It seems I managed to skip posting anything here in February. Oh well, it was a busy month, not least due to the East Winds: Third Window Festival (see previous post) in Coventry and the related duties of interviewing Confessions of a Dog director Gen Takahashi onstage for his mid-month ICA screening in preparation for Third Window Film’s upcoming DVD release, which is currently going damn cheap on Amazon UK (especially if you buy it alongside the DVD of the same company’s Confessions, currently on theatrical release and doing great biz thanks to Claudia Winkelman naming it the must-see release of its week on BBC’s Film 2011).

Hand Soap by Kei Oyama, one of the visionary animators represented by the CALF label

For now however, I just wanted to return to CALF, the independent animation specialist DVD label in Japan whose various creative agents we showcased at Zipangu Fest last November. Well, first up is some good news for those in the Northeast of England – this programme is heading up to Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema on Thursday 7 April, with me in tow to introduce it. It’s the first of a series of four slots from last year’s Zipangu Fest, which ends on Sunday 17 April with Tomoya Maeno’s charming coming-of-age comedy Footed Tadpoles. The other films that will play over the following weeks are Go Shibata’s NN-891102 (described by subtitledonline.com as “edgy, gracefully apocalyptic… approached the realms of the visionary)” and on 14 April, the various films in the Ero Guro Anime Night, including Naoyuki Niiya’s wonderfully macabre Maneater Mountain and Hiroshi Harada’s infamous Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow. You can find out more about these films on the Zipangu Fest and Star and Shadow websites.

Hiroshi Harada's notorious Midori: The Girl in the Freakshow

The next bit of CALF-related news is that Viennese filmmaker Stefan Nutz is is currently putting together a documentary about Japanese indie, art and experimental animation, which sounds right up my street. The film, which features interviews with among others CALF’s Nobuaki Doi, Mirai Mizue, TOCHKA, Atsushi Wada and Kei Oyama as well as the two directors of the films in the aforementioned Ero Guro programme, doesn’t seem to have a title yet, and it may be a while before it is completed, but you can check its progress and show your support by checking out its website.

I’ve already shown my appreciation for the work of Mirai Mizue in an earlier post, but I just thought I’d flag up a few more bits of related news about this maestro of abstract animation.  Firstly, Mizue is one of the featured animators at this year’s Flatpack Festival held in Birmingham later this month, 23-27 March. Secondly, his 2007 work Lost Utopia is one of the titles nominated on the website for the International Festival of Animated Film Stuttgart 2011 – so if you like his film, then you can show your support by voting for it online. What do you mean you’ve not seen it? It’s here on Youtube!

And finally, Mizue has his own Vimeo channel, which features slimmed down versions of his more epic films, and a lot of his works that aren’t included on the CALF DVD, including the Timbre series, of 26 short films running from Timbre A to Timbre Z, uploaded at a rate of one a day earlier this year. Also recently posted on Youtube is the summation of this series, A Long Day of Timbre. A busy man!

Oh, and I believe I’ve mentioned it before, but he has his own website too.

Timbre Z, the last instalment of Mirai Mizue's hypnotic Timbre series, all available to watch on Vimeo

The CALF crew are all going to be in Frankfurt this April for the eleventh Nippon Connection, including Mizue’s label-mates TOCHKA, who I will end by saying a little more about. Few of the artists on the CALF label stretch definitions of animation quite as far as this duo, consisting of Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno, whose works are realised using a technique they call PiKA PiKA, which is a combination of long exposure and stop motion animation techniques. There’s an interactive element to all of this too, which makes their appearance at Nippon Connection all the more exciting, as audience will have the opportunity to participate in a workshop, waving their glow-sticks to create their own animation. The TOCHKA DVD is available on the CALF website along with the other animators, and yes, they’ve also got their own website.

Frozen in time, a still from one of TOCHKA's PiKA PiKA "lightning doodle" projects, coming to Nippon Connection this April

Rather than me reproduce their press release in full myself, you can read all about the forthcoming Nippon Connection on the website of Jason Gray. As well as the CALF focus, highlights include an exhaustive retrospective of current darling of Japanese cinema, Sion Sono, the Love Exposure director whom I’ve written about many times on this website, and whose Cold Fish is going to be the next title up for release in the UK from Third Window, which brings us sort of full circle I guess….

Posted at 17:43 on 02 March 2011 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• animation
• Atsushi Wada
• CALF
• Ero Guro Anime
• Footed Tadpoles
• Hiroshi Harada
• Kei Oyama
• Maneater Mountain
• Mirai Mizue
• Naoyuki Niiya
• Nippon Connection
• NN891102
• Nobuaki Doi
• Sion Sono
• Stefan Nutz
• Tochka
• Tomoya Maeno
• Zipangu Fest

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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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Yubari International Film Festival 2010

So here I am once more, seated in my customary position somewhere in the murky depths of south-east London staring at my face partially reflected in the monitor of my Mac. Wasn’t it always thus? It seems so, the past few weeks now reduced to a fragmented fever dream of regurgitated sense memories; floating faces from a previous life, flashing neon signs of alien characters, the repetitive blare of electronic melodies echoing through my subconscious. But no – the paper trail of ticket stubs in my back pocket and appointments jotted in the pages of my diary, the unpacked suitcase overflowing with dirty laundry, DVD screeners and chirashi one-sheets, and a camera memory card full of surreptitious snapshots seem to indicate that somewhere within the blur of the past month or so, I was there, back on the other side of the world again.

The main venue, the Adire Yubari

I don’t know why I always feel the need to make such disclaimers, but yes, I had originally intended to give regular updates on my movements during this last trip to Japan, if only for my own benefit as some sort of confirmation that I was actually there as much as to jot down my impressions on current developments within the Japanese film scene. Somewhere along the way however I was absorbed into the vortex, with barely a moment to draw breath between the stream of meetings, screenings, research sessions and barroom re-acquaintances with old friends. Even sleep was a rare luxury.

Nippon Connection's Alex Zahlten in the izakaya that served as the main main post-screening meeting point

This post, then, is the first of several, I hope, in which I will attempt to set down the salient points of my stay, beginning with my first weekend at the legendary Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido. This isn’t intended as any sort of review or festival report. You’ll be able to find these from previous years on Midnight Eye, with Eija Niskanen’s piece on last year’s here and Tom Mes’ from the one before here. No, basically this is just an excuse for my to put up some of my photos from that weekend and assemble them into some sort of narrative.

Freezing at the saturday night stove party with Eija Niskanen

I’d been in Tokyo a couple of days before flying up to Hokkaido, the evening before spent back in a bar run by a certain pink director best known for his work in the 1990s. All this meant I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep before heading to Haneda airport at some ungodly hour on the morning of Thursday 25th Feb. Turns out I needn’t have bothered rushing as the flight was delayed by several hours due to the dense fog encircling Tokyo, so several hours were spent loafing around drinking coffee and saying hellos to all the others heading up north. These included such notable luminaries as director Nobuhiro Yamashita and actor Ryo Ishibashi, both of whom were sitting on the festival jury – as well as a whole swathe of festival staff members, casts and crews of the films playing there, and numerous others drawn to the buzz of one of the high-points in the Japanese movie world’s social calendar. My own reason for going, aside from the sheer joy of being there and looking out for some decent titles to introduce to England, was to participate in a panel discussion with two other Japanese film specialist programmers, Marc Walkow (NYAFF) and Alex Zahlten (Nippon Connection), about the overseas appreciation of Japanese cinema, which all went pretty swimmingly, I thought.

Hand-painted hoarding for Carmen Comes Home

Without saying too much about the individual titles that played at this years fest, which I’ll have ample opportunity to do over the coming months, my overall impression of YIFFF was that the overall emphasis was on the fun and the films rather than glitzy red carpet posturing (the various financial difficulties suffered over the past few years, not only by the festival but the actual town itself, have been well-documented elsewhere). Outside of the festival, Yubari town was quite an experience in itself. A tiny place about an hour-and-a-half drive from Sapporo otherwise better known for its melons and its now defunct coal industry, it consisted of little more than a couple of hotels and a handful of buildings surrounded by snowy mountains and linked by a main road covered in a thick sheet of ice that made crawling between its small selection of screens, bars, eateries and karaoke joints a pretty perilous experience.

Hand-painted hoarding for Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

The other most noticeable thing about the town is that its streets are festooned with hand-painted classic film posters, both Japanese and western. This is a clearly a town that takes its cinema pretty seriously. Aside from skiing and melon farming, one can’t imagine there’s much more for people to do here other than watch films, although outside of the festival one imagines that opportunities to catch the latest releases on a big screen must be pretty limited. The eclectic programming mixed recent foreign hits such as District 9, The Hurt Locker, Sherlock Holmes and An Education and home-grown premieres like Tomoyuki Furumaya’s Bushido Sixteen and Shusuke Kaneko’s Bakamono- The Idiots with a host of modestly-budgeted jishu eiga titles, the best of which screened in the separate Off-Theatre section. The less said about the opening film, Surely Someday, the better. A puerile caper movie involving a boy band starring and directed by Shun Oguri (from Boys over Flowers, Crows ZERO), it did at least provide a welcome opportunity to catch some shut-eye. Elsewhere however, there were some great discoveries, with the premiere of Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2, the follow up to last years Off Theater winner 8000 Miles (the Japanese title Saitama Rapper gives a better indication of the film’s contents) capped off with a sprightly performance from its pert ensemble cast of girl rappers (comprised of Love Exposure’s Sakura Ando and the newcomers Maho Yamada, Fumi Sakurai, Kumiko Masuda and Mayumi Kato) providing an uplifting end to the Friday evening.

Onstage shenanigans from the cast of Saitam Rapper 2: Girl Rappers

It also soon became clear that in packing for my trip to Japan, I’d failed to appreciate just how damn cold it got in Hokkaido in March. Ok, so it wasn’t so much of an issue while watching films of course, but the walks between the various venues and post-screening drinking holes might have been a little less gruelling had I thought of bringing along a pair of gloves, at the very least. The Saturday night ‘stove party’, which followed a mind-blowing selection of ero-guro anime including Naoyuki Niiya’s revelatory kami-shibai workout, Man-Eater Mountain (Hitokui yama), was great fun, swilling down warm sake and feasting off charcoal grilled dear meat, octopus and scallops, although sadly the cold soon got the better off us and we beat a hasty retreat to the cosy Grace Karaoke bar for a lengthy singsong session.

Naoyuki Niiya's experimental kami-shibai movie Man-Eater Mountain

Christ knows what the place is like once all traces of the festival have gone, but it was clear that the locals definitely appreciated the massive influx into their town, and were the epitome of politeness and welcoming geniality. Lovely people. The cosy friendliness of the place was infectious, meaning that it was easy to rub shoulders with the other festival guests, including the highly-personable Ryo Ishibashi, and the legendary Johnny To, who generously treated all of the other guests to a farewell party at a local sushi restaurant. Yes, Yubari 2010 is a memory I am going to treasure for a long, long time, as it was one of the best film events I’ve ever attended in Japan. I pray I make it back again sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Posted at 11:49 on 15 March 2010 Filed under news.

• Tagged
• Man-eater mountain
• Naoyuki Niiya
• Saitama Rapper
• Sakura Ando
• Yubari

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