loved by Japanese businessmen.  In fact, co-founder of Sony Akio Morita (1921-99) and a number of other prominent Japanese executives were instrumental in saving Ullman’s Birmingham, Alabama home and turning it into a museum (See: Akio Morita Library).  The Birmingham Boys Choir even went to Japan in 2009 and performed a song version of the poem for audiences there.

There was more than one version of the poem, but the following is considered the standard:

Youth

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Source: Samuel Ullman Museum, Birmingham, Alabama

Aki Kōno’s puppet animation is set during the Second World War.  An active soldier dies (possibly kills himself?) and his comrade finds him with a letter to his mother clutched in his hand.  The injured comrade takes the letter to the man’s mother but he unknowingly just misses seeing her as she walks in her geta-clad feet in the opposite direction down the street.  He sees posters advertising a Pierrot performance for children and as the mother is not at home he decides to watch the show.  He enjoys the Pierrot performance so much that it moves him to tears, for the horror of war has meant that he had almost forgotten how to smile.  When he later calls again at the elderly mother’s house he suddenly realizes that she is the actor behind Pierrot.  The film’s poignant message is that age does not matter when one is young at heart – or in the words of Ullman: “Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind.”

The animated short has no dialogue, though Kōno does impart additional story information using occasional inter-titles.  The lack of dialogue matches well with the Pierrot theme.  The nostalgic atmosphere of the film is created subtly with two songs: a haunting rendition of the Kyūshū folk song “Itsuki Lullaby” (五木の子寺唄/Itsuki no Komoriuta) sung by Hideko Seno, and the melancholy strains of Claude Debussy’s “Claire de lune” (piano for both songs: Misaki Takada).  The expressive puppets are beautifully crafted and the puppet movements are excellent for such a young animator. 

Aki Kōno made Youth during her undergraduate studies at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto (2008).  She went on to do her graduate studies at Tokyo Univeristy of the Arts where she made a beautiful silhouette animation called Promise (約束 / Yakusoku, 2011).  Check out her website to learn more about her animation, illustration, and other art projects.  She has posted the film on Youtube:

The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (わんぱく王子の大蛇退治, 1963)

The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (わんぱく王子の大蛇退治 / Wanpaku Ōji no Daija taiji, 1963) is the first feature film that I watched on my new Toshiba Satellite Ultrabook with its cinema-wide 21:9 ratio screen and it looked fantastic.  Directed by Yūgo Serikawa, Toei Dōga’s sixth animated feature film was shot using Toei’s anamorphic process Toeiscope (東映スコープ), whose slogan at the time was “Picture Size Three Times as Large; Interest One Hundred Times as Great” (Anderson/Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, p.252).  In so-doing, Toei Dōga was following in the steps of Walt Disney who had produced the first animated film in Cinemascope, Lady and the Tramp (1955), less than a decade earlier.  In terms of its unique art design and colour palette, The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon has much more in common with Disney’s spectacular Sleeping Beauty (1958) which was the first animated film shot using the Super Technirama 70 widescreen process.  The epic scope of the story is in keeping with the trend of the times.  I’m thinking of the classic Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 60s, such as The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), and El Cid (1961), which all employed widescreen technologies and spectacular colours in order to keep cinema competitive against the threat of the new medium of television.

Ichirō Ikeda and Takashi Iijima’s screenplay is an adaptation of various mythological stories surrounding Susanō (voiced by Morio Kazama, at the time going by his birth name, Tomohito Sumita), the Shintō god of the sea and storms.  Many of the key details of the stories are unchanged from how they appeared in the original sources (the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki), but others have been altered or modernized.  One of the main reason for the changes is that children were the target audience, thus many salacious and grotesque details were excised and the stories have been repackaged as the childhood exploits of Susanō.  According to legend, Susanō was the youngest child of the gods of creation, Izanagi (Setsuo Shinoda) and Izanami (Mitsuko Tomobe).  He was reputedly brave; however, his quick-temper would often get him into trouble.

Susanō’s hot-headed nature is established in the opening scenes of the film in which he plays with his friends in the form anthropomorphic animals.  Talking animals are a modern twist to the Susanō story. This may have been influenced by Disney, but certainly anthropomorphic animals appeared in early pre-war anime as well.  Susanō’s sidekick, the rabbit Akahana (literally “red nose”, voiced by Chiharu Kuri), is being chased by a tiger and Susanō comes to his rescue. The young boy almost loses his temper completely with the tiger but his mother, Izanami, intervenes.  The loving bond between mother and child is illustrated with a bathing scene where Izanami washes her son and sings a sweet song to him.  Their actions are mirrored by a tanuki mother and child.   

Susanō’s idyllic childhood comes to a sudden halt when he learns of his mother’s death.  He refuses to accept that she has passed on and in spite of his father’s protests, Susanō sets off to sea with Akahana determined to recover his mother from the Underworld.  His adventures, which are punctuated by dramatic fight sequences with a giant fish and a fire god, take Susanō to visit his brother Tsukuyomi (Hideo Kinoshita), the moon god, in his crystal palace and later to his sister Amaterasu (Noriko Shindō), the sun goddess, where the famous story of the cave takes place.   Because of the trouble Susanō causes Amaterasu, he is asked to leave her realm which leads to climax of the film:  the tale of Yamata no Orochi, the eight-headed dragon.  Susanō meets Kushinada-hime (Yukiko Okada) and learns of the sad fate of her sisters who have been sacrificed to Yamata no Orochi.  Susanō’s fight with the giant beast is one of the most visually dynamic fight scenes in all of anime history, which was principally animated by Yasuo Otsuka and Sadao Tsukioka (Learn more about this scene from: Anipages)

This is the first Japanese animation to formally introduce the role of animation director, who in this case was the legendary Yasuji Mori (filmography).  As animation director, Mori would have supervised all the work done by the key animators (Hideo Furusawa, Masao Kumagawa, Yasuo Ōtsuka, Daikichirō Kusube, Makoto Nagasawa, Chikao Katsui, Yōichi Kotabe, Masatake Kita) in order to correct any errors and maintain continuity.  I associate Mori with the idealised animal characters of Magic Boy (少年猿飛佐助, 1959) and Fables of the Green Forest (山ねずみロッキーチャック, 1973), but this film has a unique look that makes it stand out among other animation of this era.  The central characters (Susanō, Kushinada-hime, Akahana, the Tiger) have broad heads, except for Izanami and Amaterasu who have the more typical idealized doll-like oval heads.  The most unique character designs are the angular ones of Tsukuyomi and his people who look as though they have been hewn from blocks of ice.  (See the Ghibli Blog for original character sketches).

Romantic pastels are a rarity in the mostly high contrast colour palette of this film.  Although the choice of colours and many of the character designs are typical of early to mid-century illustration and animation art, the composition of the widescreen frames seems heavily influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics.   Frames are not composed according to Western principles as used by Disney, but according to the Japanese aesthetic as seen in art such as sansui-ga and woodblock prints.  From a filmic perspective, the innovative variety of shots from extreme close-ups to extreme high angles keep the spectator actively engaged from start to finish. 

Another element that makes this one of the top anime of all time is the dramatic score.   It was composed and arranged by Akira Ifukube, of Godzilla fame.  He really was the ideal choice for a Shintō epic for he had both a deep knowledge of traditional Japanese and Ainu music (his father was a Shintō priest in Hokkaido) and was inspired to become a composer after hearing a radio performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (coincidentally used in Fantasia).  It is a wonderful score – which can be enjoyed on its own as an audio track as well as with the visuals.  His soundtrack would easily make my list of top ten animated feature film soundtracks of the 20^th century. 

Akira Ifukube no Geijutsu 7

Tetsuji Honna, Japan Philharmonic Orchestra

Wanpaku Ouji no Daija Taiji

The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon won Toei Dōga the Noburo Ofuji Award for 1963 – the only feature length film to do so until Hayao Miyazaki won for Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979).  Among those in the anime industry in Japan, The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon is considered one of the best anime of all time.  It ranked 10^th in the Laputa Top 150 Japanese and World Animation survey (2003).  It is available on DVD (JP only).

©Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

This review is part of Nishikata Film Review’s  Noburo Ofuji Award series.