A week to go till Zipangu Fest gets fully underway, and I have it on good authority (i.e. the Genesis Cinema’s box office) that tickets are selling fast for all screenings. We’ll be making an official announcement about the guests in the next day or two, but I can reveal now that the first is actually arriving later today – Takuro Kochi, sound engineer for Naoyuki Niiya’s Man-eater Mountain, part of the Ero Guro Anime programme. We’re heading down together to introduce the screening at the Cube in Bristol this Friday, held as part of the Encounters Film Festival, and Kochi will still be around for the London premiere of the film the following week.

I should also remind all those in Bristol that the Ero Guro programme is going to be followed by a late night double bill of pink films directed by Yojiro Takita, last year’s recipient of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for the melodrama Departures. Both films are part of Takita’s celebrated Train Pervert or Molester Train series from the 1980s, which I write about at some length in Behind the Pink Curtain, and are being presented in association with the US-distriburor Pink Eiga, who’ve released them on DVD. Details about Sexy Time Trip Ninja can be found on their website here and, for Groper Train: Search for the Black Pearl, here.

Naoyuki Niiya's Man-eater Mountain. Definitely not one for the kids!

But back to the animation. I first caught Man-eater Mountain earlier this year when I was Yubari Film Festival (see my Yubari report from March), and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have honestly never seen anything like it before. This isn’t animation as such, as the individual scenes don’t actually move. Director Niiya himself describes it more accurately as a kami-shibai or paper theatre animation, after the form of sideshow story-telling popular with children in the prewar period, although I’d have to say, I personally wouldn’t show this film to kids, as there’s some pretty strong stuff in here, particularly during the demonic orgy set at the portal to hell during the climax. This is the stuff of a particularly fervid imagination, a heady brew of ancient Japanese folklore, Edogawa Rampo and HP Lovecraft, beautifully illustrated by Niiya, who also performs all the voices of the characters, with the atmospheric soundscape provided by Kochi. Yubari was also responsible for the revival of Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow, a notorious title from the world of underground animation directed by Hiroshi Harada (and reviewed a few years back on Midnight Eye by Johannes Schonherr). Powerful stuff too, I thought, so this is why you’re seeing a selection of both Niiya and Harada’s quite unforgettable films at this years Zipangu.

Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow - Classic ero guro from Hiroshi Harada.

Such underground indie titles point to the fact, as I often like to point out, that there is a whole lot more to Japanese animation than anime, with its parade of magic girls, pocket monsters, cyborgs and slathering tentacular beasts. Since at least the beginning of the postwar period, there have been a host of individuals exploring the full expressive potential of the animated medium, operating outside of the commercial industry and pushing its artistic limits to the extreme – figures such as Kihachiro Kawamoto, Tadanari Okamoto, Koji Yamamura, Tomoyasu Murata and Kunio Kato, to name but a few. Its pretty difficult for most of us to even find out about the work of most of these practitioners of what is sometimes referred to in Japan as “Art Animation”, a slightly misleading term for what is essentially independent animation. The best place to look is Cathy Munro Hoates wonderful Nishikata Film Review blog – an occasional Midnight Eye contributor, Cathy is currently researching a book on this less commercial side to Japanese animation.

Atsushi Wada's In A Pigs Eye, the modern face of Japanese indie animation.

That said, the main problem in finding out more about indie animation outside of specialist film festivals is simply down to the limited opportunities to see it, which is why I’m really excited about the new CALF animation label founded this year by Nobuaki Doi, and even more excited that he has agreed to work with us for the first ever Zipangu Fest to present a programme of selected works by the various creative agents assembled beneath his banner. So far CALF has put out DVDs by Mirai Mizue, Atsushi Wada, and the TOCHKA collective, with a release of Kei Oyama’s works planned for next Summer. You can read an interview with him talking about the project with Chris Magee on the Toronto J-Film Powwow website, and purchase all the DVDs in question from the CALF website here or, if you’re in London next week, pick them up from the Zipangu Fest merchandise stall.

Lost Utopia, a typically bizarre work from Mirai Mizue.

Of the three disks out so far, my favourite is the one dedicated to Mirai Mizue, whose mesmerising biomorphic patterns reject narrative in favour of colour and movement for the sake of movement. As such, they are rather hard to describe in words, but imagine perhaps, a head-trip movie constructed by Benoit Manderlbrot out of Paisley fabric and pulsating amoebic blobs. The most amazing thing is that each highly detailed frame of these works is actually hand-drawn, not created by computer, even the clear lines and solid blocks of more obviously geometric works such as Modern. What I love most about these is that it is quite clear that Mizue understands how image and sound work together perfectly. The synaesthesic qualities of his work are best encapsulated by Trip!-Trap!, with its jazzy score by Alice Nakamura, and Fantastic Cell, an earlier work realised in 2003 – this latter is unfortunately presented silently, due to rights issues surrounding its use of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, although I do remember finding it online somewhere in its entirety a while back. It comes as no surprise to hear Mizue cite Juan Miro as an influence in the fascinating on-disk interview, but the deliciously funny Devour Dinner, in which various biomorphic critters munch upon one another, also reminded me of another painter, the Surrealist artist Yves Tanguy.

Mirai's wonderful Devour Dinner, one of the many films featured on the CALF DVD release.

Time prevents me from going into more detail about the other two disks at the moment, though I’d hate to suggest that they’re in any way less interesting than Mirai’s and I will endevour to write something about them in the not so distant future, once life has calmed down a bit after Zipangu Fest. All I’ll say now is that I can guarantee all of these films are going to look absolutely fab on the big screen, so definitely one of the hot tickets as far as I’m concerned.

Eye candy - Mirai's Jam is definitely one for the big screen.

Check out the Zipangu Fest website for more details on the Ero Guro programmes at Bristol on Friday 19th and London on Friday 26th, and for Beyond Anime: CALF Animation on Sunday 28th.

Posted at 12:28 on 17 November 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• animation
• Atsushi Wada
• CALF
• Encounters
• Genesis Cinema
• Kei Oyama
• Man-eater mountain
• Mirai Mizue
• Naoyuki Niiya
• Nobuaki Doi
• pink film
• takuro kochi
• Tochka
• Zipangu Fest

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This week has been a terrible one for the world of animation, with two of Japan’s pioneering contributors to the field passing away within a day of each other, Kihachiro Kawamoto on Monday, August 23, and Satoshi Kon on the Tuesday. Both of them had a profound effect in steering my tastes and interests within Japanese cinema and both will be sadly lost.

Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue - I'd never seen anything like it in 1998

The news came through of Satoshi Kon’s sad passing on the Wednesday, with the director of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paranoid Agent and Paprika succumbing to pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 46. I won’t go over the details of his career here, as there have been a host of obituaries already to him, and so I’ll just refer you to this one on the Guardian website, and for those who wish to know more about his work, I advise you to check out Andrew Osmond’s book-length study Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist. What I will say is that Kon had a considerable impact with his films, pushing the field of animation into entirely new territory. I have often expressed certain misgivings about elements of his work, but I won’t deny he made exceedingly complex films, rich in narrative and visual detail and beautiful to look at. Certainly, I had never seen anything like Perfect Blue when it played at the ICA in 1998, and it was one of the catalysts for my wanting to study Japanese cinema in more detail. The film has a deeper resonance for me also, as my chapter about the film in the anthology The Cinema of Japan and Korea was the first time I ever saw anything I’d written published in book form. Kon was working on The Dream Machine when he died, which looks set to be completed by the staff of Madhouse Studios with whom he made his startling work.

An early picture of Kihachiro Kawamoto: Puppet Master at work in his studio

I never met Kon during his lifetime, but I count myself has truly privileged for even that brief hour or so I spent with Kihachiro Kawamoto interviewing him at his makeshift studios at Tama University of Fine Arts in Hachioji in 2004 when he was working on his magnum opus, The Book of the Dead. As mentioned, Kawamoto passed away on Monday of pneumonia, a day earlier than Kon, although the news only seems to have filtered through today. He was 85 years old.

I first encountered the name Kawamoto in March 2003 at an event held by the Japan Animation Association of which he was then president. As much of an epiphany as it was for me, I soon discovered that his film that screened there, his surreal collage animation The Trip from 1973, was far from typical of his oeuvre. The subtitled DVD of his short films then out in Japan was the clincher for me though. From that moment I knew that more people had to know about these beautiful pieces of stop-motion animation as possible, and so I brought them to the attention of 100 Meter Films, who introduced them to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, who held a retrospective of his work in July 2005. It was a symbolic moment, as it marked Kawamoto’s return to the city where he’d studied at the studios of Czech puppet master Jirí Trnka over 40 years before.

Kawamoto's Self-Portrait (1988)

Much later, when I organised the tour of his films across the UK, I noticed quite a few audience members came back for the repeat screenings. We launched the tour at the Watershed in Bristol on March 2008, with a whole weekend dedicated to the art of stop-motion and a panel discussion involving Peter Lord of Aardman Animation and the creator of Morph, David Borthwick of the Bolex Brothers, best known for The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, and the amazing Barry Purves, a huge fan of Kawamoto’s films and probably the closest equivalent to the Japanese maestro anywhere in the world. The first part of this panel was videoed and can be seen on Youtube. As you can see, it was a fairly “animated” discussion and I struggled to get a word in edge-ways, but nevertheless, a wonderful weekend. And Kawamoto’s most recent screenings were put together by me for Toronto’s Shinsedai Festival in July. Missed them? Well, console yourself with the knowledge that Kimstim has put out both a compilation of his short works and his final feature Book of the Dead on DVD.

Kihachiro Kawamoto's House of Flame, stop-motion animation at its most exquisite

If you want to know a bit more about Kawamoto, there’s the interview I did with him for Midnight Eye and a longer article I wrote for Film International, which appeared in January 2007 and was available online at one point, but for now you’ll have to it track down in print yourselves. And for those who have never seen a single film by Kawamoto, Dojoji Temple and House of Flame are about is sublime as animation gets.

Kawamoto's earlier puppetry work for Asahi beer in the 1950s

Book of the Dead was always intended to be Kawamoto’s final animated work, but nevertheless, his death comes as particularly sad news. As I said, I only spend a very brief time talking with him, but I was amazed by his friendliness, his energetic spirit and his positive world view, and I am certain that the world was a better place for having him in it.

Kihachiro Kawamoto during production of Book of the Dead in 2004

Posted at 13:23 on 27 August 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• animation
• Book of the Dead
• Kihachiro Kawamoto
• Perfect Blue
• Satoshi Kon
• Shinsedai

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Now on Blu-Ray, Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973)

Up until a couple of months ago you’d have been hard pressed to explain to me the point or the necessity of getting a Blu-Ray player, but there’s been a number of releases recently that have made me change my mind about the new format. A good deal of these have come courtesy of the Eureka label, including the exclusive releases of F.W. Murnau’s City Girl, which I aim to cover on this site soon, and Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods, which I’ve just reviewed as part of the latest Midnight Eye update. The UK-based distributor is now also in the process of upgrading some of the more popular titles from its Masters of Cinema range to exploit the medium’s fuller possibilities, with July’s releases including another classic Imamura title, Vengeance is Mine, which I reviewed on Midnight Eye when the original DVD came out a number of years ago, and René Laloux’s trippy 1973 animation Fantastic Planet. I wrote something about this for Twitch when the DVD came out, but since the new Blu-Ray version is considerably expanded from this original release, I thought the best way to go was to present my original review here in a slightly re-edited version, with added comments pertaining to this reissue. Here goes, then…

Psychedelic French sci-fi from Rene Laloux

Back in 2006, Eureka was responsible for the UK DVD debut of René Laloux’s psychedelic animated sci-fi, Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), which represented the first time the company had dipped their toes into the animation pool with their Masters of Cinema series, and it was particularly refreshing to see a company out there with the belief that animators are just as eligible for cinéastic canonisation as their live-action counterparts. Until then, there had been, and in fact still is really, a general tragic dearth of DVD releases of non-American or non-Japanese animation, and if anything Laloux’s 1973 Cannes Grand Prix winner serves to remind us of the rich tradition in European animation that bridges the gap between these two extremes.

It is almost de rigeur to cite Hayao Miyazaki’s seal of approval on any slightly off-centre animated release, but the claim on the cover blurb of the Blu-Ray and DVD that this adaptation of Stephan Wul’s novel ‘Oms en série’ “can be seen to prefigure much of the work” of the director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away still seems pretty apt: it’s easy to spot more than a passing resemblance between this film’s depiction of two warring races battling it out in a hallucinogenic alien landscape of bizarre vegetation and strange buildings with that of Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind.

Rene Laloux provided an early influence for Miyazaki

The story charts the hostilities between the blue-skinned, red-eyed, web-eared Draags and the more traditionally humanoid but miniscule Oms (Nausicaa featured ‘Ohms’) with whom they share an antagonistic existence on the same planet of Ygam. One of the Om’s is plucked from his mother’s bosom as a baby by Draag girl Tiwa, re-christened Terr and raised as a pet. Tiwa is an indulgent keeper to Terr, nurturing him to adulthood and pumping him full of knowledge from the Draag’s shared information pool. The other Draags however, are complete shits, in one scene tying the hair of two tiny Oms together and forcing them to fight to untangle themselves. But soon Tiwa too becomes bored with her new plaything, allowing Terr to escape into the wild and share his knowledge with a tribe of wild Oms. But by this time the Draag’s are stepping up their plans to begin the merciless process of ‘de-omisation’ and rid the planet of their verminous competitors.

Oms vs. Draags

Blessed with an all-pervading psychotropic atmosphere and a wonderfully trippy soundtrack from Alain Goraguer’s not to dissimilar to the later work of Gallic retro-boppers Air, Fantastic Planet whisks you right back to the early 70s (the full soundtrack is included on the new Blu-Ray, a welcome addition, but I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to include it on a separate CD? If you want to listen to it now, you basically have to do so through your TV rather than a CD player, using up a lot of electricity and boosting your carbon footprint in the process. Maybe there’s a way around this, but I’ve yet to discover it). I hesitate to use the word ‘surreal’, because it has become so dulled by overuse as to become almost meaningless, but if there was an animated work that warranted such a label, it is this one. Be warned though – the drug-inspired and often highly sexualised designs complete with images of bare-breasted aliens will probably deter the more Victorian-minded from presenting this to their pre-teens as a Disney substitute. This is definitely one to be filed under the category of “adult art animation”.

Included on the Blu-Ray is Alain Goraguer's gloriously retro soundtrack

That said, it is also doubtful whether most modern-day adults will pick up on the underlying metaphor. The humanoid ‘Oms’ and the domineering Draags were regarded at the time as a allegory for the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslavakia, although in this respect it is also worth quoting from Craig Keller’s brilliant essay ‘The Schizophrenic Cinema of René Laloux’, contained in the disk’s accompanying booklet, which makes the astute comment that “One might reflect on the connotations inherent to names like Terr (“terre” is French for “earth”), Oms (“hommes” = “men,” “mankind”), and Draags (“drogues” = “drugs”), although searching for a more complex allegorical interplay between these three referents is unlikely to result in anything that can be said to scan sensibly.” The film was in fact a French-Czech co-production made at Jiri Trnka’s studios in Prague (where the Japanese stop-motion puppet animator Kihachiro Kawamoto also served an apprenticeship earlier in the decade – in fact, as much as Terry Gilliam’s animated interludes for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Laloux’s film bears a distinct similarity in ambience and design to Kawamoto’s collage animation The Trip (Tabi), which also critiqued the Soviet invasion). In marked contrast to Kawamoto’s happy experiences in Prague however, the five years it took to complete Fantastic Planet were allegedly something of nightmare for the French animator, who was almost ousted from the director’s chair by various Czech rivals during the production.

Don't mess with Draags, kids

All of this information, and a good deal more regarding Laloux’s background and that of his collaborator, the illustrator-musician-writer-filmmaker Roland Topor, is contained in one of Eureka’s customarily informative colour booklets, which at 56 pages is now double the size of the one included with the original DVD release. The Blu-Ray package also expands on the number of Laloux’s other short films from the two included first time round (his 1965 cut-out collaboration with Topor, Les Escargots, and a really intriguing cel-animated piece created long after his association with the illustrator had ended, this time realised with the staff of Pyongyang animation studios in 1987, entitled Comment Wang-Fo Fut Sauvé) to five.

Classic animated surrealism, Les Escargots (1965)

The first of these shorts to be included, Les Dents du Singe (1960), is a real treat. Basically, the story of how Laloux got into the world of animation is pretty weird in its own right. He actually started off working at La Borde Psychiatric Clinic in Cour-Cheverny in 1956, a sort of progressive lunatic asylum in which the inmates were encouraged to participate in creative activities as part of their treatment. Laloux oversaw the first of these, Tic-Tac (1957), a live-action shadow puppet theatre in the vein of Lotte Reiniger and filmed in 16mm monochrome that somehow ended up on French television. This was followed by his first colour film Les Achalunés, shot using backlit pieces of tinted glass. Sadly, neither of these are included on the disk, although clips from Tic-Tac appear in the 27-minute French documentary from 2003 entitled Laloux Sauvage, in which Laloux gets to tell his bizarre life-story firsthand. Anyway, Les Dents du Singe (1960) was the last such collaboration with the clinic’s inmates, and the one that effectively propelled him into a new phase in his artistic career, marked by his fruitful association with Roland Topor.

Well, there’s clearly a lot to be said about Laloux’s idiosyncratic output, so I’d advise anyone interested to check out this great new release of a truly wonderful film. I ended my review of Eureka’s first DVD of this film in 2006 thus: “Having gorged myself on the contents of this beautiful disk several times now, I am left with an overwhelming appetite to see more of Laloux’s mesmerizing work in the animation field. His 1988 feature Gandahar sounds really intriguing… Anyone at Eureka listening?” Well, whether they were listening specifically to me or not (probably not, let’s face it), Eureka did end up releasing a DVD of Laloux’s final animated feature (btw, not only was Gandahar also animated in North Korea, but equally bizarrely, a certain Bob Weinstein is credited as the producer of the English-laguage version), and also his 1982 feature Les Maîtres du Temps. Perhaps these will be due for a Blu-Ray upgrade soon too?

Stephan Wul's novel of Fantastic Planet now published in English by Creaton Books

As a quick postscript, I should mention that Stephan Wul’s 1957 novel on which Lalous based his animation is now available in an English-language translation from Creation Books. There’s a bit of info on Wul in the Blu-Ray booklet too. Apparently his primary profession was not as a science fiction writer, but as a dentist, a profession which he found considerably more lucrative despite the high regard his stories were held in (although let’s face it, no one is talking about the quality of his root canal work now, are they).

Posted at 16:55 on 12 August 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Alain Goraguer
• animation
• Blu-Ray
• Eureka
• Fantastic Planet
• Hayao Miyazaki
• Masters of Cinema
• Nausicaa
• Oms en Serie
• Rene Laloux
• Stephan Wul

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