Annecy 2016: P'tits Déj du court / Shorts & Breakfast - Koji YAMAMURA

 

Kōji Yamamura is in Annecy with his latest animated short “Parade” de Satie (サティの「パラード」/ Satie’s “Parade”), which was made in honour of the centenary of Erik Satie’s ballet Parade (1916-17) and the 150^th anniversary of Satie’s birth (1866-1925).  The film soundtrack uses a recording of “Parade” by the Dutch indie jazz band, Willem Breuker Kollektief.

All of the filmmakers in the Annecy shorts competition are invited to a breakfast chat with the festival’s artistic director Marcel Jean called P'tits Déj du court (Shorts + Breakfast) to “talk about the genesis of their films” as well as “the development and the artistic and technical choices.”  Yamamura’s breakfast occurred Tuesday, June 14^th.  Ilan Nguyen was on hand to interpret between French and Japanese for Yamamura.  The following is an approximate English translation of the proceedings. 

Jean: I now invite the director of “Parade”, Kōji Yamamura, to join me. [applause]  So, Erik Satie.  .  . what is your relationship with this great composer?

Yamamura:  I had a CD of Satie’s music.  I have known his music since I was about 20 years old.  There was an exhibition about Satie about 30 years ago and I got a copy of the catalogue.  In it I learned a great deal about Satie as a person.  For example, that he had lived alone in Arcueil in a small apartment that no one ever visited.  After his death they discovered many things in his apartment, including thousands of cards that he had written and drawn on.  These cards had texts that were ironical.   This later, lonely period of Satie’s life interested me a lot. 

Jean:  “Parade” is of course by Erik Satie, but Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau where also involved in the work.  Did you consider at all including them or did you want to concentrate on Satie?       

  

Yamamura:  I very much concentrated on the character of Erik Satie.  I wanted the work to express the life of Erik Satie, and for “Parade” to be one element of the larger picture.  Finally, I wanted to concentrate on the music of this ballet itself.  As the music plays, I integrate certain elements of the life of Satie.  There was a certain distance between Satie and Cocteau.  From the start, Satie did not fully appreciate Cocteau’s script.  Picasso and Satie started getting along well and Cocteau became a bit of a third wheel.  In the end, Satie did not remain faithful to the original text of Cocteau. 

Jean: You rightly say that you are aligning yourself with the music of Erik Satie, so is the length of your film predetermined by the length of the music?  Also is the music not also a train of thought?

Yamamura:  Initially, my hope was to reproduce in animation the first public performance of “Parade” in 1917. As it is a ballet, the length of the music would be already set.  The information about the original performance was pretty sketchy, so I used some of these fragments, these choreographed elements and used my own ideas. . . . . . [I didn’t catch all of this part]

Jean: “Parade” is a ballet and a ballet is a dance, “the art of movement”.  When I watch the films of Kōji Yamamura, there is an approach to movement that is very stylised and very free, and I ask myself, at what point, in ‘Parade’ but also in general,  does dance or other arts of movement act as a reference?

Yamamura: Obviously, the elements of movement, dance in particular, are the important elements for me.  As we know, in animation the animator creates a choreography of movement in a certain sense.  Of course, there exists, in this case in particular, different ways of expressing the internal.  But when one compares the relationship between the ballet and the music on the one hand and the animation and the music on the other, there are notable differences.  It’s a question of corporeality.  The ballet is restricted by the corporeality of the human body, but animation is free of this.  It is not constrained by the limitations of the body. 

Jean: [to the audience] Do you have any questions for Kōji Yamamura? 

Audience member:  Thank you so much for bringing us films that tell us a lot about culture.  First you brought us a film that told us the story of Muybridge, and now a story about Cocteau and Satie.  My question actually does not pertain to your film but to the film that we saw last night, The Red Turtle [the French-Japanese-Belgian feature film co-produced by Wild Bunch and Studio Ghibli].  Everyone was agreeing that Michaël Dudok de Wit was influenced by Japanese art.  What did you think about this film?

Yamamura: Well, it’s a bit difficult to publicly state my opinion on this subject.  I will answer quite frankly, I think this material would have been more appropriate as a short film.  It’s not quite obvious why it would have been done as a feature.   

[There were two more audience questions before the session wrapped up.]

An Instant (2003)

"Things begin with 1, and return to 1"

物事は１から始まり１に戻る。

Azuru Isshiki’s 2003 animated short An Instant, pares the art of animation down to its essentials: a series of images drawn in paint on paper.  It begins and ends with a small dot, but in-between Isshiki explores the full range of expression possible with just simple animation tools.  The film consists of just black and red paint on a variety of different papers.  Dots, lines, and spirals dance across the screen, as does a cheerful female figure.  It is an exuberant and life-affirming piece in the same vein as Norman McLaren’s Boogie Doodle (1940).

The animation is accompanied by a dynamic percussive score performed by Kyōichi Satō (佐藤強一, b. 1962).  It was first shown as a silent film accompanied by a live impromptu music performance in 2003 at an animation event called "INTO ANIMATION 3" organized by JAA (Japan Animation Association).  After this event, the music was recorded and added to the film. 

An Instant screened as part of the programme A Wild Patience – Indie Animated Shorts by Women at Nippon Connection 2016.    It appears on the ASIFA-JAPAN DVD, vol 1, which can be used for non-profit screenings celebrating International Animation Day (IAD) held by ASIFA national groups.

Azuru Isshiki (一色 あづる, b. 1949) is an animation artist from Tokyo.  She worked at Toei for five years before going freelance.  She is a member of the animation group G9+1 and was a participant in Kihachirō Kawamoto’s collaborative work Winter Days (2003). 

Azuru Isshiki Filmography

1992       Wind / 風 / Kaze

2002       A Day of the Earth / 地球の一日 / Chikyu no Ichinichi

2003       Winter Days / 冬の日 / Fuyu no Hi – collaborative work

2004       An Instant

2005       Tokyo Fantasia / TOKYO ファンタジア – collaborative work (G9+1)

2006       Chigueso – Under the Sky of the Planet Earth / チグエソ　地球の空の下で /

                Chigueso – Chikyu no Sora No Shitade – Minna no Uta (NHK)

2007       A Dream Man / 夢人-ユメジン- / Yumjin – Minna no Uta (NHK)

2009       Rambling Child / Yushi no Ko

2009       A Part of Space

2010       Let's go to the Field after the Festival / おまつりすんだはらっぱに /  

               Omatsuri Sundara Harappa ni – Okāsan to Issho (NHK)

Dear Deer (ディアーディアー, 2015)

Dear Deer (ディアーディアー, 2015)

official website: http://www.deardeer-movie.com/

Takeo Kikuchi’s debut feature film, Dear Deer (ディアーディアー / Diā Diā, 2015), won the Nippon Visions Jury Award at this year’s Nippon Connection.  The film was recommended to me by festival curator Atsuko Morimune because the opening sequence features animation by Atsushi Wada, who was my NC animation guest in 2012.

See: Art of the Absurd: An Interview with Atsushi Wada, Atsushi Wada Works 2002-2010, & more

A young woman (a much too short cameo by the wonderful Rinko Kikuchi) is alone in the exhibition space of a local museum at closing time.  She presses a button several times in order to watch a video installation but it does not play.  A few moments after she walks away in frustration, the film plays for the cinema audience.  Animated with Atsushi Wada’s signature style, the short film tells the story of the local Ryōmō sika deer (sika deer are known as shika in Japan), a type of sika deer famous for its antlers, which used to be found in the Ryōmō district of Tochigi Prefecture.  The film claims that the deer used to be prolific until invading foreign species, industrialisation, and hunting drove them into extinction by the Second World War.  Fifty years later, three local children spotted a deer and took a blurry photograph of it.  The people of Ryōmō celebrated this sighting, but as no Ryōmō deer have been spotted since, many believe it to have been a different species of deer (see note at end of review for deer facts).

The story begins twenty-five years later when the three siblings who spotted the Ryōmō deer reunite in their hometown because their father is dying.  The eldest son, Fujio (Kōji Kiryū), stayed at home to run the family business but the economic downturn and his father's hospital bills have left him burdened with debt.  The second son, Yoshio (Yōichirō Saitō), has lived away from home for a long time and is jobless and struggling with mental health issues.  The daughter, Akiko (Yuri Nakamura), has also lived away since leaving school and is trying to divorce her husband.

This family reunion is fraught with problems as each sibling is in turn confronted with issues that they have avoided for much too long.  Fujio is under pressure from a local developer to sell his land to make way for a shopping centre.   Fujio knows he cannot save the business and he needs the money to pay his bills, but he is under pressure from the community not to sell his father’s factory. 

Although his family seems to think that he is mentally ill, Yoshio’s main problem seems to be an inability to take responsibility for the mistakes he has made in his life.  This issue manifests itself in the form of an incident that occurs when Fujio lets Yoshio take the wheel of their father’s car.  His neglectful driving leads him to run over a dog.  Rather than trying to find its owner and apologize, Yoshio buries the dog, and tries to cover his tracks with a series of lies.

Similarly, rather than using the time at home to come to terms with why her marriage has failed, Akiko throws herself back into a toxic high school affair.  As layer upon layer of the weaknesses of these siblings is revealed, we are hooked into the storylines by our curiosity to see whether or not the central characters have an epiphany about their lives, or if they will continue in a downward spiral.

The extinction of the deer and the disintegration of the family serve as metaphors for the decline of small towns all over Japan which are suffering because young people and businesses have moved to larger city centres.  The film was shot in the director’s home town of Ashikaga in Tochigi Prefecture and was produced by the lead actor Kōji Kiryū with his own production company Office Kiryu (オフィス桐生).

The most intriguing thing for me about this film is the fact that I identified more with the minor characters – Akiko’s underappreciated writer husband Seiichi (Yurei Yanagi) and the poor family who lost their dog – than I did any of the central characters.  I dearly hope Kikuchi does a sequel about the life of Akiko’s writer husband who cooks her a wonderful breakfast before walking out of her life to a future unknown.

On a final note: although the deer works as a wonderful metaphor within the story of the film, this is a fiction.  There is only one species of deer in Japan, so if Ryōmō has or had its own regional deer it would be a subspecies of the sika (cervus nippon) such as C.n.nippon.  In real life, the deer is not a very good metaphor for threatened species in Japan because deer and wild boar in Japan are a nuisance to farmers due to over-population.  Deer are overabundant in Japan because of a combination of conservation efforts, a reduction in hunting and the 19^th century extinction of the native species of wolf.  The only subspecies of deer under threat are the Kerama deer (C. n. keramae) which are native to the tiny Kerama Islands of Okinawa.

Takeo KIKUCHI (菊地健雄, b. 1978) was born in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture.  He is a graduate of Meiji University and The Film School of Tokyo (Eigabi).  He apprenticed under Takahisa Zeze before working as an assistant director for many years under various directors.  Dear Deer is his debut feature film.  

2016 Cathy Munroe Hotes