Eight short Japanese films will be shown on Friday and Saturday evenings at the festival in the new movie tent. We hope you enjoy this new addition to our event!
Directed by: Kihachiro Kawamoto
THE DEMON (Oni) (8 min / 1972 / Color) A pair of hunters encounter a ghastly demon in the woods. Escaping by severing the apparition s arm, they make an even more grisly discovery on the journey home. Based on the 12th-century Japanese medieval legend Konjaku-monogatari.
House of Flames (Kataku) 1979/19 minutes
A Japanese “Drama of the Absurd.” A young village woman is torn between two suitors. Out of anguish, she decides to destroy herself. Although her intentions are pure, her death reverberates with shocking consequences.
Directed by: Koji Yamamura
Bavel’s Book (1996/5 minutes)
Adult Jury Award (Animation) Chicago International Children’s Film 1998
The imaginative possibilities of animation and reading are intertwined in this spirited Koji Yamamura short. Two kids find a dusty book on a park bench and soon become immersed in a “Robinson Crusoe”-like adventure. They’re in for a jolt, however, when their desert island starts swimming. Yamamura’s painted frames swell with movement and color as the boys zoom through the literary imagination.
Mt. Head (Atama-yama)
2002/10 mins. Nominee Best Animated Short Film 2003 Academy Awards
Koji Yamamura’s Oscar-nominated animated short reworks a surreal Rakugo comic monologue concerning a miserly old-timer. Unable to abide waste, he eats the pit of a cherry earlier saved from the trash. In a peculiar turn, the seed begins sprouting out of his head. Hordes of miniature office workers arrive for picnics under the shade of the blossoming cherry tree without much consideration for the man below. Fed up, he yanks the plant from its root. Contentment continues to elude him, however, and a surprisingly psychedelic conclusion envisions his soul’s ultimate unrest.
A Child’s Metaphysics (Kodomo no Keijijogaku)
2007/ 5 mins.
The animation may be simple but A CHILD’S METAPHYSICS nonetheless contemplates complex concepts like language acquisition and acculturation. In less than five minutes, Koji Yamamura strikes upon several memorable images of education, some hopeful and others not. Children’s heads are spread flat like maps, stuffed with numbers, accessed by ladder, zipped shut and unlocked. Two birds train a girl to smile. Another figure removes her head to read it as a book. Sergei Prokofiev’s twisting melodies lend an added degree of fluidity to the ongoing metamorphoses.
Directed by Osamu Tezuka
Tales of a Street Corner (Aru machikado no monogatari)
1962 39 mins
One of Osamu Tezuka’s earliest and most delightful animation suites, TALES OF A STREET CORNER bursts with imaginative storytelling and expressive visual design. The cast of characters includes a watchful streetlamp, a mischievous moth, a lonesome teddy bear and a whole raft of romantic figures plastered on the city walls. Following after Takia Tatsuo’s fluid score, Tezuka ranges between nighttime serenades, exuberant musical numbers, romantic farce and the looming threat of war.
Jumping
1984 6 mins
A simple idea takes wondrous flight. Like a pogoing POWERS OF TEN, Osamu Tezuka’s animated frame conjures a gravitationally liberated point of view shot. We begin by springing down a leafy suburban street but soon we’re bounding over trees and the civilized world. The film’s movement (with dreamlike suspension in the air punctuated by giddy surprises on the ground) alternates between superhuman overlooks and minute detail. Tezuka’s humor and social conscience shine through in the trajectory of this exciting vertical adventure.
Legend of the Forest (Mori no densetsu)
1989/ 29 mins
Osamu Tezuka’s ambitious fable doubles as a panoramic history of animation. As a flying squirrel and his brethren confront deforesters, we progress from fine woodcuts to zoetrope drums, Winsor McCay-inspired pen animation to Betty Boop black-and-white, Disney-lush painted frames to the bold manga style Tezuka himself innovated. As an epic tale wordlessly staged to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, LEGEND OF THE FOREST cannot help but recall FANTASIA. But Tezuka’s film is more pointed in its ecological reverie.
About Tezuka Osamu
His impact on Manga and Anime is impossible to measure. It was his work that changed the evolutionary path of Japanese animation that today sets it apart from all else. Anime Academy
Known as the god of manga and the father of anime, Tezuka Osamu (1928 1989) has created hundreds of comics, dozens of films, and even some television series (including such internationally beloved shows as ASTRO BOY, SPEED RACER and KIMBA THE WHITE LION.) His pioneering, unparalleled career is without rival for its extraordinary range of visual styles. Included in this set are some of Osamu s most legendary works, including Pictures at an Exhibition and Legend of the Forest. The former combines 10 individual short vignettes to create stunning visual riffs on classic fine art. But the 30-minute Legend of the Forest is the animator s masterpiece. An epic of forest faeries, sprites, wizards, and animals defending themselves against greedy industrialists bent on destroying nature, the film stylistically traces the evolution of animation from 19th-century etchings, to Disney and Fleischer cartoons, to contemporary anime. The animation in Legend of the Forest is as ravishing and inventive as anything seen in Disney s Fantasia.
About Kihachiro Kawamoto
The short films of Kihachiro Kawamoto represent a fusion of Eastern European stop-motion animation and traditional Japanese Bunraku puppetry. Kawamoto studied under the great Czech animator Jiri Trnka (The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka), and his cut-out/puppet combination films–“An Anthropo-Cynical Farce,” “The Trip,” and “A Poet’s Life”–share the dark visions of the old Soviet Bloc artists. “The Breaking of Branches is Forbidden,” in which a drunken novice violates the orders of a severe old monk, echoes the farcical Kyogen comedies that break up programs of Noh plays. “Dojoji Temple” is a strikingly beautiful retelling of a popular Kabuki play: overcome by lust, a woman transforms into a demon-serpent to take revenge on the monk who rejects her. Kawamoto has said that “Dojoji” allowed him to experiment with the combination of two- and three-dimensional elements needed for “House of Flames,” his masterpiece to date. Reminiscent of a Noh tragedy, the film recounts the story of three star-crossed lovers whose suffering transcends the phenomenal world. The title of the collection is not hyperbole: Kawamoto’s films truly are exquisite.
About Koji Yamamura
Koji Yamamura is considered one of the greatest independent Japanese animators of this generation. Born in Japan in 1964, he has been crafting animation since age twelve by combining traditional drawings with mixed media such as modeling clay, still photography and painting. Yamamura has fashioned entirely distinctive, stunningly imaginative worlds with free-spirited creativity: trees grow out of heads, birds dream of fruit, and children are swallowed by whales.
Koji Yamamura first garnered major international attention in 2003 when his universally acclaimed Mt. Head received an Oscar® nomination for Best Animated Short Film. Yamamura is the only Japanese animator (besides the legendary Hayao Miyazaki) to ever receive such an honor.
