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02
Mar
More on CALF animation

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.
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    22
    Apr
    Back in Blighty!
    I'm the King of the World!!!! Cruising back to Dover.

    I'm the King of the World!!!! Cruising back to Dover.

    Wow, that was a longer trip abroad than I expected! Finally got in midnight last night, after a 12 hour car/ferry journey courtesy of a ride-share agency, a concept all but unknown in the UK, but very popular in Germany, and in this particular instance, invaluable – my flights got cancelled twice, and I was getting rather itchy feet in Frankfurt, so am just amazed I am now back at home in one piece. Piles upon piles of stuff to catch up on now I’m back, so this post will be brief, but I just want to say a huge thanks to Marion, Holger, Alex, Mayu, Christiane and all the others at the fest, not only for their work in putting together such a great event, but for their amazing behind-the-scenes level-headedness in making sure all of us were housed and entertained during our extended stay, while they attempted to find ways of getting us all back home. I’d also like to say thanks to my hosts for my final days, Heiko and Kerstin, who kindly provided me with a bed while I ummed and ahed about the best way of making it back home.

    Freak volcanoes notwithstanding, this year’s Nippon Connection was the most fun I’ve ever attended, with great films, great guests, and a generally excellent atmosphere all round. Sadly, I fear, few of the organisers got the chance to enjoy the festival as much as they should have, considering it was the tenth anniversary, occupied as they were by these unexpected events in Iceland. Film festivals are an immense amount of work at the best of times, so I really feel for the Nippon Connection staff who had to spend the past few days dealing with the volcanic aftermath, and as far as I know, are still dealing with it now. Hope they get a chance to relax soon and realise what a great job they’ve done. For these and so many other things, I salute them all. See you next year, Frankfurt!

    Posted at 14:45 on 22 April 2010 Filed under news.
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    20
    Apr
    Update from Nippon Connection

    Nippon Connection officially came to an end on Sunday evening, although you’d hardly know it. As I write, there are currently still around 40+ guests hanging around Frankfurt trying to work out how and when they’re going to get home, myself included. On the one hand, there’s a kind of feeling that the festival is still ongoing, minus the films of course, as everyone rallies round to make the best of a bad situation, huddled around in bars trying to ignore the obvious realities of the situation. On the other, as boredom sets in, it’s only a matter of time before we all get sick of the site of one another, tired of saying our final farewells only to find everyone back at the festival centre next day awaiting new updated information about our imminent departures.

    Of course, things could be a lot worse. If the volcano had blown a few days earlier, there would have been no guests, no prints and basically no festival, hardly a fitting celebration for Nippon Connection’s tenth year. I’m actually in a better situation than most of the others here who need to get back to Japan or North America, because in the worst case scenario, I can always hitchhike up to Calais and stand on the beach, as in Atonement, amassed with all the other Brits awaiting repatriation. And we should spare a thought for the poor jishu eiga director who has been grounded for the past 5 days in Istanbul, where he was meant to be transferring flight…


    I have to say, I’ve been fairly in the dark about the whole situation until today. I’d not read any newspaper coverage nor seen any TV reports about the volcano in the English language. The only screens I’ve been looking at have been filled with Japanese films. I knew over the weekend that the whole incident was going to be a damn inconvenience, but buried my head in the sand as I realised that there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it and didn’t want it to affect my enjoyment of the festival. Now it looks like I’m here for a couple more days, at least I’ve got my laptop, internet access, and a few DVDs to watch, so things could be a lot worse.

    Nippon Connection Audience Award winner Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, directed by Shinsuke Sato and produced by Production IG

    Well, that brings me to the festival, which is, after all, the reason we are all here, and though we’re all going to look back and laugh in a year or so on the events that overtook the tenth Nippon Connection, the festival was memorable for other reasons too, namely the films. This year, I was accorded the honour of sitting on the jury for the Nippon Digital Award, alongside Bernt Brehmer and Dr Roland Domenig. It is the first year Nippon Connection has had a competition for the digital selection, which has got stronger and stronger over the years and at present provides the best showcase anywhere in the world for some of the most important discoveries in the world of Japanese indie filmmaking, documentary and experimental animation, courtesy of the pioneering efforts of programmers Alex Zahlten and Christiane Borchert. Basically, if you’re into the edgier, more innovative side of Japanese film, Nippon Connection’s annual selection is second to none. This meant, however, that I had to spend much of the fest in the digital screening room, so never got the chance to watch any of the more mainstream fare playing on the big screen. Some of these I’d seen before, but I didn’t catch any of the films that got the audience award this year: in third place was Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Symbol; second was Shuichi Okita’s The Chef of South Polar; with the main prize going to Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror, a 3DCG animation from Production I.G. directed by Shinsuke Sato – well, I never saw that one coming, but the Nippon Connection audience has always been an unpredictable lot.

    Noriko Eguchi in Kota Yoshida's Yuriko’s Aroma

    Noriko Eguchi in Kota Yoshida's Yuriko’s Aroma

    There was some great stuff playing in the Nippon Digital selection however, including Daishi Matsunaga’s documentary on the bizarre transgender performance artist Pyuupiru, which you can read all about on Midnight Eye and Yu Irie’s 8000 Miles Part 2: Girls Rappers, which I mentioned in my Yubari report. However, we were all particularly impressed with Kota Yoshida’s Yuriko’s Aroma, a slick and sexy comedy-drama starring Noriko Eguchi of Moon and Cherry fame, playing a not dissimilar role as an aromatherapist with a particularly sensitive olfactory organ who develops an unhealthy obsession with her employer’s sweaty teenage nephew.

    Pyuupiru, in Daishi Matsunaga's film of the same name

    Pyuupiru, in Daishi Matsunaga's film of the same name

    It wasn’t the winner, but we gave it a special mention anyway, and hopefully I’ll find a way of bringing it to the UK before the year’s out. The man of the moment, though, was Tetsuaki Matsue, who impressed me a lot about ten years ago with his promising documentary debut, Annyong Kimchee, detailing his own “coming out” to his friends about his Korean ancestry. I’d always felt that Matsue had subsequently rather coasted along on his talents, but it seems he’s finally come of age this year. It’s true, his Annyong Yumika, also in competition this year, his portrait of the legendary AV and pink actress Yumika Hayashi, who tragically died in 2005 and who is perhaps best known with foreign audiences for her role in Shinja Imaoka’s Lunchbox (2003), wasn’t a million miles away from his usual style. It manifested both the strengths and weaknesses of Matsue’s previous films, though it was engrossing enough, and for those who don’t know much about Japan’s sex film industry and its surprise hidden links with Korea, it was certainly a revelation. Still, it wasn’t quite winning material, so it’s just as well that Matsue also had another film in competition, the near work of genius that is Live Tape. I’m going to be covering this film in a whole lot more detail on Midnight Eye very soon, but for the moment, the nutshell description is this is a single-shot film of the musician Kenta Maeno (also at the fest) as he wanders around Kichijoji performing with his guitar. It’s actually a whole lot more than that too, but basically we were all agreed this was the most innovative, refreshing and inspiring uses of a single DV tape we’d seen in a long, long time and a much-deserved winner. Matsue’s prize is the subtitles of his next film provided completely free of charge, courtesy of the Japanese Visualmedia Translation Academy (JVTA). It should be finished before the year’s out – there’ll be more info on this nearer its release, but for now I’ll just say it is going to be set around Tokyo’s celebrated otaku enclave of Akihabara.

    Star of the show: Kenta Maeno in Tetsuaki Matsue's Live Tape

    Star of the show: Kenta Maeno in Tetsuaki Matsue's Live Tape

    Unfortunately I didn’t get my camera out for any of the festival, so you’ll have to make do with stills of some of the films I’ve mentioned for now. Anyway, this is me signing off for the day. Can’t get back to London for the Takahiko Iimura films, but it doesn’t really matter as he can’t make it either, which leaves me with no other choice other than to pop out for a coffee and a Bratwurst, and try to amuse myself while I await further news on my travel plans.

    Posted at 13:08 on 20 April 2010 Filed under news.
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