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Tadanari Okamoto Film Works Vol. 3 1961 - 1995 DVDR Beginnings: 1932-1963 To tell Okamoto's story from the beginning, we have to make a short detour to talk about Tadahito Mochinaga, the legendary father of Japanese stop-motion animated filmmaking. Mochinaga had started out working under Mitsuyo Seo, and had left Japan for Manchuria just before the end of the war, where he found himself in demand for his animation knowhow. (To learn more about his fruitful China period, I refer you to an outstanding article on Mochinaga by Kosei Ono on AWN.) Upon returning to Japan around 1953 after nearly a decade in China, Mochinaga made several TV advertisements using the stop-motion technology he had developed in China, thus becoming the founder of Japanese stop-motion puppet animation. In January of 1956 he completed his first Japanese-produced stop-motion puppet film, Uriko Hime to Amanojaku (18 minutes). The film proved popular enough that he was able to produce another, 5 Monkeys (17 minutes), completed in June 1956, which reportedly showed definite technical improvements over his first. Not long after his return from China Mochinaga had taken on a protege, a young person named Kihachiro Kawamoto, whose first job as the puppet maker for Mochinaga was a television advertisement made in 1953. Kawamoto seems to have created the puppets for many of Mochinaga's films made between this year and the founding of Mochinaga's studio MOM Productions in 1960, including a promotional film about the history of beer commissioned by the Asahi Beer Company, completed in July 1956, and Little Black Sambo, completed in November 1956, which is the film that brough Mochinaga to the attention of Videocraft International in 1959 at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The technical strides made since the previous year must have been quite something, because Videocraft was so impressed by the polish of the film, probably in no small part thanks to Kawamoto's puppets, that it convinced them to commission a handful of stop-motion TV series from the studio, including The New Adventures of Pinocchio and Willy McBean & His Magic Machine. Which brings us back to Tadanari Okamoto. Born in Osaka in 1932, Okamoto graduated from the law school of Osaka University in 1955, and worked in the legal profession for two years before quitting and entering the film school of Nihon University in 1958. After graduating in 1961, Okamoto entered the MOM production, where he worked on several of the TV series commissioned from the studio before finally quitting and forming his own company, Echo Incorporated, in 1964. Along with Kawamoto, then, Okamoto is one of the more famous of the figures who followed in the footsteps of Tadahito Mochinaga and continued to develop the possibilities of stop-motion animation. Full article on ANIPAGES. Enjoy this rare gem.
09/24 09:28 naruto
Yoji Kuri - Film works 1965 - 1977 The contemporary Japanese animator Yoji Kuri has enjoyed the most successful international career of all the many independent Japanese animators whose work stands in contradistinction to the more elaborate, more collaborative, and more commercial productions from such industrial giants as the Toei and Toho studios. As such, Kuri constitutes a fine example of the Japanese experimental film artist, being in a sense an Asian analogue to such animators as the American Robert Breer. Kuri's early years were spent as a cartoonist, but by 1960 he had established a small independent studio which centered upon a solitary 35mm animation camera. In the following year he completed Human Zoo, which won the Bronze Medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. As the film-scholar Millie Paul suggests, it was this award that truly launched his career. The brief animated work that followed—such as the erotic Aos, the abstract Locus, the educational Discovery of Zero—allowed him to develop his reputation and style. The 1967 film The Room (which grew out of one of Kuri's flip-books) provides some insights into that style, and the structures which came to mark his acollaborative, independent animation through the 1960s and 1970s. The Room is precisely five minutes long and is made up of 19 brief tableau units, each of which is largely confined to the rather surreal space of a stark and simple line drawing of an empty "room." Such simple, black-and-white line drawings are typical of Kuri's style, not unlike that of the American cartoonist James Thurber. Further, while The Room was shot—frame by frame, in an admixture of animated cels and cut-outs—on color stock, rarely does color appear in the film (and only then to heighten an effect or to underscore a mood). Tableau One provides the film's titles, which appear within the room's simple space. What follows are 18 disparate tableaux with almost no narrative causality or continuity between them. Each tableau itself is distinctly marked by often bizarre metamorphic transformations. In Tableau Two, for example, two feet emerge from the room's right and left walls, then feet metamorphose into a bird which flies around the room. Such metamorphic transformations—where one figure seems almost to "melt" and then reform into a very different figure, linked to the first only by subtle topologic similarities—are one of Kuri's stylistic and structural hallmarks. The Room is replete with them, having more than 40. In lieu of more traditional (and commercial) narrative linkings between images, these metamorphoses underscore far more associational (and thematic) unities which bond Kuri's rapidly paced exchanges of mise en scène. The Room, like most of Kuri's work, is for adult audiences, and such themes as the conflict between the sexes, the violence of war, and bureaucratic boredom, predominate. But perhaps even more predominant is Kuri's artistic insistence upon graphic similarities: comparisons and contrasts of tones, lines, and forms which continue to reiterate the essential (etymological) meaning of our Western term "aesthetic" as "a study of sensation/perception." Not only for The Room but for all of Kuri's extensive production (which likely exceeds 400 films, many unreleased, many others international prize winners), one must keep in mind Kuri's total control as an independent artist. All funding, conception, scripting, graphics, shooting, sound, editing, and even distribution are—in the main—from his hand. As a result, Kuri's films, such as The Room, are very personal, yet remarkably international, partly due to his penchant for soundtracks which avoid spoken language and which instead consist of an "international language" of sound effects and/or music. Kuri's total artistic production is very varied. He began his creative life as a cartoonist and continues such work today. He continues to fashion flip-books, kinetic sculptures, paintings and drawings, and cut-out compositions. He is probably the best-known Japanese independent both in his own country and throughout the world. His satire and sexuality, his caricature and metamorphoses, and (perhaps above all) his post-Hiroshima "black humor" all bond together with an experimental willingness to explore various animation media. The result is seriously funny adult fare, at once popular and yet "theoretical" enough for the connoisseur and magically international in its appeal. He is a consummate, exemplary independent artist who is constantly and consistently creative. —Edward S. Small films include -two fishes -fantasia of stamps -human zoo -love -the chair -aos -the man next door -the window -au fou -the room -two fishes -love of kemeko -g string -the midnight parasites -the bathroom -pop -manga
09/24 09:28 naruto
Tadanari Okamoto Film Works Vol 4 1961 - 1995 DVDR Beginnings: 1932-1963 To tell Okamoto's story from the beginning, we have to make a short detour to talk about Tadahito Mochinaga, the legendary father of Japanese stop-motion animated filmmaking. Mochinaga had started out working under Mitsuyo Seo, and had left Japan for Manchuria just before the end of the war, where he found himself in demand for his animation knowhow. (To learn more about his fruitful China period, I refer you to an outstanding article on Mochinaga by Kosei Ono on AWN.) Upon returning to Japan around 1953 after nearly a decade in China, Mochinaga made several TV advertisements using the stop-motion technology he had developed in China, thus becoming the founder of Japanese stop-motion puppet animation. In January of 1956 he completed his first Japanese-produced stop-motion puppet film, Uriko Hime to Amanojaku (18 minutes). The film proved popular enough that he was able to produce another, 5 Monkeys (17 minutes), completed in June 1956, which reportedly showed definite technical improvements over his first. Not long after his return from China Mochinaga had taken on a protege, a young person named Kihachiro Kawamoto, whose first job as the puppet maker for Mochinaga was a television advertisement made in 1953. Kawamoto seems to have created the puppets for many of Mochinaga's films made between this year and the founding of Mochinaga's studio MOM Productions in 1960, including a promotional film about the history of beer commissioned by the Asahi Beer Company, completed in July 1956, and Little Black Sambo, completed in November 1956, which is the film that brough Mochinaga to the attention of Videocraft International in 1959 at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The technical strides made since the previous year must have been quite something, because Videocraft was so impressed by the polish of the film, probably in no small part thanks to Kawamoto's puppets, that it convinced them to commission a handful of stop-motion TV series from the studio, including The New Adventures of Pinocchio and Willy McBean & His Magic Machine. Which brings us back to Tadanari Okamoto. Born in Osaka in 1932, Okamoto graduated from the law school of Osaka University in 1955, and worked in the legalprofession for two years before quitting and entering the film school of Nihon University in 1958. After graduating in 1961, Okamoto entered the MOM production, where he worked on several of the TV series commissioned from the studio before finally quitting and forming his own company, Echo Incorporated, in 1964. Along with Kawamoto, then, Okamoto is one of the more famous of the figures who followed in the footsteps of Tadahito Mochinaga and continued to develop the possibilities of stop-motion animation. Full article on ANIPAGES.
09/24 09:28 naruto