This year
marks only the second time that a woman has won the prestigious Noburō
Ōfuji Award for innovation in animation at the Mainichi Film
Concours. The first was the puppet
animator Nozomi Nagasaki for N&G Production’s Home Alone (るすばん,
1996) nearly two decades ago. Now,
Japan’s oldest animation award has been won by recent Geidai
graduate Hana Ono (小野ハナ, 1986), who goes by the pen name Onohana in English. Onohana is from Iwate Prefecture and completed
a degree in Art Culture at Iwate University (2009) before doing her MA in
Animation at Geidai (2014).
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| Order Geidai Animation 2014 |
Crazy Little Thing (澱みの騒ぎ / Yodomi no Sakagi, 2014) is Onohana’s graduate film from the Geidai
programme, where she was supervised by the 2007 Noburō Ōfuji Award
winner and Oscar nominee Kōji Yamamura. According to a short “Making of” Doc made by
Geidai that I picked up at Hiroshima last year, Onohana began with an incomplete
vision which she developed as she went along.
Once she got stuck in, she explains that the story seemed to take on a
life of its own. She storyboarded the
10-minute short and then made each frame by hand using pencil on paper. The entire film is in a sombre black and white
with very little dialogue.
The film
opens with a shocking scene of a girl, possibly in her early teens, sneaking up
to a sleeping man on the sofa. She slips
a noose around his neck and strangles him.
All the action happens in the background, while in the foreground loom
tall, dark liquor bottles. We soon see
the space from a ceiling shot as the girl moves to tidy up the room with the
hanged man looming over her. This shot
allows us to see that in addition to bottles, the table is littered with beer cans. She takes the bottles to the kitchen where
the floor is teeming with bottles. The girl’s
sad face staring over a sea of bottles tells us all we need to know: this poor
girl has been brought to such desperate circumstances by the alcoholism of her father.
The girl
puts on her coat and rushes out into the snow to check the mail. She cuts a small, forlorn figure against the
vast white garden. The front gate and
the house are distorted to loom over her, emphasizing her smallness. When she steps back into the house, the phone
is ringing. She doesn’t answer
immediately, and is shocked by the sound of her father’s voice snarling at her
to answer the phone. He has an open can
of beer in his hand and is watching her closely. The phone goes to the answering machine and
we hear the voice of the grandmother.
The father tries to get to the phone, but is blocked by the girl and
then the vision from the past disappears and we see that the father is still
hanging from the noose.
Thus the
story begins to weave in and out of reality and the imagined, the concrete and
the symbolic, as the girl deals with her fluctuating emotions. At
times she is in a rage at her father, at other times she seems to be calmly mourning
his passing. There is even a brief scene
that looks like the man mourning a funereal photograph of his younger
self. The story comes to a head with a
tree growing symbolically out of the father’s corpse. The house floods with a black liquid and the
girl must climb the branches of the ever growing tree to escape, hopefully to a
better future that the horrors of the past.
It is a
deeply troubling film that examines the growing problem of individuals living
in isolation in Japan since the collapse of traditional family structures. Stylistically, Onohana uses a lot of shots
from directly overhead that show the floorplan of the house. When you go to the real estate agent in
Japan, you don’t usually see photographs of the apartment but rather such
floorplans since space is at such a premium.
Not only do these scenes add visual interest, but they emphasize how the
girl feels trapped in that space, like a guinea pig in a cage. It is a powerfully moving film that is not
for the faint of heart.
Crazy Little Thing has screened at many festivals over the past year including Nippon Connection, Tokyo Anima!, SICAF,
Fantoche, Anilogue, and Geneva. The film received an honourable mention for the
Walt Disney Award for Best Graduation Film at Ottawa. It appears on the DVD Geidai
Animation: 5th Graduate Works 2014.
Learn more about Onohana on her official website or follow her on twitter, tumblr,
and vimeo.
Onohana also belongs to the animation group Onionskin along with
fellow animators Toshikazu Tamura, Ai Sugaya, and Yewon Kim. In addition to
their indie work, they make music videos and commercials.
Cathy Munroe Hotes 2015
