Haven't been watching much lately other than going through my box set of Hajime Ningen Gyators, which continues to entertain me to no end. I find I can watch an episode a day and never get sick of it. Can't say that for many other shows. Even Ganso Tensai Bakabon or Dokonjo Gaeru, other A Pro shows from the same period, get kind of repetitive if you watch too much, but I never tire of the stone-age family. The drawings are always lively and spontaneous and the stories crazy and fun. Though as the series progresses I find that it becomes a little tamer in terms of the stories, which lose a bit of their edge and become kind of watered down and cliche where once they were unhinged and unpredictable. It seems like the classic case of station complaints changing the course of a series, as happened to a show similar in spirit, Goku no Daiboken, though it's not as extreme here. It happens right around the time this cutesy and unneeded Amanojaku character is introduced.

Minoru Maeda, an animator who wasn't on my radar up until watching Gyators, is one of my favorite animators from the series. He's got one of the more pronounced styles on the show, drawing the characters with huge blocky limbs and really sharp angles, putting the characters through inventive distorted poses, and coming up with interesting layouts. It doesn't move much in his hands, in contrast with Yoshiyuki Momose or whoever, but he carries it with his drawings. In the first three quarters of the show he usually draws a half episode by himself, but in the last quarter he draws four full-fledged solo animator episodes. (by which time the show switches to a single-story format, rather than two 10-min stories) I've long associated him with Group Tac, as he's been a mainstay in their projects over the years, but he actually worked at Gyators sakkan Takao Kosai's Studio Junio from Gyators onwards and throughout the 80s, until co-founding his own subcontracting studio, Synergy Japan, in 1988 (together with Hiroshi Azuma and Minoru Okazaki, the latter of whom was one of the regular episode directors of Gyators). He's most well-known perhaps as being the character designer of Dr. Slump, directed by Minoru Okazaki, and then Anpan Man, as well as sakkan/"chief animator" of Dragonball & Dragonball Z.

I watched Cencoroll, an episode-length one shot produced based on a pilot from a few years back that impressed me when it made the rounds because of its skillful animation. Even the FLCL-inspired sensibility seemed fairly well executed, albeit not particularly original. Drawn out to nearly thirty minutes, it's a languid and desultory bore with no real reason to exist. It's amazing and all that Atsuya Uki could do all the animation, backgrounds, etc. by himself, but I don't quite see the point if he doesn't have anything to say other than rehashing anime cliches and making them more boring. There are some genuinely creative indie animators working in Japan who have created their own conceptual worlds and idioms, but when it comes to people who think in anime tropes like this, and who are actually quite talented in the technical aspects, I think the world would be better served if they worked as a cog on a worthwhile project rather than creating a short that did nothing much more than to seem like a failed attempt at grandstanding when they just don't have what it takes as an artist to be directing, at least at this stage.

I said I didn't particularly enjoy the sexy nurse schtick in Trapeze, but I've changed my mind. I now think it's one of the best things about the show. The reason being it's quite clever how they've subversively replaced the element of 'moe', with its sexualization of a nonexistent drawn character, with an actual human female (though of course she's rendered as a drawing most of the time). I would hardly call Gyators the pinnacle of artistic expression, but it's testament to the astonishingly limited range in which the industry has now boxed itself partly by catering so obsequiously to the fad for this peculiar genre (although that is certainly not the only reason) that something as harebrained as Gyators seems so amazingly fresh and different from everything being made today. It can't be healthy that there doesn't seem to be freedom anymore in the industry to explore different styles of material and visuals.

I re-watched Arion a few days ago and find that despite being a failure as a film, it's a valiant attempt, and it's directed with conviction and passion that I don't find in many films these days. One part stood out to me in terms of the animation - the part where Lesphina breaks the bonds of Arion and allows him to escape. It's short but stands out from the rest. At first I suspected Norimoto Tokura or Shinji Hashimoto, because it has that proto-realistic but strange feeling to the timing and a rich, fluid motion. It feels like it's conceptualized differently from the rest of the animation in the film. It even had a bit of Utsunomiya feeling to it, though I know Utsunomiya did the part on the flying monster later on, so it couldn't be him. I couldn't find the full credits, though, so I don't know if they're involved. The only name in the truncated credits I've found that seemed a possible fit was Toei animator Yoshinobu Inano, and that turns out to have been correct. Okiura, who cites Inano as an influence, mentions in an interview that he'd similarly been impressed by the scene when the film came out. Inano seems to have been one of those seminal proto-realistic animators who paved the way in the 80s for a whole slew of more well-known realistic animators who built on his approach.

Cool beans. Charles Huettner, the guy who made a fan-made music video for Animal Collective's awesome song Water Curses that knocks the stuffing out of the boring official music video (and a great official one for DM Stith to another awesome song - he always animates awesome songs, which is better than making an awesome video to a song that sucks), says he's working on his first ever full-fledged Animated Short. Looking forward to that. He says he's got no schooling or much experience in 2D animation. And I friggin love his two music videos. How messed up is that? So I'm looking forward to it all the more. Some of the most refreshing animation I've seen has been from the unschooled. I think schooling can be good and bad. Charles talks about the process for making his great music videos on his blog too. Worth a read. And I love all the random crazy experimentation and stuff on his Vimeo account.

I watched the second episode of Trapeze and it was way better than the first one in my opinion, or at least better. They did a great job of focusing on the guy this time and digging deep into the root causes of his problem. Very funny and psychologically probing. Original script is really funny with its suggestive phrases, and kudos to translators of fansub for doing a good job conveying those in English. Though it's interesting how the whole basis of the story - his getting a permanent hard-on supposedly as some kind of post-traumatic reaction to his wife leaving him - seems undermined by the way the real-life doctor dude felt the need to interject to point out that such a thing in fact never has psychological roots. But whatever. At least they're honest! And you know what I'm warming to the use of real-life actors. They do it much more copiously here than in Kemonozume, so it feels like a different strategy, and I find that in this case it actually serves to make you relate to the character more. Who can relate to a drawing? I like that they're doing animation that kind of rejects itself at the same time.

I haven't watched anything from the new season for once. The only show I've checked out is Trapeze. Anything I missed? I had kind of high expectations for Trapeze going in, and honestly they weren't really met. I think I have a pretty good idea from the first episode what they're going to be doing stylistically for the rest of the show, and while I'm sure I'm going to enjoy the directing and the stories, I'm disappointed there's nothing that strikes me as really new in Kenji Nakamura's new show the way Bakeneko and its continuation Mononoke did. It felt like I was watching Kemonozume or Mind Game with the way the live-action was integrated, mostly in close-ups of the face, just like how Yuasa did it. Yuasa's film and shows each felt like they were exploring their own unique stylistic universe, whereas Trapeze doesn't really feel anchored to any strong visual concept. If anything, it just feels like a free-for-all. It's certainly fun, but I can't say I was too convinced by the first episode. I felt it was a little too ditzy and over-the-top with all the colors and the random strangeness without any of the things they were doing having any impact or actually meaning anything other than being there just to look weird. That, and the whole story was kind of boring. The next episode is about a guy with a permanent erection - killer-sounding material. I really like the concept overall of exploring a new person's mental or physical complexes or illnesses in each episode, which is what I'm guessing this is going to be, but I kind of feel like there needs to be more actual exploration of the psychology of the person and less random strangeness for it to really work. That was the real problem, more than style - that we didn't come away feeling like we knew the inner workings of this guy's psyche very deeply.

Yuasa's shows similarly were very daring with the mixing of media in the animation and the vivid and bold use of colors, but the combination actually felt balanced and harmonious in his hands, whereas in Trapeze the gaudy colors and random mixing of media just feels a little gimmicky and even tacky. I'm sure part of that is deliberate, though, so I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. Nakamura is a sophisticated director, and I'm sure that part of the syrupy synthetic feeling of this episode is intentional. At the very least, the show has a unique tone like nothing I've ever seen before.

And I was really not too impressed by the characters by Takashi Hashimoto this time around. The characters worked fairly well in Mononoke and its predecessor, but I didn't much like the designs here. It's not even about the animation so much as just the designs of the faces, which just don't do anything for me.

Anyway, it's still entertaining and definitely strange and like nothing else out there at the moment, and that can only be a good thing. Part of why I haven't watched anything this season is that I've been too busy. But that's the surface excuse. Mostly I just don't have the patience to wade through the ocean of same old same old anymore. At least this show is refreshing and unpredictable. It's quite amazing how literally dozens of shows are made every season and usually only one or two max actually attempt to do something that doesn't look and feel like everything else that has come before.

The subject of the next episode reminds me of something I overheard while I was in a coffee shop one day: "It's a problem when you can't get it up, but it's even worse when you can't get it down". It was raining outside, and the person was apparently having trouble with the latch on their umbrella.

Nothing blew me away at the VIFF this year like Tropical Manila did in 2008 and Secret Sunshine did in 2007, but I did see some good films this time around, as always. And as always, there were a ton of films that I wanted to see but just couldn't get around to seeing, either because I was pooped from watching so many films, or from scheduling overlaps. It's fun for two weeks to cram films, but after a while you get burnout. It's gotta be a special thing watching a good film, and not homework, otherwise the magic's gone.

Films I really wanted to see and hope to get a chance to see sometime include Eighteen, a film from South Korea that won the Dragons and Tigers award this year (Bakal Boys got honorable mention), Dirty Paradise (French Guiana film about natives fighting for their land rights), Extraordinary Stories (Argentinan 4-hour drama inspired by Borges), Petropolis (Canadian film about the unfolding tar sands disaster next door in Alberta), The Sound of Insects (weird/cool-sounding Swiss film featuring narration inspired by one of my favorite Japanese authors, Masahiko Shimada), Autumn (Turkish film likened to Chekhov via Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Crude, American Casino, Petition, H2Oil, North, and The Age of Stupid.

Films I'm disappointed weren't shown include the new film by the director of Tropical Manila (maybe it's not done?), the chiptune documentary Reformat the Planet and Priit Parn's new film Life without Gabriella Ferri. (For any of my readers in Rio de Janeiro, Parn's new film will be playing on November 11 at the No Taboo 4th annual Festival of Animation and Sex Education)

Adrift was a gorgeously shot and technically very well directed Vietnamese film that somehow didn't sit well with me despite its technical proficiency. The scenario deals with a gorgeous woman who, just wed to a nice young man she discovers quickly to be quite immature sexually, becomes predictably sexually frustrated and succumbs to the wiles of a sexy male model (I'm guessing he's a male model; he's not in the film). The whole seemed to strive for a kind of literary atmosphere, with its velvety tone of languorous yet understated sensuality and the exploration of the psychology of sexual awakening, but it just rubbed me the wrong way and came across as disturbingly artificial and shallow with its Barbie and Ken protagonists and the wife's eye-rolling 'dilemma'. The elder sister who thrusts her innocent younger sister into the situation with a mixture of detachment, love and nihilistic cruelty, was not surprisingly a writer, and the way the directing strove to paint with this world-weary and sophisticated demeanor felt forced and cliche. I'm kind of biased because as a general thing I find films in which a supposedly 'ordinary person' is played by a gorgeous actress or actor to be hopelessly flawed and unbelievable from the outset (Wong Kar-Wai's films being a notable exception), so my bullshit radar was on whenever the wife or her suitor were on the screen, which was basically the whole film. It felt like porn without nudity - sexually frustrating. Actually, maybe now I understand what the director was trying to do with the film.

At the End of Daybreak was a Malaysian film I hated within the first minute, in which the protagonist boils a rat in a cage to death. I can't respect a director whose poverty of imagination requires him to kill a defenseless animal on-screen to shock the audience. After this delightful opener, the film proceeds to be boring for an hour as the protagonist whines to his mother that he doesn't want to go to jail for the statutory rape of his 15-year-old girlfriend before serving up a completely absurd and laughable climactic twist in which the boy and his friends kill the girl and her friends.

Indepencia from the Philippines was conceptually daring but in the final count just not particularly memorable or interesting. The concept is interesting: It's shot in the style of a 30s film from the Philippines, which is to say in black and white, with the set consisting of painted backdrops and a few potted plants to simulate the jungle setting, and interrupted mid-way by a propaganda newsreel by the occupying Americans. The story tells of a mother and her son who flee into the jungle to escape the fighting that erupted with the United States around 1899 (read the Wiki entry in the Philippine-American War). It depicts their daily life in a makeshift hut, evokes their constant fear of discovery, and hints at the atrocities committed by the Americans, which included deliberately killing children. All of this sounds very interesting on paper, but it's unfortunately tedious watching. The history leading to Philippine independence in 1946 is complex and multi-faceted and it would have been nice to see something that helped understand this little-known chapter in the history of American imperialism.

Home is a great documentary that everyone should see - a comprehensive examination of the problems facing our planet today that is powerful and almost overwhelming but with a poetic rather than dry style. It feels like a personal summation of all those environmental issues that have been hovering in the collective consciousness for the last decade. It consists entirely of shots of various locales on the earth shot from above, presumably mostly in a helicopter, accompanied by free-ranging poetic narration that ticks off the countdown to our collective demise and has to struggle fiercely to end optimistically. For its images alone this is a film of staggering beauty, but combined with the poetic narration it makes for a new type of ecological disaster documentary like none we've seen before. It's deeply informed about the various issues at play but personal in tone, like a video essay. This is one of the films that will probably receive widespread distribution, or at least more widespread than many of the obscure films I've seen at the VIFF. I strive to see the obscure ones and miss out the ones likely to get a later screening like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But this one I'm glad I saw. I'm glad I didn't miss this sucker-punch of a documentary.

Agrarian Utopia is a really interesting film and one of my favorites from the festival. It's interesting because I thought it was a documentary for the whole running length, and only just discovered that it's actually scripted and uses actors (albeit nonprofessional ones)! One of the things I like about many of the films being made today in Asia is how they see a filmmaker go into a local situation, assess the issues that its people face, and create a drama that in style and in content feels like a documentary exploring those issues, but doing it within the framework of a fictional narrative. Bakal Boys was an excellent example of this approach. So is Agrarian Utopia. The film depicts the daily struggle of two farming families who work the soil of borrowed land in northern Thailand. At the beginning we see them enter the land, and the film ends with the landowner kicking them out because he has been forced to sell the land ("because I'm late on my car payments" he states). In-between we are essentially seeing a documentary on the life of the poor rural Thai farmer, from the planting of the crop to its harvest. We see them capture rats and shoot stray dogs to get protein in their diet, which is painful to see but feels natural and normal in their situation. A contrast with these families who are forced by circumstance to live as farmers is provided by a hippy-like retired teacher who lives alone on a small farm and lives off of his organically farmed vegetables. His choice is intellectual; he lives in the fictional ideal of the agrarian utopia, rejecting the wasteful consumption of consumerism that is in fact at the root of many aspects of the global ecological crisis. The farmers live in the real world, in which the masses of poor are forced to wear their bodies out in indentured servitude in the brutish circumstances of farm life. It's a subtly presented but potent contrast, and visually is a very honest examination of the life of the Thai farmer, which in many ways telescopes to the life of farmers elsewhere. An excellent film that resides at the borderline between fiction and documentary.

Sweetgrass is a film on a similar note - an actual documentary about rural life, this time a raw and unmediated documentation of the livelihood of Montana sheep farmers. The bulk of the film is occupied by the dramatic driving of the sheep to pasture in the Rockies and their eventual return. This is an example of rawest form of documentary. Editing is very spare, there is no narration, characters are not interviewed. The whole film consists of long shots of the farmers and their sheep that by the nature of the material are weighty and dramatic and hold the viewer's attention. It's in a way the truest form of documentary: the shot communicates rather than the cut; the subject rather than the director. The film shows us a rough and ready type of cowboy who seems to come right out of another era before the west was won. In a way, you feel for them in the same way you would for Thai farmers. The journey is no Sunday picnic, and you've got to respect their fortitude for doing such unforgiving work in this day and age. The hardest part of the journey comes at the destination in the mountains, which in their brute majesty wear out sheep dog, horse and owner alike. In one memorable sequence, after the sheep have strayed one too many times, one of the cowboys breaks down in a torrent of shockingly colorful language that seems both typical of the stereotype and yet pathetically human and frail. The mountains and the sheep have him on the verge of physical and mental breakdown. The cinematography is also quite daring in its spareness and the length of the shots. The unforgettable moments of the film are the moments of quiet observation when camera and documentary are forgotten, as when the camera follows an old-timer seated on his horse in the twilight of dusk as it slowly walks up the mountain, the man mumbling and singing to himself quite naturally. You feel as if you've glimpsed the ghost of the eternal cowboy of imagination, happy in the heroic loneliness of the untamed wilds.

Today is Better than Two Tomorrows was a story from Laos about two young boys who are sent by their family to a monastery to become monks for a few years. The film was shot entirely by the director, Anna Rodgers from Ireland, and provides a good look into life in Laos, a place I wasn't very familiar with. The length of time the director spent with the kids before shooting to accustom them to her presence makes for some uncannily candid and unforced shots of everyday life, as they have clearly forgotten they have a filmmaker in their midst. I recall hearing a similar story from the director of a superb Chinese docu-drama from a previous VIFF, Ma Wu Jia, which had flawlessly natural acting from its child cast. Today is in fact a documentary, but it has the pacing of a good drama. The excellent editing keeps things developing at all times while taking plenty of time to display the beauties of the locale and its people and how the days flow by. As we follow the young protagonists on their journey, we're privy to all of their emotions and the complex societal fabric that envelops them, and it makes for emotionally rewarding viewing, unlike some of the other documentaries I've seen, which can be rather dry and distant. One thing that was not explained in the film is exactly why the boys have to go to the monastery, so I asked the director after the screening. It turns out that it's not a case of poor families sending their children to become monks to have one less mouth to feed, which is what I had assumed. Laos, together with Thailand, Burma and Cambodia, practice the Theravada branch of Buddhism, which says that Buddha was just a man, as opposed to the Mahayana sect in most other countries where Buddhism is practiced, which has deified Buddha. The upshot is that, in Laos, as we see in this film, the onus of reducing your burden of karma lies with yourself (whereas in Mahayana Buddhism you just have to pray occasionally to a diety), and hence a large part of the population apparently spends time in their youth at the monastery, later re-integrating with society at large and living a normal life. I happen to just be reading Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles, which talks a bit about this. Today is Better than Two Tomorrows is a great film that provides a colorful look into a culture most of us probably know little about. It's too bad this film and most of the other good films I've seen probably won't be shown in many places after this. So many good films are made each year, and so few people get to see them.

My big catch from this year's VIFF was perhaps less a single film that the collective work being done by unsung but superb filmmakers with small teams in poor countries documenting real life through various hybrids of drama and documentary - films like Today is Better than Two Tomorrows, Bakal Boys and The Wind and the Water.

Yasuhiro Aoki, Kenji Nakamura and Akitoshi Yokoyama are my three favorite directors to emerge in the last few years. Yokoyama had done any number of great episodes before Kaiba in 2008, but it was his work on Kaiba that made me really sit up and take notice. He storyboard and directed episode 3, episode 7 and episode 9. Ever since the great work he did on these episodes I've been looking forward to whatever he might do next. That next thing has come in a surprising place - he did episode #351 of Naruto (#131 of Shippuuden). It's the next deluxe action episode. I enjoyed the directing of this one much more than I did the previous one directed by Toshiyuki Tsuru, #123 of Shippuuden.

In his Kaiba episodes I felt that Yokoyama showed himself to be good at effectively utilizing space to choreograph action, and this Naruto shows off that side of his directing skills really well, especially during the fight at the beginning, where the characters are jumping around and running through the maze-like city. He's also very detail oriented in the processing of the screen, and every shot has a feeling of perfect timing and pacing. Even the visual texture has a great feeling, with the particular colors in each shot and the timing and drawings of the animation always feeling exciting and serving the action without being flashy the way a lot of action animation is these days to distract from the fact that it's not that well choreographed. He just has the instincts of a seasoned director. I frankly hope that in the future his talent will be put to use on more ambitious and worthwhile projects that allow his true talent as a storyteller to shine, but I really like that he's a director who is able to jump between dramatically different content and do the content justice on its own terms, rather than being a director who's tied to a particular style and who bends the arm of whatever he's doing into that particular style. Such directors to me often come across as somewhat mannered and inflexible. I won't say it was a mind-blowing episode. It's limited by the material (it drags in the second half). But the action was nicely choreographed in the first half, with a nice tightness to the pacing that you want of action sequences.

Animators probably responsible for the action were that young firebrand Hiroki Tanaka, who seems to turn up with some crazy action in a new episode every week, and who was here also the sakkan; Nozomu Abe, an animator I know nothing about but whom I've heard is good; Hiroyuki Yamashita, one of the main Naruto regulars (he's listed first in the credits for the opening sequence of this episode); Taiki Harada; and Takayuki Hamada, the awesome animator from Kaiba etc. who was obviously brought on-board by Yokoyama. Kenichi Yoshida and Tatsuo Yamada are co-sakkans. The latter probably was brought on by Hiroki Tanaka, as they were two of the main crazy action guys on Precure in the old days (i.e. a few months back), but how the heck Kenichi Yoshida (Eureka 7) got involved I don't know.

Speaking of the opening, it also featured animation by Matsumoto (as usual) and the new regular op animators Shingo Yamashita and Kenichi Kutsuna, the gif animators from Birdy. I think for once I could identify their work. Matsumoto followed by Kutsuna at the beginning? Yamashita (if it's him doing those two shots where some unidentified character transforms into a beast) is sure doing crazy stuff.

France has given the world a number of groundbreaking animated feature films over the decades, most notably Le Roi et l'Oiseau (The King and the Bird, 1948-1980) by Paul Grimault and La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet, 1973) by René Laloux. One that has probably slipped through the cracks over here is a 60-minute feature released in 1984 directed by Jean-François Laguionie, who is perhaps best known for his short film La Traversée de l'Atlantique à la Rame (Rowing across the Atlantic, 1978). I just had the chance to see Gwen et le Livre du Sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) last night, and for me personally it instantly ranks near the top of the heap.

Gwen is a film of beauty and purity like few I've ever seen. It should be seen by all connoisseurs of good animated cinema. With its poetic tone, enigmatic imagery and narrative evanescence, it's animated filmmaking for adults in the true sense of the term. More than 20 years have passed since its release, but I find that it still works brilliantly. It's clearly an important but underappreciated achievement in the annals of feature-length animated filmmaking.

Like My Dog Tulip, this film stands as a beacon of how a small team of animation craftsmen can create a feature-length film of great beauty through perseverance and dedication. This wonderful film was made by a team of six people over the span of four years, and cost only 6 1/2 million Francs to make (about a million dollars back then I guess - pocket change compared to today's big feature budgets).

The film itself feels to me like a poem more than a typical animated feature. It's image-based as opposed to narrative-driven. But that's not to say it doesn't have a narrative. Despite being so languid and meditative and full of bewilderingly poetic imagery, it has a very clear narrative and the story is in the classic quest format. It also has a very clear story that makes perfect sense when it's explained by Laguionie (as it is in the superb 40-minute interview included on the French DVD I bought - though I fear there are no subs of any kind on the DVD), although while watching the story is not so clear, and it comes across as a somewhat surrealistic and baffling unfurling of events - delightfully so. However, if so desired, it parses. It's not random for the sake of being random.

What we are presented with in the film is a future world decimated by some unknown apocalypse in which the peoples of the world are split into two - people living in the desert who bear a vague resemblance to the desert peoples of north Africa, and urban refugees living in the ruins of their city. Without revealing anything, the film makes some very obvious and profound comments on the nature of our consumer society, without being didactic or even spelling it out. Although there is dialogue, for the most part Laguionie communicates the nature of the situation through images depicting the ravaged world in which these characters are now forced to eke out a living, rather than narration. And even the images leave much to the imagination, and never stoop to pure literalism. Every image is bewildering and destabilizing. The film boasts any number of incredible shots, both still and in motion, that work as beautiful painterly images. Some of the shots have an ingenious trompe-l'oeil quality about them, like an Escher painting, or something out of The Thief and the Cobbler, and the city has a vertiginous and overgrown feeling like the city in Le Roi et l'Oiseau by Grimault, Laguionie's mentor. The image of the characters dashing across the desert on stilts is one of the film's most unforgettable.

The visuals for this world inhabited by the characters is truly astonishing to behold, while yet remaining very familiar and normal in appearances. They're very painterly, both in texture and in content and layout. They remind of Matisse and Rousseau. Although 'surreal' is a term that is often misused, the images feel deliberately surreal - the way a character will be wandering in the desert only to suddenly encounter an area completely covered by bed frames, pillows, mattresses and sheets billowing in the wind. Or a giant tea kettle in the middle of nowhere. The wonderful thing about the surreal imagery is that it works on two levels - it creates a surreal atmosphere that transforms a quest into a visual feast not to be taken literally but rather to be appreciated on a poetic level; and it works as a narrative in which the strange images are in fact explainable props in a science-fiction story that turns out to be a powerful dystopian vision of one possible future for our consumer society.

Laguionie made many interesting comments in the interview that reveal his unique nature as a creator. He noted that during the conceptual development stage, which was handled entirely by himself, he greatly enjoyed the process of testing out different ideas and fleshing out the characters, but that once the character was chosen, the rest of the work - the rote work of drawing the character consistently, over and over again - was much less appealing to him. Regarding the music, he made the interesting comment that he doesn't like it when music describes an action literally - running gets fast music, for example. He prefers the music to describe the state of mind of the characters, and for it to be tied to the emotion of the scene. And of technical note is the fact that Laguionie built a multi-plane camera from scratch for this film in order to achieve the feeling of depth in the desert. What can now be achieved ever so simply on computers was back then a huge labor. We might see the effect today and not realize how much effort was expended to achieve it.

One of the defining traits of the film is that the screen is unified - the characters are drawn not using the typical outlines and flat colors of typical cartoons, but using gouache to give them the texture of a painting, like the background art. I can only imagine how much this must have compounded the labor of animating these characters, as they actually had to animate the gradations of color changing dynamically around the curves of the figures with each new drawing. Laguionie's two more recent films look more like your typical 'dessin anime' adaptation of a 'bande dessinee', whereas this film comes across as 'animation'. The visuals are painterly, like an artistic short, completely at odds with the traditions of feature-length animated filmmaking, which for labor-saving purposes demanded certain techniques - paint on cels, flat colors - in order to be able to achieve the feat of drawing a character anew 12 times per second. I really like this film because it's another great example that shatters the illusion that that's the only way of doing things. It's one of the great achievements in feature-length indie animated filmmaking.

Some more thoughts on films I've seen at the VIFF. I'll start with the ones of more relevance to this blog.

I saw the fourth installment in the McDull series, Kung-Fu Kindergarten. I never saw the third one, but I'd seen the first two at the VIFF in prior years. The second had disappointed me, being a rehash of the first in style and tone, and seeming to show the seams of the material, which seems like nothing more than a series of gags in retrospect. I was astounded that the fourth film felt pretty much exactly like the previous entries. It's something of an amazing feat to be able to make so little progress after four films. I assume it's intentional, because the formula seems to work with audiences. The audience at the screening I saw was roaring with laughter at the tiniest little movement of a character. It seems like the film couldn't go wrong. The mere appearance of a cute anthropomorphic animal on the screen was enough to elicit a wave of "awws". I think I laughed honestly at the joke where the guy breaks a toothpick and throws it in his tea to perform an augury, and McDull goes, "Um, I used that to pick my teeth." But the rest as pretty slim pickins. Like the previous films, the style of the film is hand-drawn characters and CGI or paintings for the backgrounds and everything else. The backgrounds were actually quite nice in and of themselves in many spots, but the animation of the characters was just as lifeless and uninteresting as any of the previous films. I think part of what ruined it for me is people roaring with laughter at jokes that to me seemed like they might support at best a knowing smirk. Humanity depressed me in that theater. If I were watching it at home, I think it might have come across as a harmless little witty 70-minute entertainment, and an example of an internationally successful mainland Asian animation franchise, and I would probably have liked it better. I think it's fair to be demanding, though, and to ask: If it's possible for a franchise like this to be successful, where are the other mainland Asian projects trying to do something more ambitious? That's what I'd like to see. I thought the first McDull was ambitious and a laudable film. Making a series of it ruined it for me.

My Dog Tulip by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger is one of the best animated films of the last few years, no hesitation. It certainly renewed my faith in the possibilities of small-scale animated filmmaking after my viewing of the former film. This is indie feature filmmaking done right - a true work of love, handmade throughout without unnecessary polish, extremely creative with limited means, deeply felt, and with intelligent humor that elicits genuine laughter. I've been waiting for this one for years, and it exceeded my expectations, probably because I was not familiar with the source material. The source material, about the experiences of an English writer from the first half of the last century, is a masterpiece of dry English wit that serves up one of the most candid portraits of our relationships with our animal companions that has ever been put to paper (at least, judging by the film). The film largely consists of narrated reminiscences by the author about his experiences with his dog that are brought alive into visuals by the animation, much as was the case with the last film by the Fierlingers that I saw a few years back - A Room Nearby. The animation is very crude, with even buildings being drawn in a couple of askew scribbles, and took some getting used to. But this is animation at its most honest and real. Every movement of a character, every idea for what to portray on the screen and when in relation to the narrative, comes across as believable and funny, as the work of a master artist who isn't worrying about surface prettiness, but rather about creating animation that is truthful at every moment, whether it's in the realistic portrayal of the dog's behavior or the many flights of fancy in which the dog dons a dress and prances about. The humor of this film comes from wry and unflinchingly frank observations about the icky facts of life, whether it be describing the sanitary habits of one's canine, or going into an extremely uncomfortable level of detail about matters of reproduction (I now know more about dog vulvas than I wish I did).

Legendary Russian animator Andrey Krzhanovsky, who will be turning 70 next month, was represented at the festival with his debut live-action film, A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland, released after 6 years of work. The film depicts the life of exiled poet Joseph Brodsky, and feels excessively languid and uninteresting in the sequences depicting his youth, but it works tremendously well in the various animated sequences that litter the film and bring alive the world of Brodsky's imagination and poetry. Together they make for a good balance in depicting a poet's life, and the film serves as a good example of how to use animation to heighten live-action filmmaking. I just wish the film were shorter and more tightly edited.

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention is a documentary about the outsider musician/inventor who goes by the name of Trimpin and currently resides in Seattle. I wish I had known about him when I lived there briefly, as the man has no cell phone, no web site, and there is basically no way to know where his work is being displayed short of contacting him directly. Which is a tremendous shame, because this wonderfully directed and edited documentary brings to us a picture of a true genius who is creating art that comes directly from within his soul. As the documentarist himself noted in the Q&A after the screening (at which a genial Trimpin was also present to kindly explain his take on things), his work comes across as a big up yours to the art establishment. Whether or not his art commands high prices, he will go on creating his extravagant sound sculptures, like a boy so endlessly fascinated by the magic of machinery that he must constantly take things apart to see how they're made, and put them back together in ingenious new configurations that bring dead and decaying technology humorously to life. Although Trimpin's sister was inclined to discount the suggestion that his genius is entirely the product of his upbringing in Germany, with its tradition of musical mechanical contraptions, I can see how Trimpin's playful art seems influenced by the whimsical sensibility of those mechanical novelty toys. This is the kind of art whose delightful ingenuity makes everyone, young or old, happy and puts a smile on people's faces, and I have nothing but respect for him for continuing to do what comes naturally to him, irrespective of whether fame follows or not.

The Hong Kong film Written By was the only film I walked out of this year. I haven't seen a film so excruciatingly artless, manipulative and ham-handed in a good long time. The acting was horrible, the directing was tasteless, and most of all the story was pretentious and ludicrous. It attempts to be sophisticated with its hilariously bad imitation of every Charlie Kaufman cliche ever mimicked by a talentless film school student of a scenario, but it falls flat on its face, as does every attempt at humor and emotion. It's been a long time since I've seen a film that so rubbed me the wrong way.

Toad's Oil by actor-turned-director Koji Yakusho left me with a good feeling inside. Although the film is very wobbly if judged critically, and there are a lot of things you could criticize about it, and I'm not even sure it's a good film, I liked it and I appreciate what Yakusho tried to do with it. I liked his acting to begin with. Despite having the world at his feet, I got the feeling that Yakusho was an honest actor and person. I can't think of a more honest and emotionally raw performance than his performance in Eureka. This film benefits of that same kind of unfeigned, instinctive emotional honesty. It deals with a dark subject, but none of the characters betray any emotion throughout what's going on, which comes across as laudably unmanipulative of the audience as well as an interesting examination of how people deal with tragedy, keeping things bottled inside and putting a happy face on grief.

The Wind and the Water was one of the most deeply satisfying films I saw at the festival this year. The film's production style is innovative, being a collective effort at the opposite end of the idea of auteurism that dominates art movies, and its exploration of its characters is richly nuanced and thought-provoking. Ostensibly the first film to be produced entirely in Panama, it tells the story of a native boy from one of the islands inhabited by the aboriginals who comes to Panama for the first time, and an aboriginal girl raised entirely in Panama who visits the islands for the first time, and how their lives intersect. Structurally very elegant, the film is full of little details about the two characters' lives that makes their experience very believable as well as shedding light on the dynamics of life on both sides of the divide. From the girl's perspective we see the ambition to become something in the new society, to leave behind the old culture tied to outdated norms of social behavior and illogical rules, as well as the racist pressure that looks down on who she is deep down, and would never accept her no matter how hard she tries to become something she's not. In our position we see things naturally from her perspective and feel sorry for the ignorance, darkness and poverty in which the natives enclose themselves, and understand her wariness at the world of the elders. The boy's perspective rooted in the island culture is equally believable. He's shocked at the hollowness and institutionalized interpersonal dishonesty of life in town when he goes there. The film is admirable because it isn't necessarily a naive praising of all that is cultural tradition and rejection of everything that is new and modern; it's an even-handed examination of the complex interplay of both sides. The film was made by a collective, with native youth from all walks of life contributing their own life experiences during pre-production to make the experiences of the two characters true to life in that area. (I found this very reminiscent of how Masaaki Yuasa filled out the back stories of the characters in Mind Game with experiences of his staff) In short, this is a magnificent achievement of a film.

Jermal is an austere film from Indonesia that makes for difficult but rewarding viewing. The story is about a boy whose mother just died who goes off in search of his father, whom he finds on a fishing pier in the middle of the ocean. The father had fled society years ago on a murder charge, and now lives a beastly and mute life as a brutal overseer of his fishing operation's child labor. The entire film takes place on the jermal, and it's testament to the quality of the directing that the film holds up during its full length and doesn't become boring or tiresome. It is, however, difficult to endure the banal violence of the torments to which the boy is subjected throughout the first half by the dozen other boys on the jermal, not to mention his own father. As he bonds with the boys and eventually begins to get close to his father in the second half, the film takes on a more straightforward drama trajectory that is a little easier to stomach and even has a moving emotional impact. In retrospect, though, I'm very skeptical about the concept of the film at a basic level. The father's rejection and meanness towards his son seems believable thematically as a psychological corollary to the very obvious physical metaphor of the jermal as a cocoon in which the father shuts himself off from the world - accepting his son breaks down the mental wall he'd built up, and leads to his rehabilitation with society, even if it means heading back to land to face jail time. The transition from brute beast to loving father is just a little much to accept.

I'm very drawn to the ferment occurring in Chinese cinema these days. Some of the best films and the worst films I've seen from Asia lately have been from China, but even in the case of the bad films there's always at least some kind of visceral thrill at what they tried to do and failed. There's real experimentation going on with young filmmakers over there. Kun 1: Action is unfortunately one of the prime examples of the bad side. I find it hard to criticize it, because it's essentially film student wankery, and it's kind of redundant to criticize film students for making pretentious films in homage to Jean-Luc Godard as if they were the first to discover him. That's just what they do. I just can't fathom why it was included in this festival.

Cow is the diametric opposite of the latter - a big artificial wonderful studio extravaganza with superb acting from a huge cast of talented actors, magnificent cinematography, spot-on directing and a satisfying and rich story and characters. This is a shining example of the sort of intelligent films they're making in China aimed at wide audiences. It's not an art film - it's too riotously entertaining and exciting for that - but it's very artistic in both theme and execution. Set in the 1930s in Shandong province in the midst of an attack by the Japanese army on a small Chinese village, the film is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of the army, but admirably makes a point to depict the naive young soldiers of the Japanese army as being coerced, like the Japanese people, into fighting a war at the behest of a brutal imperialist government. Probably the most striking thing about the film is its cinematography. It's like they shot the film, and then put it all through Photoshop with the contrast set to 100. Every single solitary object on the screen looks so sharp it'll slice off your finger if you touch it. It's quite beautiful in its elegiac sepia mood, especially in evoking the bomb-blasted colorless deadness of the countryside, but I thought maybe it was a little overdone. Most of all, though, the interaction between the main actor and the cow is quite extraordinary. They manage to create a real feeling of there being a relationship between the two, and to make it seem as if the cow had human feelings and reacted like a human to what was going on around it. It's very artificial, but also very entertaining, and it's admirable in that it makes audiences invest so much emotionally in a cow, something I doubt has ever been done before, or at least to this extent.

Nomad's Land is a simple video travelogue by a Swiss guy retracing the footsteps of a Swiss writer who had taken a trip across the middle east and central Asia by motorcar several decades ago and written an evocative account of his journeys. At first I found the narrator an insufferable prig who could do nothing but talk about his own angsty emotions like an inward-turned adolescent while he's traveling through eastern Europe and the near east, without making a single comment that was enlightening or informative about the culture of the lands through which he travelled. While this criticism remained to an extent thereafter, the sheer beauty of the people and landscapes he photographed once he entered the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan inhabited by nomads of old who lived a life apart from the dominant mulsim culture won me over and made the rest of the journey mesmerising and unforgettable. The hale beauty of the people, with their colorful clothing and ornaments and uncovered heads and open and inviting smiles, serves as a shocking contrast with the cultural and religious closedmindedness and fanaticism that encroaches upon them. It comes across as a miracle that they should be able to continue to exist in such an environment without having been annihilated by the monolith of monoculturalism and religious extremism. It was with a feeling of awe and deep reverence and that I observed the unfolding of their traditional winter solstice ritual, in which they must go sacrifice a goat up on the mountain lest the gods be angered and spring be forever withheld. After continuing eastward, the narrator finds himself in dire straits on a number of occasions, and it was more embarrassing than anything and you felt like the narrator was getting what he deserved for dealing the people of these regions the insult of looking at them through the rose-colored glasses of western pastoral idealization. For the imagery and the tone of the latter half of the film alone, though, with its continuously changing patchwork of central Asian cultural richness, it's worth the price of admission. It's an exciting travelogue that will make you feel like dropping everything and striking out on the journey of a lifetime, possibly never to return.

Another obscurity from the post-Akira period that I just discovered is Vampire Wars from 1990. I sought it out because it features Hideki Hamasu as animation director. It didn't disappoint in terms of the animation, and even as a film it's a fun romp with entertaining directing and good action. It's a nice little OVA from this period that's worth rediscovering, especially if you're a fan of Hamasu's work elsewhere, be it as character designer/animation director of Perfect Blue or as the brilliant animator of various scenes from the last two decades. This is one of Hamasu's early stepping stones. This film comes from a period of Hamasu's work with which people over here will be less familiar: his Toei period.

Hamasu actually adapted an original design by Hiroyuki Kitazume, and it does feel very much like you're watching Kitazume characters. It's not as extreme as what Koichi Arai did with his adaptation of 3x3 Eyes, in which case it feels more like you're watching Arai's characters. But Hamasu brings the characters alive well, and there's a nice feeling of reality in the rendering of the drawings throughout, just as there was in Arai's work on 3x3 Eyes. Kitazume was himself one of the main expats from Studio Bebow, the studio that pioneered an early vein of realism in the 80s prior the resurgence of realism in the 90s. As it turns out, Toei itself had a vein of realism developing throughout this period at the hands of a number of animators, so Vampire Wars acts as in interesting intersection between these two veins. Hideki Hamasu, Koichi Arai and Takaaki Yamashita seem to be among the three most important animator figures in the realistic vein at Toei during the period from 1988 to the early 90s, and they left behind a lot of good work during this period on video releases of anime produced by Toei in the years immediately before and after Vampire Wars, mostly on Toei's in-house "Toei V Anime" label.

Ever since Ken the Wolf Boy, Toei Doga has always been a company that was quick to exploit new markets, and they jumped into the OVA market fairly soon after it took off. They had a number of series being released over the years on a continuous basis, and many of the more talented animators at the studio in the late 80s/early 90s, such as Kochi Arai, Hideki Hamasu and Takaaki Yamashita, worked on these OVAs. Just as Toei proper had long produced yakuza live-action movies, much of Toei Animation's anime output in the 80s seems to have been to create versions of the same kind of content aimed at younger audiences. They did this by adapting manga about juvenile delinquents such as 'yankee' high school kids and biker gangs.

One of the earliest, and the longest-lived, was Shonan Bakusozoku, a series about biker gangs that ran for 12 episodes, each about an hour long, released semi-yearly between 1986 and 1999. Crying Freeman, a story this time about full-fledged gangster warfare, was released yearly (except 1993) in 6 episodes between 1988 and 1994, also about an hour long each. I've long meant to write about this series in particular, as it's perhaps the most impressive in terms of the animation and the densest summation of this Toei realistic vein. Two more series about juvenile delinquents, or 'yankees' as they're known in Japan, followed: Yankee Reppuutai ran for 6 episodes from 1989 to 1996, and Be-Bop High School ran for 7 episodes from 1990 to 1995.

With the exception of Crying Freeman, none of these are very well known over here. I haven't seen any of Be-Bop High School or Yankee Reppuutai, but I've had the chance to look at a number of episodes of Shonan Bakusozoku, and it appears to have been a surprisingly solidly produced series throughout, both in terms of the directing and the animation. Good animators appear throughout, including Koichi Arai, Hideki Hamasu and Junichi Hayama.

Prior to doing Vampire Wars, Hideki Hamasu acted as assistant sakkan and drew animation for the first two episodes of Crying Freeman (1988 & 1989), which featured some superb sakkan work by Koichi Arai. Arai, meanwhile, had been given the opportunity to design and sakkan an OVA with Xanadu: Dragon Slayer Densetsu in 1988 (Hamasu was an animator). In 1990, around the same time as Vampire Wars (which features Arai as an animator), both Arai and Hamasu did an episode each in an OVA series adapting fairy tales entitled Hanaichi Monme. In 1991, Hamasu was an animator in every episode of Arai's 3x3 Eyes, and then for the next few years was heavily involved with Be-Bop High School and Yankee Reppuutai while Arai gradually moved away from Toei productions. It's not long after this that these two great ex-Toei realistic animators begin to be credited alongside the great realistic animators from the rest of the industry in the classic realistic productions of the 90s like Ghost in the Shell and Perfect Blue.

As this reveals, there is a lot of overlap in their work at this period. In fact, Hamasu is reported to have even worked on Akira, although he's not credited. (Arai worked on the baby room scene) So the new vein of realism coming from Takashi Nakamura et al. in Akira was undoubtedly an influence on these two animators, although the influence of in-house Toei animators such as Junichi Hayama, who had developed their own vein of quasi-realism in the rendering of the face and body on shows like Fist of the North Star and Sakigake! Otoko Juku from 1984 to 1988, can't be discounted.

Episode 5 of Shonan Bakusozoku, released in 1989 smack in the heart of this period, is a good place to start to get a sense for what makes the Toei video releases of this period appealing. It's easily the most exciting in the series. It features a good scene animated by newer animator Koichi Arai, and a climactic sequence animated by older animator Junichi Hayama, and overall it's among the more salient in subject matter (many of the episodes are kind of non-sequiturs about a character's first love or whatever - this one's about GANGS FIGHTING) and the most excitingly directed in the series. Aside from having done great work throughout these Toei video releases and on the earlier 80s Toei TV shows, Hayama was apparently a big influence on the Toei animators of this period. He mentored at the very least Yoshihiko Umakoshi, and he was the designer/sakkan on the great JoJo's Bizarre Adventure OVA series released 1993-1994 & 2000-2002, which featured much great animation work from a smattering of the best animators of the day, including Hamasu and Arai. He's more obscure than the people who came after him, but he's got an interesting style and I'd like to see more from him.

Immediately after Vampire Wars Toei released another Toei V Anime video entitled Psychic Wars featuring designs/sakkan by Masami Suda, the person behind Fist of the North Star and many of the Toei V Anime series. It's a major step down in both directing and animation and not worth revisiting. Vampire Wars has genuinely decent directing that makes the film watchable. Psychic Wars is stunningly boring. The animation is also consistently uninteresting despite featuring both Hamasu and Hayama as animators. It looks like a relic from a bygone age, with weak, directionless, rote drawings, when younger animators like Hamasu had already pushed the style in newer and better directions.

The drawings in Vampire Wars, in contrast, are tight and edgy, and every drawing and layout feels deliberate and visually compelling. The emphasis of Vampire Wars isn't so much raw realism as more the rich drawings of its characters, each line of whose faces are rendered in exacting detail that vividly brings alive their every emotion. Posing and layouts are also dynamic and stylish. The movements are rich and fluid, with less of the feeling of off-the-cuff, sparely applied raw, realistic poses that you get from Koichi Arai's work, whom in retrospect appears to have been the more innovative in his approach to character animation. The work here is rather of solid craftsmanship with a realistic hue, rather than being boldly realistic.

To commemorate the first 200 vids posted on my Animated Music Videos blog in the first month, here's a pick of some of my favorite discoveries.

I'm particularly impressed by what's being done with digital imagery by artists like Lucio Arese, Aubo Lessi and Alex Rutterford. Aubo Lessi's video for Thomas Feiner & Anywhen's Siren Songs creates a beautiful blur of digital dots and blends the abstract with the human figure in a gorgeous way. It's familiar in technique but the end result is like nothing I've quite seen before. All of his other videos are extremely inventive visually, showing a mind constantly devising new visual schemes. Lucio Arese on the other hand uses digital environments to send you on an exciting roller-coaster ride brilliantly matched to the complex rhythms of the IDM, as in his video for Autechre's PlyPhon. Lucio Arese also did a video for a section of Bach's Goldberg Variations that is an effective use of animation to translate the various lines of polyphony at play in the score into the visual dimension. Alex Rutterford's video for Autechre's Gantz Graf, a bracing song of mind-blowing programming complexity and sonic richness, comes quite close to doing the song justice, and is interesting from a technical point of view, as he created the video partly by feeding an image of the sound file for the song into the animation program, so that the video stands at the intersection between animation in the conventional sense of each frame or movement being devised by the animator, and computer-derived animation. These videos all explode the music video genre and are consummate audiovisual creations.

Otherwise, the rest of the pieces I picked are all wildly varied in style, but are all creations that IMO exhibit the highest level of craftsmanship and creativity. Or to put it more simply: These are the ones that really wowed me, or I just found to be delightful creations. That's not to put down the quality of the other films in there. It's all worth going through, as honestly everything is interesting regardless of its caliber, and there are plenty of other videos of very high artistic caliber. Special Problems' video for Tame Impala is quite nice, for example, as is Marc Reisbig & Hanne Berkaak's video for Of Montreal, Josh Logue's delightful video for Architecture in Helsinki made entirely of animated stitchings, all of Sean Pecknold's videos, Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber's chalk animation video for Firekites, Pharrell Williams' video for Santogold et al, Laurent Gillot's video for Amadou et Mariam, and plenty of other videos that are great but probably more familiar because they've been publicized pretty widely on the internet lately, like the video for Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance, or the amazing new Shynola vid for Coldplay, etc etc....

I'm set to break my own record this year for films viewed at the VIFF - day seven and I've seen 15 so far. Such are the fruits of anomie.

Apart from finding myself more annoyed than usual at the various irritating theatregoer archetypes - the guy sitting next to you who does a little 'heh' for some cosmically unfathomable reason every thirty seconds, the dozens of people laughing hysterically at shit that ain't even meant to be funny, and ain't - I find a demographics issue really bothers me. You go to an Iranian film, it's largely Iranians in the audience. French film, French people. Korean film, Koreans. It's common sense. Obviously people want to go see new films from their homeland when they're alone across the ocean and homesick. But it's an international film festival. It's about celebrating and experiencing other cultures and directing styles by seeing films from lots of countries that you didn't even know were making films. So far I've seen films from Chile, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Tibet and South Africa. I'm excited about seeing the first ever film from Panama. It bothers me that in spite of the bounty of cultural richness being offered to our great city at this festival, and in spite of the illusion of cultural diversity in attendance, it feels like the same type of person who'd never go see a film with subtitles. Of course It's a sloppy generalization with I'm sure plenty of exceptions, since I didn't interview every audience member or anything, but it's something I noticed and wondered about anyway.

As for the films, maybe I'm becoming a grumpy old man, but I'm mostly disappointed so far. Mostly just so-so films and a few out-and-out bad films. Nothing mind-blowing. Keeping my fingers crossed something will excite this year.

One of the recurring problems I found with the films was that they were too long. I've never liked it before when people say a film should have cut off thirty minutes or whatever, but that's exactly what I found myself feeling at the festival for several films. I find that I'm more critical about wanting a film to know what it's trying to do, do it, and get out. It almost seems like filmmakers feel constrained to fill up the two-hour time slot even if they don't have enough material to do so and make it work. Time after time I would be sitting there saying to myself, "Great film! Hope it ends soon." And then thirty minutes later it's still going on, and I'm starting to dislike the film as a result. It's admirable when a film can pull off a 2+ hour length, but I think it's even more admirable when a film can have the restraint to pull in at under 90 minutes. I'm beginning to realize that most films can't justify their playtime.

Sea Point Days, a documentary about the process of re-integration in a seaside neighborhood in South Africa, was probably my favorite film so far - a perfectly edited and paced documentary that interweaves various threads to suggest connections and contrasts and unexpected interpretations, and does it all almost purely through the visuals, rather than relying on narration to establish meaning. This is filmmaking at its purest and most moving. The characters are all interesting and offer valid insights, and the film's central metaphor of the public pool on the promenade as a place of healing - national, cultural, physical - is convincing and moving. It's remarkable the degree to which the filmmaker makes us think about the various issues at play in the area at this moment in time exclusively by judicious presentation of simple, unostentatious shots of life on the street. The music was also in excellent taste, subtle and not manipulative. So it's disappointing that even this great film seems to suffer from excessive length. The film is broken up into 5 parts, and the film felt like it said most of what it needed to say in the first three acts.

I'm very interested in seeing documentaries on the subject of globalization and neo-liberalism, so Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy seemed poised to be the perfect film for me. But it's good contrast with Sea Point Days in many ways. Just because it's a documentary doesn't mean all films are made alike. This film was the diametric opposite of Sea Point Days - a series of interviews stringed together with no cuts. Period. No editing, no fanfare. The figures interviewed were luminaries who provided great insights into the subject at hand, but the film was way too long (I started falling asleep two and a half hours into the film), and there was no unity or organization to the material, so the barrage of talking heads just left you with a jumble of unorganized strands. Rather than illuminating the subject, I found myself more confused than ever. The approach has its merit, but the audiovisual element contributes absolutely nothing to this film, and hence makes the film somewhat superfluous. The interviews might as well simply have been transcribed and published online.

Around the World With Joseph Stiglitz: Perlis and Promises of Globalization similarly promised to be informative, but disappointed. The famed economist is filmed wandering through the abandoned buildings of his hometown whilst discussing the negative impact of globalization on various parts of the world. This is again a case of a film about a fascinating subject that has at its center a great figure who knows his stuff, but it's a slipshod film. The images of Joseph wandering around entire neighborhoods left abandoned are quite powerful - shocking images enough when they're from some third-world country, even moreso coming from the world's economic powerhouse - but no mention whatsoever is made of what happened in his hometown. It feels underexplained. More importantly, the film is weakly argued and fails to achieve a strong, cohesive thread. Instead, we drift vaguely between subjects and shots of Joseph Stiglitz standing in ruins. Informative, but feels like it could have been better.

Moon at the Bottom of the Well was my second favorite film so far. A delicate, natural and convincing drama about a couple in Vietnam that presents a sensitive and nuanced metaphor for the evolution of social mores regarding love and relationships in that country over the last few decades (as I interpret it), it might have been my favorite but again was plagued by that same nagging specter - not ending when it should have. I've seen any number of films that take that slow, quiet approach to the directing that seems to dominate filmmaking in many parts of Eurasia these days - long shots, minimal dialogue and little or no camera movement - but this is one of the better executed that I've seen. Often that styles comes across as a tired stylistic ploy, but here the directing didn't feel meandering or pointless. It didn't feel like stylistic affect. The film meanders lovingly over the details of the couple's every day life. It feels directionless, but very subtly the directing is building up a portrait of the wife's decadent doting of her husband that leads her to tragedy. What felt like a spot-on drama in the first three quarters, unfortunately, abruptly shifted to melodrama following the husband's departure. Everything subsequent to that, I felt, cheapened a wonderful film. It would have been far better off leaving things up in the air at that point and cutting the last thirty minutes. Sometimes mystery is better.

Be Calm and Count to Ten, though from a very different country - Iran - also partakes of something of the same visual/directing ethos of minimal dialogue and minimal narrative of Moon at the Bottom of the Well. Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is kind of the figure at the origin of this style, or at least is its unsurpassed master (Taste of Cherry and Close-up among his crowning achievements). He clearly influenced many filmmakers the world over, and the methods his films suggested to filmmakers for how to enter a real situation and film it and create fiction out of something real, mixing documentary and drama, have resulted in some gems from far-flung corners of the globe, and freed filmmakers from the chains of conventional narrative forms. At the same time, it's resulted in some just plain tedious filmmaking. Be Calm and Count to Ten is a fairly good film that injects a welcome vein of lightheartedness and absurd humor into a style that feels detached and documentary in spirit. The boy actor at the center of the film is convincing and vivacious in his role, and a good rhythm drives the film between speedy and exciting scenes of smuggling activities and quiet scenes of the protagonists wandering around the barren environs - no feeling of excessive length here. In contrast with Moon at the Bottom of the Well, the satisfyingly inconclusive conclusion leaves it up in the air what has happened to the protagonist.

Bakal Boys from the Philippines also features a cast of amateur boys at its center. The film was shot entirely in one of the country's big slums, and the director auditioned 100 local boys for the actors of the film, finally choosing a dozen or so. In the film, the boys are metal divers who imitate their fathers in diving to the bottom of the bay to bring up scraps of metal to sell to buy food to eat. The film is a half-documentary, half-drama fictional depiction of these boys' lives. This is exactly how they live, so you are in essence seeing real life, but invested with the meaning of a narrative about the search for one of the boys who goes missing on one of the gang's diving trips. The boy at the center of the film, young Meljun Ginto, is nothing less than a dynamo of energy and charisma, a true born star, and he steals every scene he's in. The scenes of interaction are all natural and candid and splendidly achieved, considering all the difficulties the director must have encountered wrangling a whole herd distractable boys to act out their lines on camera. Shooting apparently only took three days, if I recall correctly, which was shocking to hear. Even more shocking is to hear that this is Ralston G. Jover's directing debut. The VIFF hosts a 'Dragons and Tigers' competition each year for directors who have yet to receive widespread recognition. I've seen three or four of the others in competition, and Bakal Boys annihilates the competition. It also felt like it might have used a bit of tightening near the conclusion, but it's a minor quibble. This is a splendid achievement - at times devastatingly sad, but ultimately uplifting and deeply honest.

The Search, apparently only the second film ever to be shot entirely in Tibet that actually went through the proper authorization and censorship channels and will consequently be receiving legitimate distribution inside of the PRC, was the most obviously Kiarostami-influenced film of the lot, with its setup about filmmakers wandering around the countryside in a car (Through the Olive Trees), and long shots of conversation in a car and of the car driving across the countryside (Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us). Filmmakers are driving across the countryside to find a renowned singer of traditional Tibetan opera/theater to perform in a play that they wish to film. The bulk of the film consists of the sponsor, in the car, over the length of the drive, telling a story about his first love, interspersed with auditions of villagers in various places. After the thirtieth minute of his story, it became a bit tedious. But the scenery was gorgeous, the situations were marvelously staged, the persons photographed (not 'actors') were all wonderfully ingenuous and real. It's an excellent example of filmmaking at the crossroads of narrative and documentary. The way various vectors of motivation intertwined in the film was satisfying - the filmmakers trying to make a film, and the girl singer they are forced to drive to meet her ex boyfriend (the singer), who we at first believe to be trying to get back together with him, but we find out at the end is made of tougher stuff than that. The scenes of various people they encounter along the way singing the traditional Tibetan opera were beautiful. There's no narrative other than this, yet there's a rich sense of purpose throughout. It's a quietly beautiful film that deliberately avoids emotionalism and drama yet manages to resonate. One particularly memorable scene in the film shows some young acolytes at a temple shyly fidgeting and zooming through a recitation of the sutras they've memorized. Boys will be boys, no matter the cultural context. The simple act of going around and connecting with people through art shows our common ground and breaks down barriers in a way that more direct political confrontation can't.

I'll stop here and continue with the rest later.

I wrote briefly about Malcolm Sutherland before. He's totally one of my favorite indie animators ever. His latest and longest opus, The Astronomer's Dream, is a mighty fine little trip through the mind and the universe and is worth a gander. Malcolm has self-released the film on a DVD together with 9 of his other films, and it can be bought directly from him here. Malcom's really nice, though, because it and pretty much all of his other films are up for viewing on his Vimeo account. He sets a fine example as a talented indie animator making genuinely interesting films and trying to establish a financial support loop with his audience by self-releasing his films on DVD like this.

The film is at first sight a simple, fun little romp about a cute but strange little square creature with an insatiable hunger floating through the universe on a strange humanoid ship, and the colorful and entertainingly odd contraptions that cover every corner of his habitat. But if you probe a bit under the skin, you'll find a philosophical mediation on the way in which our physical shell colors how we perceive the universe. An imaginative and fun film that leaves you with some meaty food for thought - couldn't ask for more. Also, I heartily recommend getting the DVD. Worth every penny to get to see the wonderful detail Malcolm packed into those delicious backgrounds up close and personal in DVD quality on a nice big flat-screen TV.

I thought the nine other films on the DVD were already accomplishment enough, but turns out the man is far more prolific than I knew. His Vimeo account hosts a ton of other films and tests not on the DVD. I adore all the little odds and ends he's put up on there, especially Shipoids In The Night, which he did last year. Reminds me a bit of the weird microscopic universe of Mirai Mizue, but this is pure Malcolm. This exquisitely odd test animation he did this year for what I presume is an upcoming film is also sheer coolness. A new direction he seems to be exploring these days is these landscapes of the imagination populated by strange creatures and drawn in lush, colorful detail. Malcolm is the type of animator I most like - always shifting about trying this and that technique or style to express what he's got in mind. There's such a range in his films, from photograph animation to hand-drawn animation mixed with live footage to stop motion to figurative to abstract to hand-drawn to flash, etc etc.

My favorite of his films though still remains Birdcalls, with its inventive abstract dance of shapes interpreting the songs of birds. He's really great when he's improvising in animation like this. (Here is another short test animation in this abstract vein) Apparently a more recent film entitled Forming Game that he made for the NFB is based on this kind of more extemporaneous process. It isn't on his Vimeo account but you can see a clip, a making of, and an interview. Malcom's description of his thought process is worth a listen. It's an inspiring and stimulating peek into one of our best animator minds out there today.

I got to see the wonderful Irish-Belgian-French co-production The Secret of Kells this evening. I'd been impressed by the trailer when I saw it a few months ago, and the film didn't disappoint. Kells stands right up there with the films of Michel Ocelot and The Triplets of Belleville in leading today's animated foreign feature renaissance. So many great animated features have come out of Europe & nearby countries in the last few years. (though I'm thrilled to finally be able to see My Dog Tulip at the VIFF in a few weeks)

It's pretty amazing that they could make a film whose every shot is so unflaggingly inventive and beautiful and stylistically unified. The whole film is pure stylization. The characters are each drawn in their own bold shapes, and are identifiable by silhouette, which was presumably intentional, that being one of the mantras of western animation. I admired how the lines with which each character is drawn cleverly fold into one another in different configurations depending on which way the character is standing or looking. Different characters have different modes of movement, such as the little girl who zips across the screen, popping up in unexpected places, and especially the wolves, whose movement is very interesting and one of the best examples of the uniquely stylized movement matched to the inventively stylized designs in this film.

Kells has that whole hyperstylized retro UPA look that seems so popular today in the west, but it manages to carve out its own place that seems distinct. The film is an animated interpretation of the tribulations surrounding the creation of the Book of Kells, an unfinished 8th century manuscript legendary for its lushly intricate ornamental art. The strong visuals seem to be inspired by the look of the art in the Book of Kells, skilfully adapting the spirit of this ancient stylization into a newer kind of stylization that appeals to today's sensibilities. In spirit, the film kind reminds me of The Golden Bird, with its flat layouts, geometrically stylized characters and colorful byzantine backgrounds.

The compositions are very striking and beautiful at a basic level, with trees in the forest all aligned symmetrically and their branches wound up into Celtic knots and so on. The screen is usually laid out in a flat style reflecting the spirit of the original manuscripts, similar to the look of Kirikou or Azur et Asmar. The choreography of the movement of the characters through these compositions is quite ingenious. It's like they're constantly shifting perspectives on you, coming up with creative new ways for the characters to move through the environs. In that sense it kind of reminded me of The Thief and the Cobbler.

Representative of this is a shot in which a character is climbing a tree. The leaves form a sort of line that divides the screen into two. The character climbs up across the left half, then passes under the line, and in the right half the perspective is suddenly different, as if they were two distinct shots. It's unexpected and subtly done and has a marvelous effect, like a constantly shifting and shimmering optical illusion. So much thought was put into coming up with a variety of ideas to make each shot interesting like this. It's not just the animation and art that are stylized - the directing is too. The 10 years the film was in planning and actual production show up in the film's laboriously conceived and painstakingly executed visual schemes.

I appreciate that the story has multiple levels of meaning in spite of its simplicity. The story of artists in ancient times faced with the spiritual conflict of whether to choose art or survival in the face of an apocalypse-like wave of merciless invaders raining death and destruction on the land and people brings to mind Andrei Roublev. The climax of the film is quite interesting in that there is no victory. There's disaster, and a slow recovery from that disaster, without any sort of catharsis or triumph. The emotional climax doesn't arrive upon a shield bearing a victorious protagonist. The most powerful moment in the film is the very antithesis of bombastic triumph - it's the painfully ironic moment of spiritual capitulation when the abbot realizes that the art he had derided as futile to human well-being would in the long term be more permanent and nourishing than any sustenance of the flesh. I think Kells is admirable for being a family film that presents a complex message about the importance of art to humanity.

The film has strength because it was made by a group of talented artists with something to express, not just churned out by a corporation according to a profit formula. It's not patterned after the 'family feature' template; it carves out its own visual ethos, directing style and narrative vector. The one song there is isn't a Broadway number; it's low key, tastefully handled, even somber. Kells is an example of all-ages animated filmmaking done right.

Kells kicked off the Spark Animation '09 festival here in Vancouver, so it was preceded by an industry mixer. There's nothing more annoying than being in a room where everybody knows everybody else except you. I spent the whole time getting out of people's way. Lesson learned: Misanthropy and mixers don't mix.

Another noteworthy OVA relic from the post-Akira period of 1989 to the early 90s is Explorer Woman Ray from 1989, which I just picked up out of curiosity. I'd seen it often on the shelves of video stores 15 years ago when I rented anime regularly, but the package failed to impress me, so I'd never seen it until today.

Like the best OVAs from this period, the range of quality in these two 30-minute OVAs is all over the place. This applies mainly to the first OVA; the second OVA features an admirably even level of execrable quality. It's not worth wasting any further words on. The first OVA, though, is an interesting little companion piece to the best OVAs from this period like Green Legend Ran and Hakkenden, with which it shares its unevenness of tone, overweening ambition, and handful of notable animators. Ran is similarly of interest mainly for its first episode.

The film is actually rather fun to watch. It's got that feeling of expansive adventure that was done so well in the OVAs of this period like 3x3 Eyes, although in this case it's not very successful. And the quality is fairly high overall, although it alternates randomly between very strong work and very weak work, presumably because of shortness of schedule. What's good here is quite good, and it feels like if they'd had more time it might have been better. But the source material is a major problem, so I'm dubious on that point. Overall it's a terrible film, a grab bag of cliches from adventure films like Indiana Jones, each poorly developed and carelessly integrated.

And yet, I actually really enjoyed the film. The opening sequence seems exemplary of why that is. The opening sequence alone is a must-see. The animation is excellent, the drawings are awesome, and the choreography of the action is superb. If the entire film had been made at this level of quality, it would be a masterpiece. I'm guessing it was animated by Tatsuyuki Tanaka, because this would have been the first thing he did after Akira, and being a young animator it wouldn't surprise me that he was still under the influence of the drawings in that film. But influence can't possibly account for how ridiculously Akira-esque the drawings here are. I'm inclined to suspect he was doing it on purpose and having fun with it, drawing everything Otomo-style for laughs. In any case, it's an awesome scene, like the opening gunfight in Green Legend Ran 1, and one of the great action scenes of this period of OVA history.

It's talent like this that accounts for what makes great animation interesting, and I'm guessing it's mostly the presence of talent like him in the production that accounts for why this otherwise irredeemable story and directing work to an extent. Toshiaki Hontani was co-storyboarder along with director Yasuo Hasegawa, and there were actually three dedicated layout men (line director Hiroki Hayashi, Atsushi Okuda and Hideaki Matsuoka) which was more the exception than the rule at this time, and I'm guessing helped with the quality. And there were six sakkans (animation directors).

This is the only thing Toshiaki Hontani ever storyboarded apart from Rojin Z, so it's something of a precious film for a Hontani fan like me. In my post on Crimson Wolf I wondered aloud where else Hontani might have done some good effects work like the dragon climax in that film. Well, that place turns out to be Explorer Woman Ray. There are some spectacular effects sequences in the film, mostly in the second half, involving a hydrofoil skimming across the water outrunning a giant tidal wave crashing behind it, which I'm presuming he storyboarded. I'm not sure who animated the sequences, although I've heard that Mitsuo Iso (who isn't credited) may have been responsible, which wouldn't surprise me. The water here is truly among the best of the period. And it's not just well animated; it's well choreographed. The great animation is the tool that drives the action sequence forward and gives it its impact, for which reason it's among the better I've ever seen.

Kazuyoshi Yaginuma was also involved in the film as an animator, and I suspect he may have done some of the action sequences involving the hovercraft being chased by some of the bad guys due to the highly detailed and fluid animation and very peculiar feeling to the movement. Yaginuma, like Tanaka, had just come from working on Akira, and the influence of that film is palpable in this animation as well as many little elements of Explorer Woman Ray, be it a piece of animation here or a drawing or layout there. In Akira Yaginuma animated the sequence where Tetsuo walks supported by Kaori, right before the arm transformation sequence by Tatsuyuki Tanaka. The latter bit is my favorite shot by him. I love how much work he puts into making the two bodies move in a delicately nuanced manner in this seemingly throwaway shot. He also animated the scene in the kitchen in Shinya Ohira's Antique Shop (again right before the bit by Tanaka - apparently they were close friends), as well as the part where Ran wakes up in the clinic in Ran, so he's one of the key figures of what you might call the 'realistic group' of this period.

Though there are six animation directors, it still feels like you're seeing the animators' work in the raw apart from the close-ups of the main characters. Tanaka's scene is obviously uncorrected, as is presumably Yaginuma's. Even the badly animated scenes don't feel corrected. So it's a representative piece of the trends of this period in that sense, in that it's a film steeped in animator personality.

The designs of the characters are a mixed bag of sharply defined, appealing simplicity on the one hand, and offensive, badly drawn 'westerner' stereotypes on the other. One of the things I like about animation of this period is the character drawn with very few lines like Ran in Ran and the twins here in Explorer Woman Ray. There's the feeling that these designs were made with animation in mind. They're cute, but that's not their entire raison d'etre. It's a good example of the aesthetic appeal of a functional design. There's a certain beauty and elegance borne of simplicity - when it's handled right. Some of the liveliest character drawing and animation I've seen in anime is from OVAs from this period. The character designer and chief animation director is Hiroyuki Ochi, yet another Bebow alumni. A lot of ex-Bebow staff seem to have moved to AIC after leaving Bebow. A number of spots felt like they looked like Naoyuki Onda or Hiroyuki Kitazume, but their names weren't in the credits, so I guess it was my imagination.

Overall, despite logically knowing it's a terrible film in any number of ways, there's still something I find appealing about this OVA's combination of simple designs that move in a lively and inventively choreographed way, and fun and quick-tempo adventure story. Along with the other OVAs from this period that I've mentioned, it's got an atmosphere, animated energy and broadly appealing content that stands apart from that of any other age and that seems to have been lost these days. I would have not only liked to see it done better, but to see more films like this.

I don't know much about western animators, but I love effects animators, and the effects in Michel Gagné's Prelude to Eden are pretty nice. I'd like to see more of his FX work. He has apparently been the man behind the effects in a number of features over the last two decades including The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Striking how different the approach to FX is compared to a Takashi Hashimoto or a Soichiro Matsuda. Also, though I'm not a gamer, I like animation-based video games, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet seems like a great application of animator talent to create a unique gaming look and feel - Dragon's Lair via Lotte Reiniger. Apparently Shinya Ohira animated a lot of the old Blood game. It would be nice to see that work some day.

Yasuhiko Yoshikasu's The Song of Wind and Trees (1987) was one of the quintessential shojo anime movies for me, but Toshio Hirata's earlier adaptation of a manga by the same author Doorway to Summer (1981) looks even better. Hirata's very slow and image-oriented directing style seems a better match with the characteristic atmosphere and look of shojo manga than Yoshikazu's more fluid animation and cinematic pacing. From the few clips in this video, it looks like one of the best anime renditions of a shojo manga I've seen. Maybe it's exaggerating a little, but it seems like an audiovisual equivalent of a shojo manga, rather than simply an anime based on a shojo manga. I'd like to see it in full one day. I'm not particularly a fan of shojo manga/anime, but it's a rare thing to see it adapted in a way that captures its true spirit, and find it admirable when that is done well. Yoshiaki Kawajiri did layout, Kazuo Tomisawa was sakkan, and the art director was the incomparable Yamako Ishikawa (art director of Rintaro's Labyrinth Labyrinthos). Seems like an undeservedly neglected early Madhouse gem.

I've always loved a good animated music video. I think it's the ideal form for animation in many ways - animation at its most operatic and expressive. Digital production seems to be fueling a boom in animated music videos. I've found any number of them made in the just the last year or so. I just started an Animated Music Video blog to collect all the good animated music videos out there in one place. Let me know if you want to post vids on there and I'll set up an account for you. A lot of the official vids I've seen aren't even that good. Some fan made ones, like this one by Charles Huettner for a great Animal Collective song, beat a lot of the official vids, with its perfect match of colorful, richly morphing abstract visuals to a pulsing, driving song. There is a huge range of style and imagination on display in animated music videos, and some have excellent storytelling going on.

Another video that I guess you could call a 'fan made' video is this great video by Yusuke Nagano, the father of the singer of the song in the video. Very nice song and animation, with a simple lo-fi feel that I appreciate. Regular Philip Rogosky tipped me off about this one, and also about Yusuke Nagano's illustrations, which much to my own surprise I wound up poring over for well over an hour after thinking I'd just have a quick look. I couldn't tear my eyes away. His tasteful approach to color, the elegant and creative compositions, the great posing captured in tasty lines - all very appealing. The retro nostalgia for the freer days of his childhood is brilliant stuff, and I also really dig the stylish and sexy drawings of svelte beauties.

This has probably been reposted on every person and their dog's blog, but this time-lapse footage of the Los Angeles wildfire is quite amazing. Nature's devastating FX animation. OB sakuga nerd comment: Reminds me of Toshiaki Hontani's Akira smoke.

I thought this illustration by awesome Japanese indie animator Kei Oyama was pretty funny. It reminded me of a certain drawing by H Park in the forums.

The Photograph of Jesus short by Laurie Hill is a superb example of animation in a documentary context.

Indie animator Hiroshi Matsumoto has a cool style, using cutout animation to bring alive a lush fantasy world. I just wish the clips on his site were longer. Fun site design, too. Reminds me of Samorost 1.

The next Naruto animation folly has been served up. This time it's episode 1-2-3 of Naruto Shippuden, and strangely enough, I don't see Naruto at all. It's a Hirobumi Suzuki episode, and not an Atsushi Wakabayashi episode, so not as cunningly paced and digitally caressed and kind of sloooow and dragged out as Suzuki's episodes always are. But the animation of the episode is sharp, and there are the good bits of action you'd expect from Norio Matsumoto, who as usual is joined by his progeny Yama and Ryo-timo. Assorted Naruto riff-raff animators who did self-indulgent/show-offy work on the show over the years like Hiroyuki Yamashita and Sesshagoro (presumably somebody's infantile pen name) are here too; all the Naruto movers collected together. I'm not sure whether it's because it's a Suzuki episode or what, but it doesn't really excite me like in the old days.

I just found out that indie Japanese animator Mirai Mizue has his own web site and you can see all of his films on there. That's one of the great things about indie animation today - it's quite easy for artists to share their work on their own home page if they want. Many years ago I wrote a bit about Mirai Mizue's debut film, Fantastic Cell (2003), which was shown on Digista, and wanted to see more from him in this style. But I never got around to looking to see if he'd continued to do anything in the intervening years.

I was reminded just now by a post by Amid on Cartoon Brew about his latest film, Jam (2009). Looking at his site, where Jam can be viewed online, I was delighted to discover that he'd not only continued to build on that style over the last few years, but that the films were all viewable on his home page. (Fantastic Cell is here) He's one of my favorite animators in today's indie Japanese animation scene, with a truly unique voice and sensibility.

The Carmen ~In Fantastic Cell~ (2002) is another one of the films in the patented 'cell' style that he's developed. It was actually a study for his debut film, but is quite fun and gets across what makes his films so much fun. He does a great job of bringing alive these organic yet abstract shapes of various cells and strange cellular creatures, and syncs the animation with the music in a way that makes the movement very funny and makes the film really fun and interesting from moment to moment. This particular film reminds me of Oskar Fischinger in the way the semi-abstract forms are zooming around on the screen - an abstract animated ballet set to a famous classical music piece.

Trip!-Trap! (2005) is perhaps the most impressive and broad-ranging of his films. It's a good showcase of the artist's broad range of styles and techniques, all jam-packed into a tremendously dense and fun 5 minutes and set to some great music by his constant collaborator Alice Nakamura. Devour Dinner (2008) does away with the music and goes with only funny sound effects, showcasing his ability to come up with an infinite array of those strange cellular creatures. It feels like Fantastic Planet in the way it consists of a simple sequence of shots depicting this fantastical, bizarre microscopic world in a sort of deadpan way. It's a darkly funny film where these imaginary creatures spend their entire lives eating and being eaten. Some of my favorite animation of the last few years has been work like this that treads the line between figurative and abstract in its depiction of familiar yet fantastic microscopic life, such as Robert Seidel's _grau and Erick Oh's Symphony.

His illustrations are also really cool, full of densely packed but whimsical detail. I love his sensibility and unique style. He thinks fractally, creating macroscopic forms that emerge out of seemingly repeating yet actually infinitely varied microscopic forms. He's carved out a very interesting place for himself as an artist. It's great to know there are a lot of animators in Japan working in such personal and inventive styles.

Many of the more significant anime directors of the 1970s and 1980s learned the ropes at Toei Doga or Mushi Pro in the 1960s. The different approaches to animated filmmaking learned at each respective studio consequently provide the foundation for these directors. Some started out at Toei Doga but migrated to Mushi Pro when it was founded, and flowered as artists there. Such is the case with Rintaro, who after starting out at Toei Doga moved to Mushi Pro, where he debuted as a director on Atom in 1963, and went on to develop one of the most identifiable and idiosyncratic directing styles of any anime director. He's one of the best representatives of the Mushi Pro school of animated filmmaking.

It's difficult to define the Toei Doga/Mushi Pro schools, as every director is a unique individual with his own personal proclivities and influences, and there's no reason to needlessly shoehorn creativity into a box. But one very basic notions that understandably underlies many of the ex-Mushi Pro directors is a more image-based storytelling style. That doesn't mean ex-Toei animators can't create beautiful visuals, of course. And Rintaro's films have some of the lushest animation out there; it's not a black and white issue. But you might say the visuals are the aesthetic object that is constantly played with and reinvented from project to project, rather than merely serving as a tool to tell a story, in Mushi Pro alumni like Rintaro. You can obviously trace this back to the sort of animated filmmaking that had to be done on Atom, where they didn't have the means to use lots of animation drawings, so they had to make due with still shots and fancy camerawork to hold the audience's attention.

One of Rintaro's most significant early works would be as director of Sabu to Ichi Torimonohikae, a series that built on this approach where interesting directing and still drawings carry the narrative forward. It was groundbreaking when it was released in 1968 due to its adult and avant garde atmosphere. Just as the 'style' of Atom was to a great extent the product of necessity, so was the style of Sabu. Much of what makes anime identifiable is the little tricks that were devised to make limited animation more interesting in this way, and Sabu seems to have been one of the '60s shows where stylized fudges were devised, and these fudges turned out to be so catchy and cool looking that they would later become favored over conventional expressions.

One example from Sabu is a scene where a character is slashed by a sword. They didn't have the means of actually animating the whole action, so instead, first they showed a drawing of the character swinging the sword; then they inserted a quick 6 or 7 frames of a drawing that is completely black except for having a single straight white line running diagonally and a bright spot of light shining in the middle of the line; and then they cut to a drawing of the character slashed by the sword. This is illustrative of how style is often a matter of convenience adopted as a product of necessity, rather than being purely voluntary.

To bring this back to the matter at hand, I find that Rintaro is a director who creates his best work when he is able to improvise in images the way great jazz artists improvise with music. The metaphor isn't random, of course, because Rintaro is known for being a jazz musician on the side. As it happens, jazz plays an important part in a 1987 OVA he directed entitled Take the X Train. The title of the film pays homage to the famous Duke Ellington standard Take the "A" Train, and for the soundtrack Rintaro got one of Japan's best jazz artists, pianist Yosuke Yamashita, to provide a soundtrack improvised on the theme of Take the "A" Train. The jazz metaphor, then, is explicit in this case, and the film itself has a playful looseness about it that shows this artist at his most instinctive, free and appealing.

Continuing with jazz metaphor, Rintaro has himself likened the act of creating animation to the act of a jazz trio creating music. The members of the trio, in this case, would be the director, the animation director and the art director. What makes Rintaro so identifiable isn't any one style, although his quirky directing certainly has identifiable traits from film to film. It seems to be more that, in every film, the animation is expressing itself, and the art is expressing itself, all while the directing is expressing itself. It's not art and animation being subservient to the directing. All three stand on the same footing and contribute their voice to the harmony.

Take the X Train is a very good example of this approach. Each of the three elements is extremely appealing in its own right, and together they help create a very unique little film. Like Isao Takahata, what defines Rintaro isn't a particular drawing style. His style changes from film to film, because he collaborates with different talented animators each time to devise a style of animation suited to the material at hand. In this case, as with the short Kenji Miyazawa OVA I mentioned in the last post, he got a very talented animator by the name of Yoshinori Kanemori to design the characters and act as the animation director.

Kanemori started out around 1971 at a small subcontracting studio called Asahi Film, where he worked on Toei shows like Gegege no Kitaro. He then quit and briefly worked at two other studios before founding his own studio, Studio Bird, in 1976. From Studio Bird, starting with Galaxy Express 999 in 1978, he and fellow members Yoshinobu Inano and Hiroshi Oikawa acted as the central staff in a number of Toei productions throughout the 1980s, both designing and helping to maintain a high level of animated quality, including Stop!! Hibari-kun in 1983 and the third Gegege no Kitaro series in 1985. You can see the rudiments of the style of Take the X Train in the drawings of the adults that he did in the Studio Bird episodes of Hibari-kun, such as episode 2.

Kanemori has a way of drawing the face like no other anime designer out there, and Take the X Train is a delight to watch because of his drawings. The faces are very three-dimensional, with the lips, nose, chin, jaw and other curves all exaggerated in a really skillful caricatural way. The expressions are funny and believable, the face contorting and being pulled and stretched very elastically to emphasize a certain feature or expression. I like that the faces feel identifiably Japanese despite being so stylized. The faces are more real in the way the nose is clearly drawn like it would be on a human face, with actual nostrils. The lips protrude from the face, the ears stick out, and the teeth are clearly drawn. But you wouldn't call his drawings realistic.

The designs look very peculiar at first sight, but that's not a bad thing - it's a refreshing shock and a change from the homogeneous look of everything else. If anything, after seeing this, it makes you wonder why everything else looks so boring. They're great because they're based on this animator's observation of reality, arranged into a creative form by his imagination, rather than being merely based on an industry template. I love Yoshinori Kanemori's work because he feels like a real designer who has come up with his own approach to designing and bringing characters to life.

The art director is Masashi Aoki, and the art directing is quite interesting in its own right. The art is pop in its sensibility and coloring, and the film is full of humorous, unrealistic, formalist compositions. The layout of the screen at the beginning of the film, pictured atop, is typical of the art, with its weird elements in the various parts of the screen - random billboards in the top left, a big picture of a woman's behind in a thong in the top right, and the attendees at the meeting strung like beads along the bottom of the screen facing us, as if it were the last supper according to Andy Warhol or something.

Every once in a while throughout the film, little thought bubbles or onomatopoeia will pop up next to a character's head and display some incongruous text. When the main character sees a fancy car drive past, the text "AMERICAN OFFROAD MACHINE" appears in a speech bubble above the protagonist's head in typically quirky and ironic Rintaro fashion. There's always some fun and strange thing going on with the images on the screen, be it the composition, the animation or the directing.

The presentation of this strange story is typical of Rintaro in the way linear narrative flow is de-emphasized in favor of staccato, panel-based storytelling. It's like we jump from one interesting animated painting to another, each replete with its own miniature story. That said, the film has a satisfying structure, starting off slowly introducing the protagonist in the funny and visually playful first half, and building up to a burst of kinetic action in the second half.

In the first half, there's one of the funniest sex scenes I've ever seen in animation. The sex is treated frankly, with adult humor, rather than with the usual childish prurience with which the subject is handled in anime. The advent of the OVA must have been appreciated by directors like Rintaro for how it afforded the opportunity to treat the subject of sex for the first time. (Shinya Ohira regretted having to cut the length of the sex scene in his Antique Shop OVA from a few years later.)

In the second half, Rintaro creates some wonderfully memorable images out of the X train, which is embodied in the form of lightning that flows and writhes dynamically around the pitch black screen in a manner reminiscent of Yoshinori Kanada's fire dragon in Harmageddon. Rintaro creates some truly thrilling shots in the climax, with the action being depicted not realistically, but in the very stylized way that he was so good at. For example, when the protagonist's truck hits the X-train, instead of animating it all, it's shown as a very detailed slo-mo pan of the van with lots of debris drifting past on various layers moving at different speeds, with the background flashing black and white. It's a classic example of Rintaro's skill at coming up with interesting visuals using minimal means. The character animation and art rules the first half, and the dynamic and exciting directing and effects animation rules the second. Also, the free jazz going crazy during this climactic sequence achieves a really amazing effect, making for a perfect unity of animation, directing and sound.

This film is the ultimate example of Mushi Pro-style visual storytelling. I love the pacing of this film, because it feels like Rintaro at his most unfeigned and authentic, doing what he loves best - having fun and creating sequences of images that feel good and feel right. As if to mirror how much fun he's having jamming to this tune, he occasionally inserts cards with shorts English phrases, like in the old silent movies, with interjections that sounds like something you might hear during a jazz session. This is one of the craziest, most unusual and fun OVAs ever made. There was certainly nothing like it back then, and after 20 years it still looks and feels just as crazy and fresh.

Many of the best directors working in animation in Japan have adapted early 20th century poet Kenji Miyazawa's timeless short stories. The last film made by Japan's pre-eminent indie animator of the 70s and 80s, Tadanari Okamoto, was an adaptation of Kenji's The Restaurant of Many Orders. Okamoto died in 1990 midway through production, and the film was brought to completion the next year by his longtime friend and fellow indie animator Kihachiro Kawamoto. Yesterday I finally had the chance to see this film about which I'd wondered for many years, as it was released on the recent Tadanari Okamoto DVD box set. I was already familiar with most of Okamoto's main mid-period films, but thanks to this set I have the full picture of Okamoto - and it only makes me admire the man more. His early films show a creator with a fully developed sensibility right off the bat, while his last film makes me realize how tremendous a loss it was to lose Okamoto so early, as he was still growing as an artist, and this film shows him creating something different from everything that had come before in tone and style. This film was also intended as a study for his first full-length feature. Judging by the results, Hotarumomi - we have only the title of the would-be feature - would have been a monument to indie animated filmmaking. As it stands, The Restaurant of Many Orders is a great little film and a worthy final word from a great artist.

My first instinctive impression was: This is a gorgeous film to look at. The rich images are simply beautiful, and make the short run time fly by. There is no dialogue, which further focuses your attention on the unified beauty of the images, and the mysterious atmosphere created by the piece. The fact that the film has no dialogue is already a big departure for Okamoto. His films usually rely heavily on either lyrics, narration or dialogue. The film is remarkably engaging despite this, which is a triumph of directing. Even those beautifully dense visuals feel quite un-Okamoto and new even for an artist as renowned for his technical versatility as Okamoto was.

The film's defining trait is that it looks like a moving engraving. There is no visual disconnect between the characters and the background - they both seem carved of the same plate. This kind of visual unification is something Okamoto has tackled in the past - notably in The Soba Flower of Oni Mountain, in which he devised a special technique to give both the characters and the background the same brush ink look. Once again, Okamoto devised a specific technique to achieve the unified look of The Restaurant of Many Orders. He drew the keys onto normal animation paper, but he photocopied the sheets onto cells, and painted over the cells - on both sides - with a type of watercolor paint referred to as acrylic gouache. Unlike normal watercolor, where the layers underneath remain visible, gouache covers up the layers underneath. This is the technique that allowed him to turn a technical impossibility - animating an engraving - into a satisfying and convincing visual equivalent. He piles layer upon layer of the paint to achieve the lush, soft, dense texture that fills every nook and cranny of the screen. He also uses a multiplane camera to create a truly living and breathing image with great feeling of depth. That is one of the things I most admire about Okamoto: his knack for coming up with ingenious new technical approaches to achieve a new style of movement or to enrich the visuals.

The opening pan shot of the jeep driving across the countryside seems like perhaps the most successful and impressive expression of the particular visual concept devised for this short. The screen feels alive and rich and deep here like virtually no other indie Japanese animation I've ever seen, with its delicate gradations of light and shadow and dense but shadowy underbrush of leaves and branches flying past the jeep at different speeds on the different levels of the multiplane. The scenes immediately afterward in the forest are also gorgeously beautiful, with the many layers of subtly swaying trees and the tastefully subdued color tone creating a magical atmosphere of a living and breathing forest. There are unfortunately not very many shots later on that attempt anything so complicated, although we have to remember that this film was not completed by Okamoto, so there are undoubtedly many aspects that are not as they would have been had he lived to finish the film.

But you don't have to know any of that to appreciate The Restaurant of Many Orders. This is quite simply a film that's a pleasure to immerse yourself in. That's the most basic sign of a great animated short - that you feel good watching it. Every moment is beautiful to look at and genuinely interesting, and you're always wondering what's going to happen next. The film has a beguiling atmosphere and tone unlike anything else out there, and creates a sense of dramatic development, all without dialogue, entirely through the journey. Throughout, you find yourself transported into the mind of the two hunter protagonists. It feels like a first-person experience. You sense their fear and trepidation mounting as they penetrate ever deeper into bowels of the mad, improbable mansion. And this is done entirely through the staging and character animation. The organically expansive mansion itself, rather than the mute and doltish humans, seems like the protagonist of the film. It's a wonderfully Escher-esque fun-house that seems infinite in the variety of its waiting rooms, dining rooms, alcoves, hallways, antechambers, postchambers, etc. The film is a great achievement as animation because it takes a rudimentary story and brings it alive entirely through the interaction of the two characters with this very creatively depicted house.

There have been a number of other adaptations of Kenji Miyazawa into animation, and the amazing thing is that so many of them are so incredibly good. I can't think of an author who has been better served by anime than Kenji Miyazawa. His stories are amazing creations in themselves, and these attract the directors who know greatness. Something about Miyazawa's writing continues to speak to readers young and old today like that of few other authors. I adore his writing, personally - his prose is among the most well crafted and delectable I've ever read in any language, with an idiosyncratic diction, naive imagination and peculiar stories that are unlike anything out there - although it's beyond the scope of a mere post to get to the heart of what makes his stories speak so powerfully to people of all ages and generations.

All I know is that, by some strange turn of events, many of my favorite anime films of the 80s are Kenji anime. Not surprisingly, all of the best Kenji anime were made by Japanese studios known for their more hand-crafted, artist-centric philosophy. First came Oh Production, who released Gauche the Cellist in 1982 after 5 years of work. (They later made a nice OVA series called Little Twins.) Next came Group Tac, known for the long-running animation showcase Tales of Old Japan, with Night on the Galactic Railroad in 1985. Madhouse released the two OVAs The Acorns and the Wildcat and Matasaburo the Wind Imp in 1988. Finally came Animaru-ya with The Biography of Gusko Budori. Animaru-ya and Group Tac both released a film to commemorate the centenary of Kenji's birth in 1996: Group Tac released the imaginary biopic Kenji's Spring, and Animaru-ya released an omnibus of three stories enetitled Kenji's Trunk.

The two best Kenji anime are undoubtedly Isao Takahata's Gauche the Cellist and Gisaburo Sugii's Night on the Galactic Railroad. Two more different films you couldn't find, but both are works of unsurpassed perfection as animated films. It's striking how two films could so perfectly distill the essence of an author, but both go about doing so in such diametrically opposed ways. Something about Kenji's work seems to bring out the best in animators. There are certainly some mediocre animated adaptations that were churned out to make money, but in an unusual twist, the well-crafted adaptations far outnumber the bad.

Takahata's film translates Kenji's imaginary land of Iihatov using washes of watercolor art that depict a natural world similar to ours, but more evocative and soft, nostalgic and comfortingly rural. In this world, it's not a stretch for animals to walk right up to you and speak their mind if push comes to shove. The theater scene, concert and dinner scene at the end ground the events in a pre-war Japan that seems plausibly real, which makes the scenes with the animals all the more mystical. Takahata's strategy is to ground events with enough reality to make them plausible, and then step on the line a little with imaginatively executed flights of fancy only possible in animation. The musical scenes are choreographed very imaginatively, with the musicians being blown about during storm scene, and each animal coming across as very individual in its speech and behavior. The lush and extremely appealing designs and animation are a showcase for animator Toshitsugu Saida, who provided all keys for the film. This is undoubtedly the most laboriously crafted and multilayered of the Kenji films.

Gisaburo Sugii's Night on the Galactic Railroad, in contrast, adopts a storybook tone and visual ethos completely at odds with the previous film. The colorful backgrounds are drawn with bold strokes, like naif art, and the characters are simply drawn anthropomorphic cats, sidestepping the problems inherent in depicting the inhabitants of Iihatov as humans. The animation is completely different as well. The focus here is not on bringing the characters alive through nuanced animation, but on bringing a fantastic world alive through a procession of gorgeous images that are pure and intense. The animation is consequenly very still, but in an intentionally restrained kind of way, combining with the art to create a tone of hushed awe and heightened emotion. The art for the mazelike town is one of the film's most unforgettably beautiful images. This Iihatov may have started out informed of a vaguely rural European sensibility, but it is transformed through the art into a truly unique and compelling world the likes of which we've never seen before. Every image from this film is striking and unforgettable, from the computer CG corn field, to the pillar of cranes, to the Bos skeleton buried in the geological layers of time and space. This film seems like the most imaginative and creative of the Kenji films, and also the most spiritual and profound.

Madhouse's two best directors, Toshio Hirata and Rintaro, left behind their own interpretations of Kenji's stories in two wonderful OVAs released in 1988 that sorely deserve to be rediscovered. These are the definition of buried gems. Hirata's film looks like a living, breathing illustration, with characters by Yasuhiro Nakura of Angel's Egg and Metropolis and art by Yamako Ishikawa of Labyrinth Labyrinthos and The Golden Bird. Rintaro's film is a parade of boldly formalistic shots, and uses flat swaths of pastel color to delineate the characters, who are tastefully rendered by brilliant animator Yoshinori Kanemori. The animation alternates between pure stillness in which the beautiful layouts do their magic, and shots where the characters suddenly come alive in fluid animation. This film is one of Rintaro's greatest triumphs of visuals-centric filmmaking.

Ryutaro Nakamura's The Biography of Budori Gusko is the Kenji film most about the experiences of its characters rather than necessarily about visual storytelling, although the film abounds in beautiful images and scenes where the visuals combine with the music to sublime effect, as in all of the previous films. The world of this film is very close to ours (it's the most autobiographical of Kenji Miyazawa's short stories), but Nakamura strikes a great balance between realism and animated expressiveness with the simple and playfully designed characters of Shinichi Suzuki. As a film it is more rough around the edges and not as perfectly realized as the previous Kenji films, but in its own very different way, it still feels true to Kenji's vision of the world. The fictional autobiography of the protagonist is tremendously affecting perhaps due to the combination of naive character designs with hard-hitting events such as the famine at the beginning of the film. The film has an emotional honesty and rawness that belies the cartoonish facade.

Although I haven't seen it, the very first adaptation of Kenji Miyazawa in animation was a silhouette animation adaptation of Gauche the Cellist made a few years after the end of the war by Yoshitsugu Tanaka of Perrault the Chimney Sweep fame. I also haven't seen the most recent Kenji adaptation, Kenji's Trunk, but the films are hopefully well enough crafted and worth discovering. Ryutaro Nakamura made one of the shorts with the strong team of art director Shinji Kimura and animation director Takahiro Kishida.

A while back it was reported that Gisaburo Sugii was going to be directing a new film adaptation of The Biography of Budori Gusko at Group Tac, although the film was scheduled for completion last spring and I haven't heard any news whatsoever as to what's going on. Hopefully it is still on track. It will be great to see a new Kenji film by the same team that brought us arguably the best Kenji film, although it is somewhat strange and disappointing that they had to choose to re-make a story that has already been made into a fairly good animated film. Still, it will be interesting to see how their interpretations differ.

The range of styles on display in the Kenji films amazes me. Every film takes a different approach in the directing, animation, storytelling style, etc. It would be great to hold a screening of all these films together. These films show what true creativity is about in anime.

A selection of the best Kenji Miyazawa anime:

1949 - Gauche the Cellist (movie, 19 min, Yoshitsugu Tanaka)
1982 - Gauche the Cellist (movie, 63 min, Isao Takahata)
1985 - Night on the Galactic Railroad (movie, 90 min, Gisaburo Sugii)
1988 - The Acorns and the Wildcat (OVA, 30 min, Toshio Hirata)
1988 - Matasaburo the Wind Imp (OVA, 30 min, Rintaro)
1991 - The Restaurant of Many Orders (movie, 20 min, Tadanari Okamoto)
1994 - The Biography of Budori Gusko (movie, 85 min, Ryutaro Nakamura)
1996 - Kenji's Trunk (omnibus movie, 85 mins)
   The Twin Stars (Ryutaro Nakamura)
   The Cat's Office (Hiroshi Fukutomi; cd Toshiyuki Honda)
   The Coat of a Glacier Mouse (Setsuko Shibuichi)
1996 - Kenji's Spring (TV special, 55 min, Shoji Kawamori)

Each era in the history of anime has its distinguishing qualities. One of my favorite periods is 1990-1995, when you get OVAs with a sort of crazed energy in the directing and storytelling, and realistically tinged yet fun and manic animation. Unlike in the late 80s, one of the things in the air at this period was realism, presumably influenced by things like Akira, and a lot of animators were producing realistic yet highly expressive and individualistic animation that after all these years remains extremely appealing, sitting as it does comfortably in the zone between pure, stale realism and over-the-top Kanada-school chaos.

The pinnacle of this kind of OVA is probably Hakkenden, which is representative of this era in its very unbalanced approach to the animation in the way a lot of good animators with very different styles are thrown together into a single film without being unified. The result was a film with a lot of variety in the style of animation, to say nothing of the characters' faces, which seem to look different in every shot. 3x3 Eyes is another OVA from this period with a similar sort of epic but hyperactive storytelling and realistically influenced but very expressive animated energy. The OVA has been an important outlet for the more outre urges in anime, offering unique freedoms in storytelling and animation, and there is a lot of good animation buried here and there over the years.

I just ran across a fairly obscure OVA from 1993 entitled Crimson Wolf, directed by FX animator Shoichi Masuo, that seems like another good representative of this period of OVA history. It reminds of Hakkenden in its frenzied directing and raw and extremely uneven but frequently exciting animation. I actually sought this thing out because I saw it in his filmography and was curious to see what an OVA directed by this great animator might look like, and more importantly, if it might not have some good animation. Even if they are often not very good, I find that the very first few films directed by great animators are often fun and crazy and full of great animation. Ichiro Itano's Battle Royale High School comes to mind as just such an example from the previous period in OVA history - insane and ridiculous fun with lots of fighting and very uneven but always lively and occasionally awesome animation. Much to my delight, such indeed turned out to be the case with this film.

Crimson Wolf is about as manic and crazed as they come, and I mean that as a compliment. This OVA exemplifies many of the qualities that first attracted me to anime, with its breakneck pace and story cramming in way too much information for its own good. It's an unpredictable and implausible mishmash of car chases, shower scenes, kung-fu fighting, sex, political intrigue, and cybernetic reincarnations of Genghis Khan out to take over the world. In other words, everything that makes anime great.

The animation is quite an interesting beast. Most of the time the drawings are nothing more than functional, but in quite a few spots the quality suddenly jumps, as the baton has obviously been handed to a great animator with a great sense of timing and drawing. The fighting scenes usually have a dynamic and heavy feeling to the movement reminiscent of Tatsuyuki Tanaka's dojo fight in episode 9 of Hakkenden, with its huge hands and limbs flailing about wildly in an exaggerated but tremendously entertaining fashion.

Typical of this period, many of these scenes just scream a particular animator in the idiosyncrasy of the drawing and movement. The most prominent such scene is the scene that takes place in the woman's apartment, where she is attacked in the shower. The drawings and movement here just scream Norimoto Tokura. I've long wanted to see more from Tokura in the style and quality of the work he did in the Lion and Pelican short in the Ai Monogatari omnibus film that was released the same year as Crimson Wolf. It had a rich and dynamic approach to the animation that seemed like one of the best representatives of this era's unique animation mindset. The scene in the apartment here is probably the best thing I've seen from him after Lion and Pelican. It's a bit rougher around the edges, but it's got the same very fluid and detailed body movement and distinctive aggressive, bulky way of rendering the form of the face. I've attached a pic from the two at right for reference. I know the similarity is not that obvious from these pictures, but these are the best comparison shots I could find.

The most impressive scene in the film in terms of the animation, unsurprisingly, is the climax, with its extremely fluid and well rendered dragons flying through the air. It's the best dragon climax I've seen since the climax with the little prince fighting the hydras in Little Prince & the 8-Headed Dragon, animated by Yasuo Otsuka with the help of Sadao Tsukioka. It seems clearly like the work of Toshiaki Hontani, another great FX animator. It's not surprising that a film directed by Shoichi Masuo would be brought to a climax by an extravaganza of great FX animation, and Hontani was the perfect animator to use to give this scene its requisite gravitas and power. Nobody knows how to integrate good FX like a good FX animator.

What makes me suspect the climax to have been done by Hontani is the similarity of the smoke to the smoke he did in the capsule breaking open scene in Akira, with its heavy, deliberate movement of each bulge in the cloud. The dragon is also animated with the same minute attention to detail that contrasts dramatically with the more crudely expressive animation in the rest of the film. The animation convincingly portrays the scale of the scene and the massiveness of the dragon, and is one of the better examples in anime of how proper casting of a great animator can make a scene have a strong impact on the viewer. This definitely feels like the best thing I've seen from Hontani after his work in Akira. I'd like to see what other animation he did around this period, to see if he did anything else in this vein.

There were also a number of explosions here and there throughout the film that were drawn in a distinctive pink, hazy style that is the distinguishing trademark of a talented but little-known FX animator named Hideaki Anno. Compare the effects drawn by Shinya Ohira, Toshiaki Hontani and Hideaki Anno to see just how dramatically even effects animators differ. Every animator can come up with a different way of expressing even the exact same natural phenomenon. That's what makes animation beautiful. Hiroyuki Kitakubo is also there as an animator, although I have no idea what his style was like.

By some lucky stroke, yesterday as I was browsing through a Japanese second-hand book shop, I found a copy of the "Yoshinori Kanada Special" book that was published in 1982 by Tokuma Shoten. It's undoubtedly the single best book published on Yoshinori Kanada, and probably among the better anywhere on a single animator. It is jam-packed with Yoshinori Kanada's awesome, loose, free drawings, which are massively invigorating to look at. I find the freedom of his drawings not only appealing, but liberating. It's the same feeling I get from his animation. I hope that there will be an updated and expanded version of this book published soon, supplementing the coverage of his first 12 years in this book with the last 25 years of his career. This book was published before Birth was released in 1984, and contains a lot of conceptual sketches for the film, as well as scads of genga from all of his most important work up until then. Also, I love the tag-line: Now, The Super-Hero "IKO" Shoots Your Anime-Spirit!

There's an essay by Hayao Miyazaki about Kanada at the end. Kanada had never worked for Miyazaki at this time, but was to do so soon on Nausicaa, for reasons that will become obvious below. I like how throughout his career Miyazaki regularly picked out great new animators outside of his circle of connections like Kanada, and more recently Ohira - both animators who stylistically hardly seem suited to a Miyazaki film - and invited them to work on his films, utilizing their skill as animators while allowing them to do work that preserved their individuality to an extent. Anyway, here's my translation. It's quite old, I know, but most of the things he says remain relevant and insightful about Kanada and about animators in general. His imaginary reconstruction of Kanada's development is quite perceptive and continues to apply today to many animators. Miyazaki himself, after all, must have gone through much the same process.

He's been true to himself throughout his work. - Hayao Miyazaki

Around the time we were wrapping on Cagliostro's Castle, I remember one day Tomonaga Kazuhide coming up to me and saying how he thought "This Kanada guy at Z is really good". It wasn't long after that at a get-together somewhere that I first laid eyes on Kanada ("met" isn't the right term). As I watched him go-go dancing amid the fracas of youthful animators letting loose, I thought to myself, "Now this guy is the real thing."

I already suspected him to be the "real thing" for being able to incite such barely concealed respect-combined-with-rivalry in an animator as grounded and professional as Kazuhide Tomonaga, but the way he shook his booty with zealous abandon that night only confirmed my suspicions. All of the great animators I know have some kind of behavioral quirk that sets them apart. With Yasuji Mori it's his subtle wit. Yasuo Otsuka is great at doing impressions of people (he does a good Hirohito - one of these days he's going to get killed by some right-winger). Watch out when Kotabe Yoichi gets drunk, ladies... etc.

So I was convinced that Yoshinori Kanada had to be a good animator. We met a few times after that at various get-togethers, but never really got a good chance to talk, apart from one phone conversation where I did most of the talking. I'd never even really had a good look at his work. Yet I was determined to work with him some day. I made the mistake of saying that aloud one day, which is why I was asked to write this essay. Try as I might to squirm out of it, I got tired of fighting off the repeated video education sessions and decided to give it a go, accepting that what I say here might be way off the mark.

I have no intention of trying to analyze or critique his work. For one, I've never worked with him, and for two, he's obviously doing something that people today feel is relevant, so it's not my place to stand on a pedestal and talk down to him. The only thing I know for sure is that he's a person who seems to have been true to himself throughout his work. I like animators like that.

What does it mean to be a real animator? It's a hard concept to define, and defining it would probably be meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people I've never heard of, and I'm sure there are new ones developing this very moment.

But if we narrow it down to animators who are able to create animation whose drawings and movement (including their sense of timing) feels good as animation - then the number becomes much smaller. Yoshinori Kanada is one of the few animators who can create that kind of animation.

It's easy to imagine why his unique brand of explosions and wild action has bred a league of followers. But that unique feeling in his work can't be achieved by simply copying a template pattern, as will undoubtedly be illustrated by the stale and stultified feeling of battle scenes drawn by his imitators.

The work of a great animator can only be drawn by that animator. Every element of a piece of animation - in other words, the technique providing the foundation for that piece of animation - is the product of the innate sensibility of that particular animator, which is something unique to that animator.

Very few animators have a firm grasp of how weight, momentum and acceleration affect the properties of objects, and are able to instinctively visualize in their heads how a movement might play out in space. Even fewer are able to not only do this, but go beyond logic, integrating physics with instinct to create animation that can't be explained but that simply works in the eyes of the viewers. The ability to create animation that works comes from first achieving mastery of how the laws of physics such as weight and momentum work, and then going beyond those rules - saying to yourself, "Drawing it this way would feel better", and drawing it based on that feeling. It's a mistake to think that his style can be mimicked simply by surface imitation of his crazy poses and rough drawings.

Gatchaman, for example - sorry to name names - certainly impressed with its various innovations, but in terms of the movement turned out to be a classic example of how, no matter how many quick movements or cuts you might string together, the movement simply doesn't feel good or even convincing if it completely ignores the laws of physics.

You've just started out as an animator. Suddenly you have to draw your first genga. You don't know what to do. You're worried, you're afraid. But you tough it out and just draw. Eventually, you don't know why, but you stat to get a sense for how to do it. You start to get little ideas for how to make a movement interesting in this or that scene in the storyboard. Then you start changing the storyboard. At first it's subtle, but it gradually becomes more prominent. Sometimes the director agrees, other times you have to muscle your idea through. Sometimes what you tried doesn't work and you come out with egg on your face. But you just can't hold back this uncontrollable urge to draw things the way you want.

Eventually, the scenes you animated start to stick out from the other sequences, standing apart for how much more lively and individualistic they look and feel. People start to be able to guess what part you did. Your courage starts to build. Usually with this kind of animator, the characters are way off model. Even if he drew the character designs, they're still way off model. You start to notice that, even when you think you drew a character close enough to model, for some reason other people seem to think it's way off. But you don't let it get you down.

Then you're given the chance to handle a whole episode in a TV series. The episode winds up looking nothing like the rest of the episodes, but it's interesting, so you don't let it undermine your newfound confidence.

You give sakkan'ing a shot, but you realize that you're not cut out for it. All it does is make you want to re-draw everything in your own style. You couldn't do that day in and day out, for one, but more importantly, you want to spend all your time drawing movement that you're satisfied with, not correcting other people's drawings. But sakkan's are at the top of the ladder in the animation industry, so you feel torn. You start to feel troubled by how in magazines and the like even the best animation work winds up being attributed to the director or to the animation director, or even to the original creator.

You start to find that you can predict how a piece of animation will turn out if it's drawn this way or that way. And yet, the more this feeling grows, the more you begin to feel a growing emptiness inside.

You take part in some big name projects. You decide to lay aside your issues with the structure or the storyboard or the subject of the film, and just make your part the best you can make it. Your work even receives recognition as a result. You feel like you've achieved something. Another part of you, though, begins to wonder if it's enough to simply chug along as a cog in the wheel. You begin to awaken to what it really is that you want to express as a creator.

If I may be so bold, that is the kind of animator I imagine Yoshinori Kanada to be.

The work of Yoshinori Kanada and Kazuhide Tomonaga on the Galaxy Express 999 movie (viz) was characterized in some corners as a victory for contract animators. But the issue of contract vs. subcontract is beside the point. What's really happening is that a new generation of animators is replacing the old. That's all. The problems faced by the new generation of animators are otherwise the same. If some in-house animator someplace lords their sense of superiority over you, they're not deserving of respect anyway, so just leave and go somewhere else.

When the youthful days of experimentation are past, and you've accumulated experience, and it's time to build on that experience, what kind of projects you will encounter and what kind of people you'll work with will unfortunately remain largely up to chance. But it is also undeniable that what work comes your way will be partially dictated by the kind of work you've done up until now. As we head out of this 'anime boom' towards the age of mass consumption of anime, I imagine that not only Yoshinori Kanada, but also many other animators with talent, ambition and endurance, must be holding out hope that they will encounter work that is truly meaningful. I hope sincerely that they will encounter such work.

I'd very much like to work with him, but so far the opportunity to offer him a job hasn't presented itself. I know how hard it can be to be picky about work without losing heart. I hope he takes care of himself and perseveres.

To continue with a little more on the legacy of Bebow, the studio founded by Tomonori Kogawa that I talked about in the Cool Cool Bye post, I thought I'd say a few words about another equally obscure OVA released shortly thereafter by one of the studio's offspring of sorts. I mentioned that Hiroyuki Kitazume had formed a studio called Atelier Giga together with some of the best of the other ex-Bebow animators sometime around 1986 after they all left the studio. Today I had the chance to see the first anime in which I've seen the studio actually credited: an OVA released in November of 1987 entitled Relic Armor Legaciam. It's quite nice as an example of the Bebow style in the immediate aftermath of the scattering of its best staff, although as a film it's insubstantial and hardly important.

Hiroyuki Kitazume was the director, and all of the names in the main credits - from character design to animation direction to key animation - seem to be 100% ex-Bebow staff. This film in fact feels like Atelier Giga's own Cool Cool Bye, at least in the sense of it being the film that feel like it serves as the most compact summary of the studio's style, and features work by pretty much all of the most famous of the ex-Bebow animators. This film came out after they had all worked on Gundam ZZ in 1986; Urotsuki Doji episode 1, released in January 1987; and Robot Carnival, released in July 1987. This OVA adds itself to the latter three items as perhaps the best place to sample the legacy of Tomonori Kogawa and his studio, as it feels like the style of each of these animators gradually becomes more personalized and less patently 'Bebow' from this point forward. The years 1986 and 1987 seem like the period when the lessons of Bebow felt strongest in these animators. Relic of an age; legacy of a great animator - indeed an aptly titled OVA.

These two years or so are also, unsurprisingly, the period when many of these animators' work felt at its most loose, free and appealing. Kitazume Hiroyuki's work, for example, seems to become more stiff, overstylized and excessively pretty as the years go by. I find that this OVA shows Kitazume's style at its best, particularly in the child characters, where that patented Bebow combination of strong three-dimensional rendering of the body and features and dynamic and rich posing and facial expressions seems to live on. I find it interesting to watch the film in the light of the sort of work Kogawa was doing - how it measures up, whether they continued to build on what Kogawa was attempting to do. Inevitably, different people develop in different stylistic vectors, and the Bebow legacy seems to me to become quite evanescent if you try to pinpoint it in any direct sense. There doesn't seem to be anybody really carrying on Kogawa's style and pushing it in new directions, although there are fleeting moments in this OVA and elsewhere where a quick, fun bit of movement will suddenly make you perk up. Great animators like Naoyuki Onda and Akihiko Yamashita, of course, undoubtedly learned the lessons, integrated them and developed their own style, which is as it should be.

The versatility of these animators, who could design and move both mecha and characters equally well, comes through well in this OVA, with its organic mecha and variety of designs. Nothing is tremendously original here, but that doesn't distract from the skill with which they do what they do. The directing is surprisingly solid in its pacing and its juggling of the various threads, if slightly slow and lacking in a certain spark of excitement and engagement. I was genuinely looking forward to what would happen on the journey on which the characters make to embark at the end. Unfortunately, Atelier Giga went belly up, and with it the planned continuation. The credits end with the phrase "See you again", which made me wince at the sad irony.

I get the feeling there was a lot of excitement and hope riding on Atelier Giga. This group of creators emanated a strong sense of purpose and unity at this period in time. You sense that they could do a certain very specific thing really well, and they knew it, and were proud of it, and wanted to continue building on that pool of skill. It's unfortunate that this solidarity seems to have sort of fizzled away around this time and they were all were forced to go their own way. (although of course many still worked together on different projects at other studios)

The animation of the film isn't by any means as constantly full of energy and excitement as Cool Cool Bye. It's fairly restrained most of the time, with a lot of static close-ups and torso shots that rely more on the expressive quality of the drawings than on any kind of through-conceived and meticulously animated acting. Mostly the fun acting comes through in the comical sequences with the children, where the drawings have the kind of pliability and appealing looseness that I remember, oddly enough, from Urotsukidoji, of all things. The mecha are quite competently drawn and pleasing to look at, although this is not Char's Counterattack, and there aren't any mecha fights here remotely close to achieving that kind of visceral thrill.

It's mostly the characters that feel nice in terms of the animation. Occasional shots jump out - such as the one at the top of this post, with its more Kogawa-esque, realistic but stylish rendering of the curves of the face, which swings about in this shot from facing right to facing left, each drawing rendered very tastefully and elegantly in the way Kogawa was so good at... or the brief fighting action of the bottom shot, which is plausible in its realistic poses and timing, despite being very limited quantitatively. It's among the few shots in the film that are actually exciting as animation, and is representative of Kogawa in a sense. In Ideon, the actions seemed very quick and to the point. There wasn't movement going on all the time for movement's sake as was the case with Yasuhiko Yoshikazu. With Kogawa, things moved for a reason, and in action shots, that translated to some of the more satisfying bits of action I've seen, as every drawing was made to count, which is the case here. The action is quick but actually animated, and when you step through it you get odd poses like the one shown here that the body takes in mid-movement but that that don't register unless you step through the drawings, like you might if you stepped through a kung-fu fight.

The shot at right, although perhaps hardly a money shot by conventional standards, stands out to me as being among the more appealing in the film, or more to the point, among the more telling and salient. I think what I like about it is that the drawing captures an action in mid pose so well despite being on the screen for just a split second, especially the way the mouth is slightly ajar when the head is cocked back the way it is. I also like the way his legs are folded. It's not that it's pretty or beautifully drawn or anything. It's that they even bothered to draw this drawing. It's perhaps in drawings like this that I feel Kogawa's legacy to be present at the foundation level, for the way that they internalized this instinct for quickly but accurately expressing the body's form in natural poses in a way that's immediately convincing and plausible - and doing it with these clean, elegantly flowing lines and forms.

One surprising name in the credits here is Takeshi Honda, who is credited as an inbetweener under Atelier Giga. I'm not sure if he was involved at Bebow briefly before this, but it's interesting to see that Bebow even played a small part in the early formation of this master animator. Credited alongside him as an Atelier Giga inbetweener is Keiji Goto, who went on to be fairly active and successful as an animator and character designer. Goto is reported to have been trained by Akihiko Yamashita at this time, although stylistically Goto went in a very different direction from the Bebow animators. As for where to see this thing, try your luck at AnimeSuki.

RELIC ARMOR LEGACIAM (50 minutes, 1987)

I got to see my first Miyazaki film on the big screen last night, and it couldn't have been a better film. Ponyo is my favorite Miyazaki film in a good long time, thanks in large part to its rich and dynamic animation, which makes it a film that truly benefits from being seen on the big screen. It's one of those films that renews your faith in the power of hand-drawn animation. This is how exciting hand-drawn lines can be! the film seems to say, beaming with pride.

The film feels eminently hand drawn in any number of ways, from the patently obvious lines used to draw the characters to the storybook backgrounds to the animation of the vigorously shape-shifting sea. This film feels closest in spirit to Totoro, which has long been my favorite Miyazaki film, in its atmosphere of childlike wonder and its abandonment of the trappings of logic and common sense in favor of sheer sense of wonder and magical realism. I find that Miyazaki's seams start to show if he gets too close to reality, but his genius shines brighter than anybody in the world in the realm of pure imagination. I feel this film marks a high point in his achievement, despite feeling a bit fractured, underexplained and confused, and seeming to trail off suddenly at the end. These didn't bother me too much in light of the rich moment-to-moment texture of the story and animation. In fact, I quite liked that certain things weren't overexplained. Trying to long-windedly explain down what has just happened would not only kill all the magic, it would seem extraneous and inane. It's a rare thing for a director to be able to make a film that feels so purely intuitive, and yet remains so cohesive, entertaining and meaningful.

This was clearly a film in which the director set out to make a film that forefronted the fact that it was animated. Miyazaki has long had great respect for the films of Frederic Back, and this film feels like Miyazaki's attempt to create that kind of film - a film in which the animation was alive and voluptuous and active in every single shot. In every single shot, either the animation or the simple colorful images grab your eyes and don't let go, are the vehicle of communication. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first ten minutes or so are dialogue-free. Like the first ten minutes of the late great Yoshinori Kanada's Birth, this magnificent entry sequence prepares you mentally for a film in which the visuals are meant to be the means of communication, as they should be in an animated film.

I couldn't wipe the smile off my face watching this film. Few films have ever done that for me. I've never felt so consistently 'in the moment' in any previous Miyazaki film except perhaps Totoro. Ponyo achieves a truly sublime texture through the combination of Miyazaki's genius sense for storytelling and the technical mastery of his crew. Miyazaki is now presumably hands-off with the animation, but that only allows the incredible animators he has working under him to show off their skills all the more. Katsuya Kondo is a genius and one of the best animators in the world. Despite the usual connotation of 'sakkan' or animation director being a corrector of drawings, in this case I sense that he is in no small measure to thank for the quality of the animation in this film. His philosophy of movement permeates the animation of the characters. Among my favorite moments in the film were the moments at the beginning where Sosuke is carrying the pail of water up the stairs, and where his mother is waving at him by the portico as he leaves. These brief moments showcase Kondo's genius for succinctly capturing human movement and posing in a minimum of lines and drawings. Despite their subtlety, these shots, presumably animated by Kondo, are no less magnificent than more obviously spectacular animation of the action sequences to follow.

Water has long been one of the central challenges in animation - a challenge that when overcome can create amazing results. You can trace the history of the best water animation around the word, starting from Disney and coming full circle through to Yoichi Kotabe in Animal Treasure Island and more recently Norio Matsumoto in You're Under Arrest OVA #3 and many other places (such as Toshiyuki Inoue in Peek the Whale, Yasunori Miyazawa in Moomin, etc - see my FX post for a bit more on this). Norio is the reigning master of water animation in anime, but what's amazing is how varied are the approaches. Kotabe's approach couldn't be more different from Matsumoto's. Kotabe excels at expressing the macroscopic undulation, whereas Matsumoto's genius resides in expressing the minutiae of splashes. There are any number of ways water can be expressed, all of which together shed light on its nature. Shapeshifting water is by its nature the perfect medium for the mercurial expressive possibilities of animation. The animation here is a wonderful addition to that lineage, pushing Kotabe's style in the direction of more expressive freedom.

I can't think of a feature film with so much awesome and exciting animation of water. This is a film all about water, both in terms of the animation and in terms of the theme and of the story. Water isn't just a pretty accessory to animate. Miyazaki evokes the elemental power of water and its importance in humanity's history through the awesome, overpowering waves that lap at the land like wild animals in this film. Those scenes are among the most profound animated scenes I've ever seen in their combination of animated power and thematic depth.

Miyazaki's Nausicaa, in which water played such an important part thematically, funded a film that painted the picture of man's complex but inextricable relationship with water - The Canals of Yanagawa, directed by his comrade in arms Isao Takahata. The elemental forces of nature have always played an important role in Miyazaki's films. It's good to finally be able to see a film that tries to express the brute, majestic power of the sea the way this film does, as that's something that has never been truly done in animation. There have been films in which water played an important part - such as The Sea Prince and the Fire Child - but usually these films don't go beyond the surface level technical challenge of animating water. Miyazaki's water is mythical and elemental, and not merely a technical challenge. Although it's a cliche to say this, it's true in this case that this film is a fairy tale both for children and adults.

I think the animation of the waves during the storm was the standout achievement of this film in terms of the animation. They're animated like no other waves I've ever seen. They're not necessarily realistic. They're supernatural waves, waves of the imagination, and in that sense the expression of the water in this film is new and interesting. The way they're animated is smart, too, or more likely deliberate and calculated, because using simple, bold shapes that undulate like the goo in a lava lamp avoids the chore of having to animate the spray and foam in detail the way Matsumoto does. I remember seeing water animated this way in the Shigeru Tamura films. But needless to say, here, the water actually moves, and moves something amazing. The image of the car racing along the road by the water, with the water bubbling up into the sky in all sorts of strange configurations to the side, is unforgettable in its tension and surreal power. All of the scenes during the storm achieve a remarkable feeling of tension and imminent danger presumably because we all instinctively know the wrath of nature and the ocean. These scenes seem to me to invoke that mythic fear and reverence we've had for the ocean since the beginning of time, as first expressed in things like the Odyssey.

I liked the animation in this film because of the very specific balance of visuals they achieved. So even the scenes that weren't particularly well animated were quite enjoyable to watch as animation. But the well animated scenes were indeed magnificently animated and the highlight of the film. The central spectacle of the film is of course the storm scene, and from what I can gather, for the animation of the most spectacular sequences of the storm scene, we have to thank primarily Makiko Futaki, the Ghibli mainstay I talked about before who has long been responsible for animating natural phenomena in the Ghibli films, and Akihiko Yamashita, the ex-Bebow animator I mentioned in my last post. Together they appear to have animated many of the more impressive shots in the storm scene. More specifically, Futaki is credited with doing the bits where Ponyo is running on the fish/waves chasing the car, and Akihiko Yamashita is credited with the shots of the car in the storm, to say nothing of the amazingly detailed sequence with the trawler at the beginning.

These great action sequences rank among the best to grace any Miyazaki film, alongside Kazuhide Tomonaga's opening car chase in Cagliostro, the sword fight on the ship by Yoshinori Kanada in Nausicaa, the scene with the golem coming alive by Nakura Yasuhiro and Shinji Otsuka and the fight on the railway by Hirotsugu Kawasaki in Laputa, the bike ride by Toshiyuki Inoue in Kiki, the flight scenes by Yoshinori Kanada in Porco Rosso, the action in the fortress by Shinji Otsuka and the action in the forest by Atsuko Tanaka in Mononoke Hime, the chase through the building by Kenichi Konishi in Spirited Away, and the mid-air transformation by Shinya Ohira in Howl's Moving Castle, to name but the ones that spring to mind immediately.

There were many other standout shots besides these sequences. First and foremost, of course, is the magnificent opening sequence, for which we have veteran Ghibli participant and Telecom animator Atsuko Tanaka to thank. (refer to my post on the women behind Ghibli for more on her and Makiko Futaki as well as Megumi Kagawa, who did the scene at the kindergarten). Shinji Otsuka's running on the fence near the end was typically well timed and exciting, reminding simultaneously of his running sequences in Millennium Actress and Mononoke Hime. Probably not coincidentally, he was also given another running sequence in the film - Ponyo running towards Sosuke when they're first reunited. He also apparently did the very impressive action scene where Ponyo transforms and escapes from the ship. It's no surprise that Otsuka is again one of the main animator stars of the latest Ghibli film. He and Akihiko Yamashita stand out for having done among the most - and most exciting - animation in the film. (for more info about who animated what scene in the film, consult this post in the forum)

Needless to say, it's animators we have to thank for making the animation in this film so amazing, although you'd never know that looking at the credits at the end of the dub I saw in the theater last night. Credits are there to say what the people who worked on the film did, right? To "credit" them, so to speak? The curious thing is that, in place of credits, there's just a long list of names here. I'm not kidding. It's just a big roll of hundreds upon hundreds of names, without any credit or anything. Not only that, they abbreviate the first name. Sure, I bet most people who are going to watch the dub couldn't care less, but it's nothing less than an insult and a slap in the face to every person who was involved in this film. I've seen some botched credits in my day, but I've never seen such a travesty. "We made this film" indeed.

Aside from this glitch, the dub is fairly passable. Anime dubs have come a long way from the horrible dubs I recall from the 90s. Liam Neeson is perfect as Fujimoto, as is the child actor playing Sosuke, Frankie Jonas, although the rest of the voices are hit or miss. Needless to say, the next time I watch the film it's going to be in the original language, so that I can appreciate the film as it was intended to be seen. Even dubbed, though, the power of the animation is entirely sufficient to make the film work, so if you're hesitating whether or not to see it because of that, I'd say go for it. The impact of seeing it on the big screen easily overcomes any minor drawbacks in the dub.

A lot of OVAs were produced in the 1980s, most of which have been forgotten today, usually for the best. Some have been forgotten undeservedly. Cool Cool Bye (1986) is one of the ones that's been undeservedly forgotten.

Not only does Cool Cool Bye boast one of the most awesome titles ever, it also boasts some of the best and most unique animation to ever grace any anime. Cool Cool Bye is one of those OVAs I like to call a 'karisuma animator OVA', referring to a handful of OVAs made in the 1980s as a showcase of a particular animator's genius that remain essential viewing as perhaps the densest example of that animator's style. Birth was Yoshinori Kanada's karisuma animator OVA, and Cool Cool Bye is Tomonori Kogawa's karisuma animator OVA.

Kogawa has left behind a number of other items for which he is better known, foremost among these perhaps his work on Yoshiyuki Tomino's Ideon (1980-82) and Xabungle (1982), but Cool Cool Bye in many ways represents the pinnacle of Kogawa's evolution as an animator. It came at the end of several years of experimentation with Kogawa's approach, and at the period when his studio, Bebow, was at its zenith, and was soon to scatter to the four winds.

Perhaps the thing I like best about Cool Cool Bye is that its animation and designs are a unified whole. The designs were conceived with motion in mind, and in the final product every line of the characters comes alive vividly at the hands of the animators in a boundless variety of exciting movements and poses. It's not just that the action sequences are excitingly choreographed, which they are. It's that every line feels right in every drawing of every movement. The animation feels like the creation of a master animator who not only knows how to draw a character well from any conceivable angle, but who can freely bend the lines used to draw the limbs and and facial features any number of ways in order to heighten the emotion of the expression or the velocity of the limbs in action. Every single line always feels just right and controlled in every drawing, even in drawings that are extremely deformed. It's pretty common to see deformation in anime, but usually it falls at one of two extremes: It's either taken from conventional symbols used throughout the industry, or is deformed too much, in a way that destroys the unity of the character. Kogawa's Cool Cool Bye is one of the best examples I know of a design specifically giving rise to an approach to movement.

Kogawa actually made another 'karisuma animator OVA' before this, Greed (1985), but its animation is somewhat low-key and not nearly as emphatic as the animation in Cool Cool Bye. Partly this is because Greed is twice as long, and they were able to pack every moment of the shorter Cool Cool Bye with great animation. But more saliently, the animation is the specific purpose of Cool Cool Bye, which it wasn't really in Greed. Cool Cool Bye strikes me as a kind of experiment to see how far he could push his animation in a certain direction - in the direction of vivid movement as opposed to low-key acting. It feels like a pilot film also in the very clipped storytelling, which seems there to pitch the world view to a prospective sponsor more than to be comprehensible.

Kogawa is often remembered as one of the proto-realistic animators of Japan due to his more realistic rendering of the character in Ideon and so on (which were even more realistic in the original concept, before Tomino turned them down and told Kogawa to make them more accessible, i.e. cute). But Kogawa struck out in a very different direction right afterward in Xabungle, with its more cartoony and pliable designs and very fast and exciting animation. Cool Cool Bye strikes me as an attempt to perfect that style of animation. Episode 1 of Xabungle (which used 9000-some drawings) is perhaps the closest comparison in Kogawa's oeuvre. They're both one-of-a-kind creations and among the most exciting 30 minutes of anime out there, packed full of exciting animation in a style like no other. So I find it a shame that we never got to see Kogawa build on what he achieved in Cool Cool Bye. Even the people who learned under Kogawa never made anything that pushes the style and approach developed here, which is among the most appealing I've ever seen in anime. A 13-episode TV series made at this steady level of quality would have been a classic for the ages - though it might have bankrupted whatever studio made it. Of course, what makes Cool Cool Bye great is not budget; it's talent. The animation is actually somewhat limited a lot of the time. It's just that what drawings there are are extremely skillfully manipulated.

Simply put, Cool Cool Bye is great animated entertainment. Kogawa showed with this OVA what real animation is supposed to be about. It is extremely fun to watch from start to finish, has a variety of interestingly designed characters, and is filled head to toe with great animation and inventive action sequences. Not a minute is wasted or boring. The characters are fun to watch, and each moves in a way that is unique to their character design and personality - something all too rare in anime. The action sequences are cleverly choreographed, and the characters go through some incredibly entertaining calisthenics, all expertly rendered by the animation. Bodies twist and turn about in all manner of ways, run and leap, stretch and squash. This is a movie that is all about characters running around doing things, reminding a lot of Yasuo Otsuka's Future Boy Conan. But whereas Otsuka's drawings had a sort of loose, anything goes freedom, Kogawa's animation is far more logical, deliberate, thought through. They both, in their very different way, created extremely fun character animation that more than ever seems to have a lot of lessons to offer animators in today's Japanese animation industry. Kogawa's animation strikes a masterful balance between having fun with the animation and maintaining a sense of unity.

We often speak of schools of animation in anime, such as the Kanada school, but Kogawa is interesting because he has been a big influence, but his influence can't be pinpointed to any one style the way Kanada's can. The innovation he brought to anime was more in relation the to technical aspects of how to draw characters, many of which were gradually adopted in the natural course of the overall improvement in the base level of drawing skills over the years in the industry. Kogawa seems to have been one of the people who where there kind of pointing out the little mistakes that people didn't realize were mistakes. Rather than trying to lord a style over people, he was just drawing things right, the way they're actually supposed to be drawn.

The most famous example of Kogawa's innovation is the simple act of looking up. The image here pretty much sums it up. Kogawa was one of the first people to actually think through and properly draw how a face should look from any angle, particularly when it's tilted up like this. Before going on, let me backtrack a little. Kogawa actually came to animation kind of late. The art that interested him growing up had been oil painting, at which he was pretty adept by the time he graduated with a degree in oil painting from the famous Musashino Art University. Nowadays sculpture is what really interests him, an interest clearly reflected in his very three-dimensional characters. Needless to say, most animators working either back then or today don't have degrees in art, and this training in the fundamentals of art undoubtedly permitted him to see things that the veterans with whom he worked had never realized. One of these things is how to draw a face when a person is looking up.

Kogawa started out in animation in 1970 at age 20, when he joined the Tokyo Movie studio. He stayed there for under a year before quitting and going on to do a lot of freelance work for Tatsunoko. It was during his time doing work for Tatsunoko that he began to notice that the veteran animators who were working on the same shows didn't know how to draw a face when it was looking up. The proportions would be messed up. And the funny thing is, when he drew the face the right way, it would often get corrected back to the wrong way, simply because that's how those animators had grown accustomed to drawing things in anime. That's one of the pitfalls of not learning the fundamentals of art, and not observing the world around you and basing what you draw on that (at least in a very basic sense of knowing how it's supposed to be done, and then modifying that appropriately based on the need).

It doesn't take much to get the proportion of the nose, eyes and mouth right. For example, you can draw a box, tilted at the desired angle, and place the features on one surface to get a basic sense of how they should be drawn. If you try to eyeball it without doing this, the features can come out skewed and wrong-looking, which is obviously what was happening with the veteran animators. Kogawa was, then, among the first to draw a character in various poses in a way that actually made physical sense. This is one of the things, I now realize, that made his work feel so different to me back when I first discovered it. Cool Cool Bye is interesting because the animation is very loose and exaggerated, yet at its core it feels solid and real and plausible. It's a perfect example of how grounding in the fundamentals can make even unrealistic animation more convincing.

It was his dissatisfaction with this contradiction -- that the animators who were supposed to be inspiring him knew far less than him about the very basic things -- that led him, in 1979, to found his own animation studio, Bebow. It was from this now legendary studio that Kogawa would go on to provide the animation for which he is most famous today, in Ideon, Xabungle, El Gaim and Dunbine. In the course of this work, he personally trained many of the more important animators of the next generation, including Ichiro Itano, Akihiko Yamashita and Naoyuki Onda, to name but some of the more striking examples.

My favorite work by Kogawa is without hesitation Ideon, particularly the final movie, in which his animation brought the characters alive and made them feel real like virtually no other anime I've ever see, especially back then. His work on this show was revolutionary in its dispassionately real rendering of expressions and poses, even if the designs and situation were not particularly realistic in an obvious sense. This is perhaps one of the first times I'd ever seen an anime in which I always felt I understood why the character was doing any given pose. It always made sense to me. There were other well-animated shows, but this is the first one where the actual drawings and the content of the drawings felt real to me in both the rendering of the drawings and in their psychology. His drawings also had a raw power that I'd never seen before. The characters' emotions came through very powerfully, and their acting was simultaneously more restrained and more believable than anything I'd seen before then.

Another aspect that made Kogawa's characters in Ideon unique is that he determined their color, and did something that was unheard of back then - he based the enemy side (the so-called 'Buff Clan') on a white base, and did daring things like using no highlights in the eyes and using colors rather than black to trace their outlines. This accentuated the already strong drawings to create a truly memorable impression. The Buff Clan's angular hairstyles were distinctive and cool looking, and a match with the appealing design of their clothing, which was rather ahead of its time with its sharp, minimalistic, tasteful style.

One of the things I admire about Kogawa, besides his incredible skill as an animator, is the fact that he always changed his style from show to show, and he challenged himself to try new things every time. He went from the realism of Ideon to the opposite pole in Xabungle right afterward, drawing very soft and loose characters with more heavily stylized features and proportions. In both cases, however, the spirit behind the character designs was suited to the material at hand, as well as playing a major role in determining the show's atmosphere and its impression on viewers. Kogawa's characters in both cases were striking and like nothing that had come before, and in both cases they were extremely beautiful to watch, either still in motion. Kogawa's drawings have the fundamental strength of a sketch by a master's hand. In both El Gaim and Dunbine afterward, Kogawa would again change his vector by 180 degrees each time.

From the very beginning, Kogawa had intended to keep the studio only for about a decade, so that he could train animators for a while and do a few things in commercial animation, and then move on. That is exactly what wound up happening. For a few more years after Cool Cool Bye, the studio switched from doing contract work for Sunrise to doing contract work for Tatsunoko on various shows like Southern Cross, but the most talented animators appear to have left either before or immediately after the last big bash that was Cool Cool Bye. Hence, this OVA comes across also as the final summation of what the studio stood for. Kogawa had achieved his goal of training a lot of talented animators, and those animators scattered to the four winds. A number of these animators went on to do a lot of very nice work in the late 80s and beyond, and remain among the more important animators active today. It's somewhat shocking to hear of the names who passed through the doors of Bebow, because it's a fairly large swath of the most talented animators of the 1980s - Hidetoshi Omori, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Toshihiro Hirano, Ichiro Itano, Naoyuki Onda, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Narumi Kakinouchi, Akihiko Yamashita, Atsushi Yamagata, Tomokazu Tokoro, Junichi Watanabe, Masami Kosone, Keiichi Sato, Satoru Nakamura, Toshihiro Yamane and Shino Masanori. If you watch anime regularly, chances are you've seen work by at least one of these guys in the last week on some show somewhere, old or new.

Akihiko Yamashita is one of the names that jumps out at you these days as being among the most obviously talented of the ex-Bebow staff. He has become one of the pillars of Ghibli's animation since Howl. Hidetoshi Omori and Hiroyuki Kitazume were perhaps the two most prominent Bebow animators in the years immediately following Cool Cool Bye, with their work on Robot Carnival and Urotsukidoji. Robot Carnival is a good place to start to get a quick sense of the style of Kogawa's two biggest disciples, as both created a short in their own patented style. Omori's style is very close to Kogawa, with its angular shapes and more limited animation, while Kitazume is more rounded and cute and fully animated.

Many people in Urotsukidoji used a pen name, so for a long time I wasn't too sure who was behind this show. It's actually very well animated despite the content - it's quite possibly one of the best animated adult titles ever. It turns out that most of the staff were probably ex-Bebow, so it's one of the more important pieces featuring work by the Bebow animators after leaving the studio. At the very least, it included Hiroyuki Kitazume, whose distinctive designs give him away, Hidetoshi Omori using the pen name Zen Kingoji, Yamashita Akihiko, Masami Kosone and Keiichi Sato. It probably included others.

Ero anime was in the air in 1987 for the ex-Bebow staff, because they also made a short OVA called Body Jack, this time virtually 100% using pen names. The only person I know for sure was involved is Hidetoshi Omori, because the characters are unmistakably his. But I'm sure there must have been a bunch of other Bebow people. For an OVA probably nobody has ever heard of over here, it's a surprisingly decently done piece, with a few fun action scenes. Hiroyuki Kitazume, who formed a short-lived studio called Atelier Giga together with some other ex-Bebow staff, is perhaps best remembered for his work on Gundam ZZ and the Char's Counterattack movie. The latter included quite a number of Bebow staff, including Hidetoshi Omori, Shinichiro Minami and Naoyuki Onda. Onda did a lot of good work in his very identifiably refined and lush style after leaving Bebow, especially on OVAs like To-Y, Ai no Kusabi and Armitage, and to this day continues to be very prolific and very talented.

Many of the staff behind Giant Robo were ex-Bebow staff. Tomokazu Tokoro directed one of my favorite series ever - Haibane Renmei. Toshihiro Hirano and his wife Narumi Kakinouchi worked at Bebow in the early 80s before migrating to AIC, where they defined the look of that studio in classic OVAs like Iczer 1, Dangaioh and Vampire Princess Miyu. The late Junichi Watanabe was the monster designer in a lot of these shows. Atsushi Yamagata is perhaps best known as the character designer of AIC's Hakkenden OVA series. You pretty much can't swing a stick without hitting an anime involving Bebow alumi (only slightly exaggerating).

Besides the quality that Bebow stood for, it also comes across as having been very much of a family, with a very warm and healthy atmosphere at the studio. For example, to keep the animators in good physical shape, they all did regular exercise together and had their own baseball team. (though this is of course a very typical thing for Japanese companies) The Cool Cool Bye tape came with a great little 15-minute documentary at the end showcasing a dozen or so of the animators at that time, with brief interviews and playful animations. Some of the interviews were done at one of the studio's baseball games, so in the shots from their interviews above you can see a number of them wearing the studio's baseball uniform.

After Cool Cool Bye Kogawa moved away from being a full-time industry animator. Over the period that Cool Cool Bye was in production he published a set of books on animation techniques (which were recently republished in a new edition), and from then on out seems to have focused more on his work as an educator. He mostly did isolated work here and there, often using pen names, such as Legend of Galactic Heroes (1989), Casshan (1993) and Medarot (1999). His only real big job was Ashita Genki ni Nare (2005), a movie about the experiences of a sister and brother living in the ruins of Tokyo after the end of the war, on which he served as character designer and animation director. He also recently did all the key animation for episode 5 of Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (2008). He was heavily involved in the old Yamato series back in the late 70s, most notably as the character designer and animation director of the second movie version made in 1978, and he is reportedly serving as the character designer and animation director of a new movie version that is in production and slated for release in the near future.

GREED (1985, 57 minutes)

Creator/Script/Storyboard/Character Designer/Animation Director/Director: Tomonori Kogawa
Art board: Shinichi Hirao
Animation Directors: Hidetoshi Omori & Hiroyuki Kitazume

Animators

COOL COOL BYE (1986, 30 minutes)

Creator/Script/Character Design/Director: Tomonori Kogawa
Storyboard: Bebow
Animation Directors: Tomonori Kogawa & Hidetoshi Omori
Mechanical Design: Katsuya Nozawa
Concept Assistance: Akihiko Yamashita
Art Director/Backgrounds: Kenji Matsumoto

Animators

Inbetween Check
TSUJI Kiyomitsu

I remember trying to watch Dragon's Heaven (1988) way back when but being unable to get past the atrocious and pointless tokusatsu opening. I braved it again today because I was curious to see Shinya Ohira's work on it, and it was worth it. To anyone who wishes to see some very unique visuals for anime, or to see some good early Ohira, I recommend just skipping past the baffling section and proceeding right to the animation. The film itself is an absurd little confection utterly devoid of dramatic weight, a pure product of the 80s OVA boom, but it's of interest today for its visual style, which remains even after all this time very unusual if not unprecedented in anime, and more saliently, for its strong effects and mecha animation.

I first became aware of Makoto Kobayashi's name not that long ago when I got to see some of his conceptual designs for Samurai Seven and was quite impressed by his style and imagination. As a director and storyteller I'm not so convinced, at least going by this OVA, but as a designer and artist he's got a very nice voice that is especially welcome in the context of Japanese design sensibility. It's a breath of fresh air, despite the work here seeming kind of a Moebius knockoff (elements of Nausicaa are also an obvious inspiration). What I found deeply disconcerting about this OVA was the conventionally stylized anime character heroine plopped right in the middle of all these beautifully byzantine robot and scenery designs that look straight out of a European comic. It's curious how they could be so creative with everything else but hit a wall when it comes to the characters. If you cut out all of the shots of the heroine, it's a good looking little short, but together they're amazingly mismatched. They had all the talent there; it's unfortunate that they weren't able to make a film more conceptually unified. I could have envisioned this being a a great little film in the manner of Cannon Fodder. The dialogue, directing and story were all equally weak.

It's sad that this is the case, because the drawings are of a high caliber. This short OVA maintains an even tone and quality throughout thanks in large part to the work of Shinya Ohira as the mecha animation director. (Although I've heard that Makoto Kobayashi was heavily involved in the drawing side of things, so I'm not sure to what extent the strength of the drawings is thanks to Ohira.) Ohira has said how Masahito Yamashita was his main influence in his early years, and this film is important because it features the two working side by side. Yamashita animated the opening sequence, and it's probably the most impressive single sequence in the film, with its geometrically shaped arcs of flames animated in lush detail. It's a good place to see how the baton-touch between Yamashita and Ohira occurred. Ohira brought a maniacal level of detail and brilliant draftsmanship to the mecha. The designs of the robots were actually done by Makoto Kobayashi's little brother, Osamu Kobayashi. Yes, it's apparently THAT Osamu Kobayashi, in what is possibly the earliest anime gig I've seen from him. Ohira does a great job of bringing the robots to life with his masterful drawings, which are precisely but tastefully rendered. Without Ohira's drawings, there would be fairly little of interest in this film.

Besides acting as the mecha sakkan, though, Ohira also did key animation in the film, and from what I'm able to tell it looks like he would have done some of the shots of the smoke and explosions and so on. The shape of the smoke as the ship descends into the cloud and the smoke rising from the ground as the tanks land reminds me of the jagged swirling clouds he did in Akira the same year, not to mention his earlier Captain Power work. Seeing the two side by side helps to understand in what way Ohira was influenced by Yamashita. Yamashita created effects animation packed with exaggerated detail, weird shapes, distorted perspective and unusual timing. He had a very strong sense of line, creating animation that really spoke through the movement of lines. Building on Yoshinori Kanada's legacy in stuff like the fire dragon of Harmageddon, he created effects that pushed the stylization further, creating an undulating mass of geometric patterns that felt great as animation. Ohira seems to have built on that approach to effects by pushing it in a more realistic direction. Even his more realistic effects work of this period feels deeply indebted to Masahito Yamashita in spirit. The goal doesn't seem to be just to recreate nature; it's more about creating animation that is thrilling to watch, with richly nuanced, complex forms and timing, and an intricately detailed mass of pulsating lines, which is what Yamashita's effects animation was about. These are the people who made an art out of effects animation. Ohira's work has changed a lot in the intervening decades, but his artistic underpinning seems to remain the same: creating dense, idiosyncratic, relentlessly expressive animation that thrills purely through movement.

For anyone who can read French, I wanted to point out a nice homage to Yoshinori Kanada just posted by Manuloz on his anime news web site Manganimation.net. There were a lot of things written about Kanada when the news hit the net that he'd died, but I find that very few people seemed to really understand who Yoshinori Kanada was as an animator, and where his true importance lay. Manuloz's article does an admirable job of providing an overview of Kanada's history, which can be a challenging thing to do due to the man's seemingly incessant studio-hopping. I should try to do a similar write-up in the future so that there's a comprehensive overview available in English, too.

In the years to come we'll surely see some text written about Kanada's history, influence and importance in Japanese, but hopefully in English too. His legacy lives on like that of no other animator today. There was a lot of imitation of Kanada-san in the 80s, which in the 90s seemed to diminish a little. In the 2000's, especially in the last few years, it feels like we've seen a resurgence of the style. History often has this kind of cyclic character. What exactly is it about Kanada's brand of playful animation that seems to attract young animators today more than ever? That would be an interesting topic on which to ruminate. Every season I'll see at least a few shots by some brash young animators having fun with the TV animation that reminds me of the kind of animation Kanada was doing back in the late 70s, some of it being pure imitation, some of the more memorable being work trying to develop its own voice much in the way Kanada was doing back then. Maybe that's the secret. Kanada's mindset as an animator seems particularly well suited to permitting young animators to both have fun and attempt to express their budding individuality.

I talked about Shin-chan animator Shizuka Hayashi before. I've long wanted to see more of her Kyoro-chan anime, to see what she did with characters of her own creation, and I finally got the chance to do that - episode 1 is up on Youtube (part 1, part 2). It's as good as I would have hoped. This is easily among my favorite work by Shizuka Hayashi. I've always loved the funny undulating dance Shizuka Hayashi made Shin-chan do, and you can see Kyoro-chan do a similar dance in the first episode.

Comparing with episode 2, which she didn't handle, is particularly helpful in showing the unique approach to drawing and movement that Shizuka Hayashi brings to these delightfully cute characters she created. The second episode is largely lacking in what made episode 1 so fun, although the storyboard and directing probably also played a part in making episode 1 work. There are so many scenes in episode 1 that are action-driven, the excitement created through the animation and storyboarding, such as the scene where the characters are chased by the boulder, rather than dialogue-driven. That's something Mitsuru Hongo was good at - constructing situations that would rely for their impact on characters going through interesting and exciting actions that tap the full potential of the talented animators he always made sure to use, rather than simply mouthing dialogue at one another. The nature of the material also undoubtedly let Mitsuru Hongo and Shizuka Hayashi go a little more crazy with things than they could in the real-world-based Shin-chan, letting them go for far more cartoonishly wild actions than ever before. And the animation of the characters is also consistently amusing, with lots of inventive expressions and zippy, snazzy movements, while yet remaining quite limited and restrained in the style at which the Shin-chan animators became so expert. Hongo is a director who knows the importance of good animation. I find myself much more attracted to anime featuring simply-drawn characters like this because it allows the animators more freedom to do what animators (are supposed to) do best. Nobody in the world can create more compelling realistic animation than the Japanese, but I also find that they bring a uniquely appealing approach to the more cartoonish end of the spectrum, of which Kyoro-chan seems a good representative.

Surprisingly, the show's web site is still up after all these years, and they've got a neat little page that gives a simplified breakdown of the production process for the show (and for most shows), which in their flowchart proceeds thus: planning -> scenario -> character -> art design -> storyboard -> layout/key animation -> inbetweens -> coloring -> CG production -> audio. Quite obviously very simplified. A different staff member is interviewed briefly in each section. The section on the storyboard has a brief interview with Mitsuru Hongo. One of the questions is about his view of the purpose of the storyboard, which I found rather interesting, so I thought I'd translate it, since it's relevant to the subject, although it's frustratingly brief. I'd like to read more about his views on storyboarding and directing and their relation to animation one of these days.

Interviewer: What's the hardest part about drawing a storyboard based on the script?

Mitsuru Hongo: In the case of animation, I think the storyboard is the key determinant of whether a show will be interesting or not. The script describes the flow of the story, whereas the storyboard describes the flow of time and space, so when drawing the storyboard, you have to think ahead in dealing with these things to avoid creating problems at a later stage in the production. Directing an episode can be tremendously fun because it offers so much creative freedom, but it can also have you tearing your hear out in frustration when things take too long.

Chief director Mitsuru Hongo didn't do many episodes apart from the first, unfortunately. The main one of interest would be episode 46, in which he did storyboard and directing and was again teamed with Shizuka Hayashi. I'd love to see that one. He also storyboarded episode 13 and co-storyboarded episode 63. (the staff listing on the official site only lists up to episode 74, but there are 91 episodes in total) Shizuka Hayashi was involved a little more often. She was animation director of episodes 7, 13, 20, 26, 39, 46 and 60. A few other good animators were involved as animation directors - Futoshi Higashide (6) and Yuichiro Sueyoshi (37). I assume Shizuka Hayashi may have been involved in others episodes as an animator, and maybe there were some other good animators, although I don't have a listing so I don't know. This is a series I'd like to have the chance to see in full some time. I doubt many of the non-Hayashi episodes live up to the full potential of the animation, but it would still be worth it to check. The story also bodes fairly well from what I've been able to gather from episode 2, with an unexpected tinge of political satire. I had kind of assumed the series was produced by Shin-Ei, since it was directed by Mitsuru Hongo and involves Shizuka Hayashi, but it's actually a Group Tac production. Tac produced a lot of interesting shows over the years, and I'm always discovering an interesting new one I'd never seen before.

Edit: Found a bunch of other eps. Looking forward to checking them out.

One of the classics of the 80s I never got to see back in the early days was Crusher Joe. I've been curious about it for a long time, and finally got the chance to watch the movie from 1983 and the two OVAs from 1989 today. They're both very different but very nice in their own ways, and are a time capsule of space action anime goodness from the opposite ends of the 80s waiting to be discovered by fans of good space mecha anime.

I'll start with the more recent OVAs. I wrote about Toshifumi Takizawa's work on Dirty Pair a while back, and how the final OVA from 1990 featured Takizawa's unique directing style at its pinnacle of sorts. Well, the two Crusher Joe OVAs from 1989 are like two more of those. The Crusher Joe OVAs come right after the Dirty Pair OVA series and just before the final OVA, and they all share a similar directing style and production quality, with the same tight directing Takizawa was so good at, and the same high production values from many of the same staff who did the good work on the Dirty Pair OVAs and TV series. The two Crusher Joe OVAs are probably among the best 1980s OVAs that nobody has seen.

Takizawa's directing does a great job of making both OVAs tremendously fun and exciting. Things start out slowly, but build up in both episodes to exciting climaxes that have a cinematic flow and intensity equaled only by Tomino, but more logical and restrained, without the quirkiness and histrionics. Takizawa is particularly good at putting together complex scenes in which a lot of different things are going on, with different action sequences unfolding simultaneously in different places between different characters and eventually converging, yet what's going on remains clear to the viewer all times. There is a lot of action anime out there, but Takizawa's seems unique in its elegance and strength of presentation. I love the clear sense of structure that I get from Takizawa's storyboards.

The animation in the two OVAs is truly top notch. I'm a fan of mecha anime and animation, but I'm not a fan of robots. Crusher Joe is perfect for people like me, as it's got lots of cool mecha without any robots, and the mecha are fabulously animated. Shoichi Masuo and Koji Ito of Studio Graviton, whom I mentioned before in the Dirty Pair post, provide both OVAs with superb mecha and effects animation. Masuo was in both OVAs, but Ito was only in the first. On the character side of things, we have Dirty Pair character designer Tsukasa Dokite in both OVAs, and Norio Matsumoto and Hitoshi Ueda in the second, among other people from Dirty Pair like Satoshi Isono and Dove animator Masayoshi Nishimura.

While watching the mecha animation, you will perhaps be reminded of Irresponsible Captain Tylor. The reason is obvious: Shoichi Masuo and Koji Ito were the ones responsible for the mecha animation in Tylor, which was made a few years later. Tylor featured character designs by Tomohiro Hirata, who is a Studio Graviton animator, and who was the animation director of the Crusher Joe OVAs. It's undoubtedly because of him that Masuo and Ito were involved in Crusher Joe and Tylor. Similarly, Hirata happens to have been the mentor of Norio Matsumoto, which probably accounts for his being involved in Crusher Joe and Tylor. It's amazing to think that the presence of just those three individual animators, who were responsible for most of the best work in Tylor, accounts for what makes the two items feel so similar (in addition to Hirata's designs, of course). Because the directing styles of Toshifumi Takizawa and Koichi Mashimo couldn't be more different.

The good animation in the first episodes, unsurprisingly, comes mostly in the space battle shots, which include a number of Itano circus shots that were clearly the work of Masuo Shoichi. In the second episode there are lots of great space action shots again, but in addition, there is some very nice character animation shots littered throughout, some of which are presumably of Matsumoto's hand, although I wasn't able to identify his style definitively. He's clearly identifiable by the time of Tylor in 1993, but this is still somewhat early in his career.

One of the bits of animation I most liked in the second episode was the one pictured atop, where smoke rises from the ground where bombs have just exploded. The strange thing is that it felt like I was watching the sequence of the capsule breaking open from Akira, which was animated by Toshiaki Hontani. There is an uncanny resemblance there, partly in the actual way that the clouds are drawn, but especially in the way the animation is very dense and carefully done, with each bulge in the clouds rising in a trajectory independent from the others. Hontani was the first to try animating smoke in this particular way in Japan in his Akira animation, so it seems like an odd coincidence. Akira came out the year before, so it feels like Shoichi Masuo is paying homage to that incredible smoke animation by his great sempai in the field of effects animation. Whatever the case may be, the effects work in both episodes is wonderful; especially so the climax of episode 2. Highly recommended to FX animation nuts.

There's nothing I like better than a good space action anime, and the Crusher Joe OVAs deliver big time in that field. They don't make space action anime like this anymore. Among the few space action anime I've seen from the 1990s that was up to this level was Outlaw Star from 1998, directed by Mitsuru Hongo. As I wrote in an old post, this series was not only well directed and fun and actually watchable, it had among the best action sequences I've seen in any TV series, mostly compliments of Studio Torapezoid animators Susumu Yamaguchi and Hiroshi Okubo, who played a role analagous to that played by Shoichi Masuo and Koji Ito in Tylor, filling the series with skilfully animated space battles.

Today I also had the chance to see Yasuhiko Yoshikazu's movie version of Crusher Joe from 1983, and it was quite stimulating in its own way. It was Yoshikazu's directorial debut, to be followed by Giant Gorg on TV and then his three more well-known movies. Although I was never a big fan of Yasuhiko Yoshikazu until now, because something about his work didn't quite sit right with me for some reason, watching this movie renewed my sense of respect for this tremendous animator. He is a true powerhouse of an animator. When he's behind a project, you know he's behind it 100%, and he fills every moment with his own very peculiar brand of animated nuance. There aren't many anime films that move as constantly and as richly as do Yoshikazu's films. He's the only person in Japan who has come close to doing the sort of superhuman feat that Hayao Miyazaki did in his movies, handling all of the main creative roles from script to storyboard to layout and even rough animation - even correcting the animation himself when necessary. If for nothing else, the Crusher Joe movie is an amazing accomplishment in that it seems like it was entirely animated by one person. (I'm talking about the character scenes, not the mecha scenes) In the way in which Yasuhiko Yoshikazu's individuality completely dominates the proceedings, the Crusher Joe movie feels decidedly like a child of the anime boom of the late 70s to the early 80s.

It makes me really curious to know how he managed to fill his films with so much movement that all seems like it was made by him. Perhaps he provided roughs to lay down the basic motion and then corrected the keys to get the expression or pose just right. I don't see how he could do it otherwise, but that's a hell of a lot of work. There's a reason movies nowadays have 12 sakkans. Compared to the animation of the OVAs, Yoshikazu wins hands down. Yoshikazu is credited as character designer in the OVAs, but it doesn't really feel like his work. He really has to be the sakkan for it to feel like his work. He's got this very loose line and bizarre quirky posing and expression sensibility that can't be mimicked by anyone, not least Tomohiro Hirata, whose style feels nothing like Yoshikazu's.

Apart from the look of the characters, more important is the fact that the characters feel alive in the movie in a way they don't in the OVAs. That's where Yoshikazu's genius as an animator comes in and makes his work so special. The characters' expressions are very pliable and fun to watch, the body language varied, inventive and appropriate to each character, and expressions change according to the dialogue as a shot unfolds - which hits you with reverse culture shock when you've grown used to faces remaining static over the course of a shot in most other anime out there. Not to mention that Alfin is way cuter in the movie than in the OVAs. The drawings have a certain roughness that seems unusual when looked at today. There's a perception today that movie drawings in particular need to be really well polished. You sense that Yoshikazu's priority isn't in making the faces resemble a model; rather, he wants the characters to feel alive, and for the animation to be interesting, dynamic and exciting.

The disco brawl scene was a great example of the freedom in Yoshikazu's animation. There's so much movement packed into there, and it's all so fun and amusingly presented. I like that this film feels like the freest and most playful of Yoshikazu's films. Putting aside the question of whether the film works as a film, Yoshikazu has a very unique instinct for creating this exciting flow of animation that retains momentum from shot to shot, inserting lots of different actions and ideas, and effectively using that trademark slo-mo slide of his. His action scenes are very fast, but it's not just a blur or a bunch of pans over stills - every little movement of every action is actually animated, and in considerable detail, all while maintaining forward momentum through the skillful cutting and variety of shots.

The Crusher Joe movie also happens to feature some great extended work by Ichiro Itano, from what is in many ways his best period - the period when his work was at its youngest and freshest and he was just attaining mastery. This would have been right after the Ideon movie and right during Macross, so his work here was done smack in the middle of the two items for which he's far better known. That makes it all the more interesting to discover after all these years - a whole huge chunk of great Itano you didn't know existed. It's quite good and very reminiscent of Macross, since on top of everything he's even animating mecha designed by Shoji Kawamori.

Hah, BoingBoing blogged about Belladonna yesterday. Belladonna hits the (fringe of the) mainstream. I only wish the fansub floating around out there had a translation that remotely did justice to the script of this film. I did a translation of the film myself a few years back that I think is pretty decent in conveying the coolness of the script, if I do say so myself, but I was paid for that, so I'm hesitant about releasing it.

A while back I mentioned that Anido was working on the English version of their web shop. Well, it's up now, and there are a number of items of interest on there, so I thought I would talk about one of them today. I bought the Taku Furukawa DVD a few months back but just got around to watching it yesterday.

I knew that Taku Furukawa was one of the main figures of the independent animation scene in Japan since its inception largely at the hands of Yoji Kuri and his abettors in the Animation Sannin no Kai, and I even wrote a blurb about him in an old post that provides a decent overview. But really, I'd only seen a handful of his films, and I didn't have an actual picture of him as an artist from first-hand experience with his work. The DVD released by Anido entitled Takun Films provides a commendably rounded overview of this artist, with no less than 18 of his films running 120 minutes in total, as well as a 40-minute interview and an amusing "biographicaricature". It also contains more than 100 stills of his posters, book covers, sketches and assorted other illustrations. The DVD was assembled by the legendary Takashi Namiki of Anido, and the whole thing exudes a playful vibe that is a perfect mesh with Taku Furukawa's whole ethos as an artist. The DVD also includes an English biography (which can be found online here) and a much-expanded Japanese version.

The DVD confirms what I suspected: Taku Furukawa is a unique figure. The animation he created over the two decades of the 1970s and the 1980s is, of course, unique enough, but it's his approach to animation that strikes me as unique to him, and also, uniquely Japanese. Simply put, Taku's films are not laborious works of art. They're playful esquisses thrown off whenever he got an amusing idea. They feel zen, aloof, casual. Of course, I don't mean to play down the considerable amount of work that obviously went into some of the more highly movemented films such as Sleepy, but overall, his films strike me as the antipode of Animation As Serious Art, which is odd since many of his films are often very experimental and abstract. With Taku, the primacy of the idea and its immediate transfer to paper seem to take precedence over any sort of superficial polishing. The human characters who appear intermittently in Taku's oeuvre, which is about equally divided between abstract films and amusing vignettes featuring his trademark doodle figures, are never laboriously rendered or animated, even in films in which he obviously spent a lot more time planning out the film.

Clearly a good deal of his constitution as an artist came from his experience working at Yoji Kuri's seminal 'Yoji Kuri Experimental Film Workshop' (Kuri Yoji Manga Jikken Kobo), which he joined in 1963 after assorted events subsequent to being born in 1941. His early films from 1968 to the early 70s, seen today, come across as experimental films that happen to use drawings, rather than animated films. It's not until the mid-70s that he begins to shake off the stylistic inculcation of the Workshop and come unto his own as an artist. After having made two short films at Kuri's studio, he quit in 1966. The first film on the set, from 1968, dates from this freelance period. He formed his own company, Takun Films, in 1970, the year of the release of his second film. His heyday as an artist strikes me as occurring in the years surrounding 1980, when his most appealing films were made. The last film on the set dates from 1990, even though this DVD was released in 1998. I'd be curious to see any other films he's made since 1990.

One of the things I like about Taku Furukawa is that it wasn't a done deal that he'd do animation. He graduated with a degree in Spanish, and his first love during the university days was playing the guitar. He came relatively late to the idea of doing illustration and animation, and how he came to animation was through the radical animation experimentation of Yoji Kuri & gang. I think the creators of this period were blessed with something that young animators today will unfortunately never be able to benefit from: a lack of history. Furukawa has a certain eclecticism of spirit that comes from having experienced a lot before coming to animation, which was undoubtedly possible because he lived in a culture that wasn't steeped in animation everywhere you looked. The slapdash, almost amateurish style that may strike newcomers to his work as decidedly lacking in animated inventiveness and technical skill is obviously the result of not having received formal training in animation. He came to animation the way many did at that period - by doing it instinctively. There seems to be a resurgence of interest in creating animation instinctively like Furukawa did, with a number of strong figures appearing in recent years on the indie scene doing this kind of loose, instinctive animation unfettered by anime (or western, for that matter) history or aesthetics.

Perhaps the most important influence that led to the style that defines his work, with its simple lines, is the work of Saul Steinberg. He discovered Steinberg's work around 1963 after moonlighting as an animator on the first few episodes of Tetsujin 28 while attending the university, and it was a revelation to him. He realized that it was that kind of work, and not stuff like Tetsujin 28, that he really wanted to do. Thus is what led him to join Yoji Kuri's studio. More specifically, he saw one of Yoji Kuri's shorts one day in the theater, and that same day, he called Kuri on the phone to tell him that he was coming to join the company tomorrow. This was while he was still in the university. Kuri was nice enough to turn him away and tell him to come back after graduating. Furukawa did so and promptly joined Kuri's studio.

During the interview, which was conducted at Furukawa's atelier in Tokyo, Furukawa and the interviewer are seated at a desk whose every inch is covered from one end to the other with hundreds upon hundreds of wind-up toys. The places feels like a fun-house, littered with lots of funny drawings and strange curiosities. Furukawa isn't just an animator - he draws illustration, picture books and manga and sculpts figures and other objects. Animation comes across as being merely one of the various outlets of an eclectic, playful creator who remains a child at heart.

The first three films on the set - Oxed-Man (1968), New York Trip (1970) and Head Spoon (1972) - are very much films of their era. They feel dated perhaps because the young artist was using contemporary pop iconography rather than creating something of his own. His later works are much less 'datable' to any particular stylistic fads of any era. Oxed-Man has the randomness, lack of polish and cascade of silly imagery that characterize most of Furuawa's work, but it doesn't have the later films' particular appeal that save the films from descending (in most cases) into sheer indulgence. It's based around the legend of the minotaur, but completely re-imagined through Furukawa's humorous and nonsensical imagery. But it is the work of a young artist testing the waters, so I don't think you could expect anything else. The film was his first real assay in a longer format. The way he came to make the film was that Kuri had a musique concrete soundtrack that avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi had made for one of Kuri's films, and Kuri gave Furukawa the soundtrack and suggested he try to make a film using the same soundtrack. There must be a lot of interesting stories like this yet to be told about Kuri's seminal studio. This is a film perhaps best enjoyed by not overthinking, and just surrendering yourself to its parade of bizarre imagery.

The campiest of his early films, quite probably deliberately, is New York Film, which is a chaotic grab-bag of psychedelic colors, 60s imagery, fat Americans and photos of New York. It feels like a foreigner's ironic travelogue through the 60s in New York. In the interview, Furukawa relates that the film was inspired by a trip he made to New York in 1969, a trip he decided to take partly inspired by viewing the film Midnight Cowboy. It was his first overseas trip, so it's understandable that the city left a strong impression on him. The film is his poetic travelogue of his first overseas trip. It's an interesting picture of this unique era in US history seen from an outsider's perspective.

Furukawa's personal style begins to emerge with Head Spoon, in which the borrowed imagery disappears and we instead begin to see the simple line drawings that characterize his later work, albeit still not fully developed and perfected.

The first film on the set that really grabbed me and I think still works after all these years is Nice to See You (1975). What's interesting with Furukawa is what I mentioned before - that he swings between making films that are really very abstract in concept and films in which fun doodles go through amusing antics in classic cartoon style. All of his early films were experimental, but mixed with doodle drawings. This is the first of his films that is purely abstract. What I like about it is that it is to the point, has a clear concept, and is elegantly executed. I won't ruin the film for people who haven't seen it (funny, the idea of spoilers in an abstract film), but he takes a very simple concept - the stipples created by the half-tone printing effect - and makes a film that evokes a number of ideas about the act of observing images.

Beautiful Planet (1974) is a music video in the vein of Minna no Uta, to which Furukawa has also contributed a good number of films over the decades. This may have been his first film in this format. It was actually made on commission for Unesco, and is among his first drawn films that works and is appealing. You could further divide his drawn films into films with a story and films that are just random doodles. There isn't a story in this film, but rather a series of pretty images riffing on the theme of the song. There is Taku Furukawa the storyteller, and then there is Taku Furukawa the artist having fun coming up with images and animated doodles. He also makes use of early rudimentary CGI for some of the images.

Phenakistiscope (1975) is one of Taku Furukawa's masterpieces, even though there is nothing more to the film than a series of phenakisticopes made by Furukawa shot rotating in sequence. Like Nice to See You, this is one of his films that are simple in concept and execution, and all the stronger for it. The actual phenakisticopes are very appealing and fun, and his particular genius as an animator of amusing transformations comes through very well in them. I don't know whether it was before or after, but one of the books for children Furukawa published includes some of these very same phenakistiscopes, which can be cut out and played with. 1975 feels like the year in which he suddenly began producing strong films, which he continued to do over the next five years.

Coffee Break (1977) is also one of his strongest films. If you were to only watch three or four of his films, this and the former film would be in there. There is very little to the film, in classic Taku Furukawa style - merely a very spare doodle of a person sitting at a desk downing a cup of coffee, to whom a surreal event occurs that again I will not spoil but to say that it is quite surprising, very odd, and yet very exciting to watch. Taku Furukawa is the king of nonsense animation, and this is one of his masterpieces in that style. It is nonsense of the highest order. It's in films like this one that I feel Taku Furukawa to be one of the spiritual fathers of the indie animation that is being made today by young independent animators like Atsushi Wada, with his crudely drawn figures, bare-bones visuals and loopy, nonsense stories.

Motion Lumiere (1977) is another splendid film from this burst of creativity that seems to have visited Furukawa in the years after 1975. It consists of what at first appears, if viewed carelessly, to be just a bunch of sparkly lights on the screen. When observed more carefully, they resolve into what appear to be a series of figures going through motions such as walking or lunging - as if Muybridge had been animated with a Lite Brite. It's just a very pretty film to watch, and one that evokes some interesting thoughts about the nature of movement and the history of animation.

Comix (1979) is a good Taku Furukawa film, although by any other standard it is quite random and without purpose. That said, I really enjoyed it. It's one of his best nonsense films. It features a human figure dangling from above, morphing subtly between different faces and slowly drooping downwards like a drop of water, the head always seeming just about to drop off, while a sort of rocky magma undulates below him like the ocean tide. There's nothing else to it, but it it works on the power of its oneiric imagery and mesmerizing repetition.

Speed (1980) is the film that won Furukawa the Noburo Ofuji prize. It is one of his most immediately accessible films, and it just plain looks the most like a Taku Furukawa film. It's also perhaps his film that feels the most like an 'animated short' in the conventional sense of having a story, characters, events and message. It tells a story about a caveman who travels to the future a number of times, experiencing the many advances in speed made by man over the centuries until he hits the full-speed modern lifestyle of racecars and city life, only to come back dissatisfied and settle for the rustic charm of the good old caveman life. It seems to be the film in which he perfected the unique visual style that I myself have always associated with him - a sort of animated doodle, somewhat similar to Don Hertzfeld, but more lighthearted and less arduously animated. Taku Furukawa is also active as an illustrator. The style that seems to define his illustrations and his Minna no Uta shorts is this style of simple line-drawn figure, and this is one of his best animated shorts in that style, combining these as it does with satire and a fun narrative. It's quintessential Taku Furukawa.

Sleepy (1980) is the most obviously 'well-animated' film Taku Furukawa has made. The animation is lush and inventive, and the visuals are tasteful and appealing in a conventional animation sense, with cute drawings and a simple color scheme used for each shot. At 6 minutes, Sleepy is also one of his longer films. A family with a pet dinosaur named Sleepy (his favorite activity is sleeping) go on a trip, and Sleepy saves the day when a fire hits a high rise apartment. It's the only film on the set aimed at children, and it works wonderfully as a children's film. I found myself wishing that Furukawa had made more films like this one. It's the only film on the set that I immediately wanted to watch again. Taku Furukawa was aided in the animation of the film by Takamitsu Yukawa, who has been the co-animator of most of Furukawa's films since Coffee Break, so credit undoubtedly needs to go to him for helping realize the appealing animation of this film. Furukawa happens to have made a picture book out of this particular story after completing the film.

Calligraphiti (1982) is one of Furukawa's more appealing films. The first thing that comes to mind watching the film is the cine-calligraph films of Norman McLaren. It appears to be a cine-calligraph film of the kind pioneered by Norman McLaren, in which the animator scratches a drawing directly onto each frame of a strip of film rather than drawing on paper and photographing each drawing, but in fact the drawings were drawn onto ordinary paper using an oil-based pen and simply inverted to give the impression of being cine-calligraph, as an homage to Norman McLaren. The film injects some welcome stylistic variety into Furukawa's oeuvre. If one hadn't seen this set, one might be forgiven for assuming that all of Furukawa's films were in the same line-drawn cartoon style for which he is best known. But Furukawa's films are truly diverse in technique, although the line-drawn figure style appears to be his default mode of expression.

I'm not sure if I understand how Portrait (1983) was made, but it appears that a series of five or six polaroids of different individuals going through a particular motion, always from a set distance so that their full figure occupies only the very center of the photo, were taken, and the polaroids were each hand-colored and placed in sequence. The entire film consists of two of these live-action polaroid loops shot side by side on the screen. It's a jarringly abstract piece coming after the kid-friendly Sleepy, but it is quite compelling in its purity of execution and a great example of the abstract-experimental side of Furukawa's Jekyll/Hyde personality. Together with Phenakistiscope, it is also exemplary of how Furukawa's creative thought isn't just limited to animation, but sort of migrates around between the interstices of different media, in this case creating art objects that he in turn uses to create animation.

The Bird (1985) is a short film in which a man attempts to capture a bird. It's done in the patented Furukawa style, and the various contrivances the man devises to capture the bird are amusing, although the film trails off suddenly without any kind of resolution, coming across as somewhat incomplete. The film provides Furukawa with the opportunity to draw some amusing visual devices and create a fun animated chase. Most interesting is perhaps the way the bird is animated using what appears to be a blue and red marker, as opposed to the lines used to animate the human figure. The bird's shape morphs constantly in a manner befitting the flat, amorphous colors used to form its shape, providing an interesting contrast with the line drawings of the human. The sharp black lines and flat colored blobs seem like they exist in a different dimension, making the chase seem like a fascinating portrait in futility, like the pursuit of the firebird. The best animation uses interesting new techniques and new approaches to visuals to express a theme, and this film is a great example of that, with the various ideas suggested by the interaction of the lines and the colored shapes.

Mac The Movie (1985) consists purely of animation doodles made by Furukawa, presumably on a Mac. The visuals are a kind of stroll down memory lane for me, as they bring back memories of one of my first computers, the Macintosh, on which I remember loving to play Lode Runner and doodling in the draw program. Other than the appeal of its antiquated early computer graphics, though, the film has little to recommend it, being merely a series of unconnected doodles without even the raw appeal of Calligraphiti. I'm sure it wasn't made with any sort of pretensions about being a film, though. It should probably just be taken at face value as a bunch of doodles drawn by Taku-san at the dawn of the PC age. Giving a bunch of crappy doodles a deceptively grandiose, epic title seems like the kind of joke the ever-playful Furukawa would play on viewers.

Play Jazz (1987) was also made using a computer drawing program, but has the redeeming quality of conceptual mooring and animated appeal lacking in Mac The Movie. The Jazz of the title and soundtrack pays homage to the title of the painting by Henri Matisse that in the film is subjected to animated transformations; in other words, Furukawa 'playing' (with the painting) 'Jazz'. The film consists of Furukawa improvising on the theme of Matisse's Jazz, making explicit the intriguing parallel improvisatiory nature of the two art forms. One of the things I found myself focusing on while watching the film was the actual lines of pixels. I found it oddly fascinating to observe how the morphing shapes were actually created by the change in length of these very low-resolution lines of lit-up pixels.

Direct Animation (1987) from the same year was made using the same technique as Calligraphiti, in that it is a pseudo-calligraph film made by drawing with a pen very small and photographing it so that it fills up the screen and looks like a caligraph film. This time the film was not inverted, and colors were used. The film is a good compliment to the previous film, in that this time it is purely abstract, making good use of colors and shapes to create a pleasing flow of transforming colors and shapes. It's only a minute long, but it's a beautiful minute, and shows how Furukawa jumps between different forms and styles almost on a whim, whenever he gets an idea for a film he'd like to make. I like his creative stance, which emphasizes spontaneity and variety.

The last film on the set is Tarzan (1990), which is one of his longest and most narratively substantial. The closest comparison is with Speed in terms of its use of drawn figures, clear narrative and satirical story. The film depicts a modern wannabe Tarzan urbanite who seeks out the thrills of the wilds of Africa to slake his hunger for something more raw and real, but finds that the strange creatures who greet him upon his return to the city don't hear the same call of the wild. Up until now, Furukawa's films were animated by him, in part or in whole, but this is the first Furukawa film that was entirely animated by another person - in this case his long-time collaborator Takamitsu Yukawa. The film moves a lot, the color schemes and visual design are pretty, and overall it is an amusing film with numerous of his very New Yorker-style sight gags that shows Furukawa at his most playful. Furukawa is apparently a travel addict, and this film is his travelogue from Kenya, much in the way New York Trip commemorated his trip to New York. He makes a lot of sly observations about the trip, such as quirks of the various nationalities of tourists, with the American flashing their Bart Simpson T-shirts like badges of national pride, and being mugged to purchase trinkets by the locals. I could very much relate to his feelings of despondency upon returning home to the concrete blahness of the city after such an adventure.

Taku Furukawa of course has his own web site and blog, where you can see a lot more art by him. You can see some more images from each of his films on Takun Films Animation Toy Box. For some further reading about Taku Furukawa, I recommend Nishikata Film Review's post on Furukawa's Minna no Uta animation.

To me the ocean of art out there is overwhelming. That's why I focus on animation, not that there isn't a lot of animation out there. But I feel I can at least keep some grasp on it. That's why I rarely talk about artists or manga or whatever. But I have immense respect for the people out there who can wrangle line to create something beautiful with an air of nonchalance. When I see a beautiful line I often think I'd like to see it move. I ran across Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine's lines today and delighted in them. These are the kinds of drawings I enjoy gazing at - quick but instinctive and not labored, with a soft suppleness and lightness of touch, an international spirit, stories that are just open-ended idea bubbles. I like how there is French occasionally, Vietnamese occasionally, Japanese occasionally, etc. And the spare use of orange but otherwise black and shades of gray. I actually find myself more attracted to the manga sensibility of the French. That reminds me, Dogs & Water was wonderful. I'd like to see stories like that told in animation.

It's been just over five years now that I've been writing this blog, so to commemorate that surreal milestone, I thought I'd splurge and share a little embarrassing bit of history - an AMV I made for fun right before I started writing the blog, way before MADs became fashionable. (though the soundtrack is new)

Part 1 / Part 2

The Bunkacho's Media Arts Festival is generally pretty good at rewarding interesting animation artists in Japan, and their awardees are worth tracking down. I just had the chance to see the 'recommended work' film from the 8th annual Bunkacho Media Arts Festival in 2004, Sumito Sakakibara's Kamiya's Correspondence, which was originally made as his graduation film for the Royal College of Art in 2004. Indeed, this was a wonderful film, and I'm glad I was able to postpone enjoying it until now. Watching it was a delectable experience I'd like to repeat in the coming days.

Sakakibara is an international creator, having been born in Japan and raised there until, after graduating from middle school in Urahoro city in Hokkaido, he left to go study in Europe, where he stayed for for 9 years, eventually undertaking studies in animation and a variety of the other visual arts. He then apparently returned to his home town in 2007, where he settled into helping on the family dairy farm. I'm not sure what happened to him afterwards, but at the time he was working on a manga project to document his grandfather's experiences working on his dairy farm in rural Hokkaido. The world would still be a richer place even if Sakakibara had only left behind Kamiya's Correspondence, but a it happens, he made another film entitled Flow that won the grand prize at the Media Arts Festival the next year in 2005, and later he was reported to be working on a third film entitled A Drop of Vermillion Ink as an artist in residence in France, although I don't know what came of that project, which may have been completed in 2007. I would like to find out if he has made any other animated films since then. He is also active as a manga artist and illustrator.

Kamiya's Correspondence feels decidedly Japanese in its delicate sensibility and realistic, detail-oriented approach to the animation - which is not to say it feels like anime, which is doesn't in the slightest. The washed out color palette feels somewhat similar to what Satoru Utsunomiya did in his last few projects, and the lovely rendering of the figures with a minimum of clean lines, formalist layout and lush but delicate full animation remind of Seiichi Hayashi, but both of these are creators with an entirely personal approach that isn't representative of the industry at large. I think this is an excellent example of international experience enriching a creator's work with a certain perspective or aesthetic range that would otherwise be lacking, and is lacking in most domestic creators. It feels international, yet very Japanese.

The first thing that struck me was the superb visual layout sense that Sakakakibara exhibits throughout the entire piece. Everything feels extremely refined and elegant and formal. As if to drive the point home, there are even floor shots in traditional Japanese homes, straight out of Ozu. Every one of the shots in the film is like a gorgeous, tasteful postcard. There are even references to the Choju Giga, and some of the shots of the engawa have a certain angle that seems to reference some of the old Genji Monogatari paintings.

The animation is really wonderful, reined in and elegant but rich and nuanced, and very precise in its detail, without being maniacal or overanimated. It's very spare, but every movement feels magnificent and is exciting to see unfold in its calm beauty. The characters slide through these formal compositions slowly and delicately, their movements rendered with the utmost care and grace, as they were an extension of the serene environs. The animation technique changes a few times to narrate past events, and this is done convincingly. The story told by the visuals is compelling but told in an understated way. The film is filled with moments of warm humor that are well handled. The conclusion is moving, giving this small film a considerable narrative heft for a 7-minute film. For a graduation film, this film feels accomplished and assured, as if it were from the hand of a veteran artist.

I love Sumito Sakakibara's style of animation, so I hope to be able to see his other films some time. I also dearly hope he continues to make films with this sensibility in the future, as Kamiya's Correspondence is a film of rare tenderness and honesty, and stands quite apart from most of the rest of Japanese production in its depiction of real life that is simultaneously more stylized yet more real and authentic feeling. I saw the film on a DVD print on the Best of the British Animation Awards Vol. 6, and this is a film that should definitely only be seen in DVD quality to appreciate the delicate drawings properly. I don't know if the film is available on any other DVDs out there, but I recommend the DVD overall anyway, as it's a great set even besides this film.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming series by Kenji Nakamura, Mid-Air Trapeze (Kuchu Buranko), and not just because it will be nice to have something to watch, although that will have to wait until October. It will be worth the wait, if the team that brought us Mononoke (Kenji Nakamura x Takashi Hashimoto x Toei) live up to all the high expectations I've got of their next project. Interestingly, the material comes from a Naoki-award-winning novel, which is a refreshing change from the usual use of light novels as source material, these being aimed primarily at children and adult children. The Naoki award is Japan's literary award given to new writers. I actually haven't read many of the awardees, but of the few I have, I quite enjoyed punk rocker-turned-literati Ko Machida's books, so if the other awardees are as interesting as he is, then this was a great idea. The Naoki award is surely a great mine of material that could push anime in new directions. I would prefer original material, but some very great work has been done based on source material, and so far Nakamura has the golden touch.

Civilization is more fragile than you think. This simple slide show illustrating some of the situations discussed in the amazing book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which depicts what would happen to the trappings of civilization if humans were to suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, is ten times more compelling than Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. Episodes 2-3 of the latter make little obvious use of the supposed voluminous research that was conducted for the series, so far doing very little to illuminate the consequences of such a disaster. Needless to say, I'm disappointed, as so far the show feels like a terrible waste of a superb opportunity. Instead, we are treated to endless shots of a blank-faced anime character wandering around, being shouted at by cardboard cutouts of human beings. I am probably wrong in criticizing this series, though, because they clearly set out with a goal that was at odds with what I wanted to see, so I should just accept that as the case and see where they go with it. I was quite turned off, however, by the maudlin directing of episode two and horrible production quality and excruciating boredom of both episodes. I sincerely hope that the subsequent episodes become more interesting and I start to like the show, as I do plan on following it. I'm just disappointed because I would love to see this subject matter done justice in some animated/audiovisual form. As it stands I recommend that you read The World Without Us instead of wasting your time with this show.

Speaking of things I'm looking forward to, Mamoru Hosoda's new film Summer Wars comes out pretty soon in Japan. I'm really looking forward to that, particularly (surprise) for the animation, because it sounds even better than his last film. It's got talented ex-Telecom animator Hiroyuki Aoyama doing the animation character designs and acting as one of the four sakkans. There are a ton of characters across the entire age range in the film, so it will be interesting to see how they're all made to move differently in line with their age and personality. Aoyama is good at nuanced character animation. Most of all, though, to be honest, it's the action scenes I'm looking forward to, because Toei animator Tatsuzo Nishita is the action sakkan, and I adore his style of action animation. It's an unusual post, and it was clearly granted to him because of his talent with action. It's a treat to be able to see a whole movie filled with his action animation. Apparently you can watch the first five minutes of the film online on the official website, but I'm not going to watch it. I'm going to wait to see the whole thing.

Something I've always liked in animation is the notion of restrictions. Animation itself seems to impose certain inherent restrictions. Sometimes, more interesting results can be achieved when a set of restrictions are imposed. For example, the way Norman McLaren made a film entirely out of vertical lines scrolling back and forth. (AND one with just horizontal lines) Another example is Kiyoshi Nishimoto's Laughing Moon (2000), in which an entire short film is made by creative reconfiguration of a set of 12 blocks. I haven't been able to find the latter online, but it is available on a DVD from the British Animation Awards. I think having some sort of restriction maybe forces you to be more creative with the available materials, and also focuses the viewer's attention on that creativity by eliminating distractions. Pixel Film by Garth+Ginny is a cute, fun example of this. I like how they've managed to make an appealing film using (presumably) only 50x50 pixels. The material being restricted here is the information resolution. What's the smallest resolution at which a compelling film could be made?

This film is part of a wave of creative work being done in the 8-bit and 16-bit format, both in graphics and music. Stemming partly from nostalgia for the early video game culture of the Atari, Nintendo and other game systems of my youth, people all over the world today are using retro video game equipment to make videos and music, and making it available online for free in user communities like the 8-Bit Collective, which is one of the most vibrant user-driven artist communities I've run across. They are creating art that deliberately embraces the limitations imposed by antiquated technology. To some (including me), a significant part of the appeal of this music is nostalgia for the familiar clipped and pure sounds created by the microchips in these old technologies. Many of the creators active in the genre are too young to have experienced all that as kids, though. For them, and, I believe, most of the great artists working in the genre, called chiptune, it's more than that. Everyone is different, so the motivation of the people making the music is as varied as the music is, but I think one of the fundamental appeals of using retro equipment like this is the creative challenge of restriction; of having to use a limited range of channels and sounds to create a compelling piece of music. That, and the empowerment of appropriating a technology and re-visioning it towards your own creative ends.

I myself had of course heard a lot of chiptune music in my youth without realizing it, and have fond memories of those games and their soundtracks that transported me to faraway lands. Today's chiptune is a direct extension of the music of these games in sound, spirit and execution. There are a huge number of artists active, some of whom are of very high caliber. Even the stuff of lesser caliber is usually always enjoyable. There's something about the crisp, precise chiptune sound that makes the music always fresh and lively. The music itself is extremely varied, since we're talking about a method here and not a style(?). Some of it is peppy and melodic, some has a driving electro beat, some has fast complex rhythms, some constantly changing, some is a symphonic landscape. If you liked the music of Omodaka's Kokiriko Bushi, you might like to listen to some more chiptune. Omodaka is definitely near the top of the pile, but the chiptune community is huge and has many great artists, and it's constantly evolving. It feels like a music that's really fresh and in its prime.

I've become kind of scary-obsessed with the stuff ever since I discovered it through the music of Chinese chiptuner sulumi, two of whose albums I found in a music store in Beijing one year ago. To convey the extent of my scary-obsession, and hopefully spread the infection to others, I shall confer some of my acquired wisdom. Here are a few good places to start for anyone who likes this stuff and wants to hear more.

♦ Compilations: The Crunchy Records Compilation, 8-bit collective compilation and Sea of Ice are a great place to start to get an overview of the genre by some of its best artists.

♦ Net labels: 8bitpeoples and II (Pause) have a back-catalog of great albums by chiptunes' best and are regularly updated.

♦ Albums: Shnabubula's Controller 1 was the revelation of my chiptuned life.

♦ Some 8bc artists: PDF Format, Blitz Lunar, Henryhomesweet, Zabutom

♦ Artists:

◊ Shnabubula creates thrilling virtuoso pieces that are whirlwinds of inventive melody and rhythm. Shnabubula is possibly the most musically gifted chiptune artist I've heard. Check out his keyboard chops.

◊ Disasterpeace is the chiptune artist who elevated chiptune to art with his epic musical canvases where the rhythm and melody are constantly evolving. The label he founded, II (Pause Music), is taking chiptune to the next level. (8bc account)

◊ Little-Scale is undoubtedly one of the true geniuses of chiptune, taking an intellectual approach to the creation of music by delving into algorithm-controlled music-creation and hacking the old technologies in intriguing ways to come up with new sounds. (Music, Blog)

◊ Goto80 is one of the mainstays of the chiptune community, a wildly prolific artist who is constantly putting out every manner of sonic exploration. His albums and songs are a bit hard to find because they're all over the place, but he is an incredible artist who creates music that is truly alive in its experimentation. (Blog)

◊ Aleksi Eeben is the iconoclast of online electronic music. I don't know if he qualifies as true chiptune, but he is too interesting to leave out. He creates music with a melodic sensibility that is like nothing else out there. He may not be for everybody, but he is a true original and I never tire of listening to his music. (all six of his albums for free download)

♦ Songs:

◊ Shnabubula: Dueling Consoles
◊ Fighter X: Hypergiant
◊ Wiklund: Fantasy Flight
◊ Venn & Euler: Wagering Lights
◊ Disasterpeace: Death Satellite Evasion
◊ Rabato: Ass Slap
◊ PDF Format: Walrus Report
◊ Malmen: Chips Doodles
◊ Zabutom: Retardation!
◊ Goto80: Midivsimperial
◊ Grandma: Strawberry Rhubarb Oppai
◊ Syphus: Peskimo
◊ Sulumi: Trembling Stars

A documentary on chiptune came out recently entitled Reformat the Planet, and right now I'm really hoping it will be coming to this year's Vancouver International Film Festival two months from now.

To close on a more OT note, I've been on the lookout for good chiptune music videos for months now, but I have yet to find one that is a true standout as a music video besides Omodaka's Kokiriko Bushi. The promo video for Saitone's Overlapping Spiral is one of the more decent ones I've found, while the video for
Goto80's Polycanyon is representative of the trend in the chiptune community to use 8-bit graphics to provide the video accompaniment to their music. Otherwise, I've found that most of the chiptune videos, like the one for Meneo's Papi, tend to be amusing but not that compelling as music videos.

Patrick Bokanowski's L'Ange is one of the great masterpieces of filmmaking of the last half century. If Oscars were given out for experimental films, it would surely have taken the award in 1982, when after 5 years of filming and editing Patrick finally unleashed this magisterial visual feast upon audiences. Although I don't know how much playtime the film actually got in France. Full-length feature it may be - a rarity in true experimental filmmaking - it is, however, as far as can be from a conventional narrative film, and bears comparison to few other films of its length. Yet its power, visual beauty and conceptual ingenuity are unparalleled, and more than 25 years since its release it still shines on as a beacon of the unexplored possibilities of the cinema. For a film making copious use of the special effects technology of its time, the magical images of L'Ange don't feel dated. They feel of no time. Bokanowski's magnum opus simultaneously pays homage to the atmosphere and anticipation of the early days of cinema and points towards an unknown future. More than ever today, I feel, this film is invaluable - even if it serves merely as a shock to the system to show us something that goes against all of the notions of moviemaking to which we've grown accustomed.

It was back in 2002 when this film ravished my innocent brain. I clearly remember renting the Japanese laserdisc on one of my frequent hunting expeditions for odd and unusual films to Seattle's legendary Scarecrow Video. It was thanks to them that I discovered L'Ange. And it was, oddly enough, the Japanese who seem to have been the first to make the film available in consumer format. Famously, there was a tiny cinema in Tokyo that, out of sheer love of the film or some fierce sense of conviction of the film's importance, screened L'Ange every night for about ten years in the 1990s. I don't know how many times I've discovered a great animator through the Japanese. If they hadn't released a DVD of Florence Milhaile's films, I probably would still not know about her work.

In any case, I remember being mostly just baffled and bewildered watching the film, and even dozing off for a little bit. But unlike many experimental films I've sampled over the years, I got kind of excited every time I thought about the film. It was one of those rare experiences in the movies when you've been privy to something truly new that isn't likely to catch on and become worn into the ground as a new fad. To me at least, seeing new things has been one of my prime motivators in watching the movies, and this movie was like nothing else I'd ever seen. I think that impact is part of where the film's importance lies. The feat of having created a cohesive and hugely compelling work of art completely shunning narrative in the long format is a major achievement. And the film doesn't just feel like a string of random experimental pieces, despite being episodic in format. Continuity is conveyed in a variety of ways, primarily so thematic unity around the concept of repetition. The superb cut-up music by Patrick's wife Michele mirrors Patrick's sliced-up sequences in its subtly varying layers of spliced recordings from traditional instruments like the cello - old sounds made to sound modern.

I've been waiting for this film to be released on DVD so that I could re-experience the film in its full glory. Clips have been available on Youtube, but this is not a film that can be appreciated badly compressed. It is in fact almost meaningless to watch if it is not in a high quality transfer, the images are manipulated so precisely and the effect often so delicate. Which is why I was delighted to learn that the British Animation Awards, who prior to this released a number of DVDs featuring great short animation not only from Britain but around the world, were planning on releasing both L'Ange and Patrick's other short films. Patrick made short films both before and after, L'Ange being sort of his summum opus. The BAA have done a wonderful job with the DVD. It's affordable, contains a very nice making shot back in 78-79 as well as an enlightening interview with Michele, and is internationally accessible, as it can be ordered in both NTSC or PAL and comes on a region-free DVD. There is no longer anything preventing a viewer from appreciating L'Ange in high quality as it was intended to be seen, any time, in the comfort of his or her own home, and that is pretty incredible. All you connoisseurs of edgy cinema out there should do yourselves a favor and support the BAA's bravery by discovering L'Ange.

L'Ange is interesting from an animation standpoint, too. Patrick's genius is the all-encompassing nature of his visual creativity. He dreams up wild images, and devises never-before-seen ways of bringing his images to life. A single sequence in L'Ange, say the stairwell sequence, for example, might include a section of constructed stairs, followed by an empty section that in the studio would be filled in with a trompe-l'oeil drawing of stairs bending in an impossible direction, followed by an actor at the top waving hello, which would be shot and then be manipulated in-studio to achieve the perfect balance of light and shadow. In another sequence, we see what appears to be an engraving from the renaissance of a painter squatting before a proto-camera-like-instrument, sizing up a draped model sitting at the foot of a low-lying table. Suddenly the painter's arm inches forward, and we realize that the image is a real one, meticulously staged and painted and processed to seem like an engraving. In another sequence, beams of light fade in and out in a continuous procession, illuminating a set of stairwells on which figures stand motionless, caught in the act of ascending or descending. They could be real, or they could be puppets, or the entire thing could be animated. L'Ange blurs the boundaries between the animated and the real, creating atmospheres we've never seen before and ingeniously devised illusions that are alternately ravishingly beautiful, comical and otherworldly.

L'Ange actually strikes me as being primarily animated, in spite of most of the scenes having been filmed with live actors and sets. The reason is that the shot footage serves merely as an element that is manipulated and rearranged in the studio, much as an animator might study a sequence of live-action and pick out certain parts to use to animate a character's movement. Patrick's virtuosic editing is the vehicle that creates the film's texture. Many of the sequences have such a vast number of cuts as to seem almost subliminal in effect, approaching animation frame rates. The concepts for each of the sequences in the film have their origin in a visual idea that Patrick sketched out ahead of time, much like conceptual sketches in animation, and the final images throughout seem to exist on the plane of painting or art photography rather than that of an ordinary movie.

The variety of techniques and textures in each of the sequences give the film an illusion of heterogeneity belying its strong thematic unity. There is no narrative, but throughout you sense various themes being mulled over from various different perspectives, both literally in terms of the different camera angles and zooms and so on, and in terms of the actual nature of the repetition - sometimes a person repeating an action, sometimes light diffusing through different arrangements of lenses. The primary theme is repetition. A figure will be pictured going through a single motion, over and over again, from a sampling of the infinite number of possible angles and views from which it could be seen.

The very basic nature of the actions depicted - a character walking across a room with a jug of milk, a man lunging at a suspended doll with a sword - brings to mind Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering sequences of proto-cinema, which themselves shed light on the relationship of photography to motion with their world-changing sequences of photographs of actors going through mundane actions. When looped, they seem caught, like Patrick's characters, in some infernal warp in the time-space continuum, doomed to walk up an endless staircase for eternity. The endless procession of the staircase is one of the film's central images, and perhaps its inspiration came, albeit subconsciously, from Muybridge. Several years later Marcel Duchamp created a painterly expression of time in the nude descending the stairs. Bokanowski closes the loop by creating actual moving images that seem similar in spirit to Marcel Duchamp's artistic interpretation of Muybridge's revelation.

A while back I was asked if there were any good collections of key animation that could be bought online. A lot of books have been put out, but most of those went out of print very quickly, and to find them now you'd have to buy them second-hand from an auction site like Yahoo! Japan Auctions. Here's a few that are still in print:

Denno Coil
GITS: SAC (1) (2)
Guren Lagan (1) (2) (3) (Movie)
Eva 1.0

There are actually plenty of others for recent TV series, but the ones above are among the few that are of interest from an animation standpoint. The Denno Coil book I recommend wholeheartedly. It is very big and, needless to say, contains lots of great animation work by some of the best animators in the industry, much of which I was seeing for the first time in the raw. Genga books are really great for getting a better sense of how it is that animators differ from one another, as looking at the actual drawings immediately makes it obvious how different animators differ in terms of line and form. My only beef with the book, and with all genga books that I've seen actually, is that they don't name the animator for each shot, so you're still left guessing. I haven't gotten the Guren Lagan books yet, but there was tons of great work in there, so I'm very tempted to.

Out of print but good if you can find:

A whole slew of Eva books
Nadia
FLCL
Dead Leaves
Takaaki Wada

I have the Wada book, and it's a very nice book. Books focused on one animator like this are wonderful, and I wish more were available. There's nothing better for learning how to identify an animator. The Nadia book, like most of Gainax's books, is quite nice and contains the time sheets for the more complicated shots, which is very nice. The only problem again is no attributions.

You can also find a ton of books if you search for 原画集 gengashu (key animation collection) on Yahoo! Japan Auctions. Unfortunately, most of the results are for bishojo-type adult books or for TV series of little animation interest, as "gengashu" also happens to be the generic term for art book, so you really have to search hard to find anything of interest. But fanzines collecting key animations by good animators are indeed put out every year, and you can find these at Comike, which is presumably where most of the items up for sale here came from. Hiroyuki Imaishi, for example, has long been known for putting out genga collections of his own work, and he seems to still be doing it, having hit at least volume 10 so far. Would be nice to see these collected and published for real and available on Amazon. You've got the fans now, Imaishi. You can also find collections for older series like Vifam and Gundam Z made by avid fans, as well as collections of genga by younger animators like Fumiaki Kota. I'd particularly like to get the book of the latter's key animation, as he's one of the more interesting younger faces. I'm sure there's a ton of other good little collections like this, as this is merely a sampling of what I found upon quick perusal. (just remember you have to be in Japan to bid on most of these)

Vifam
Gundam Z & ZZ
Bubblegum Crisis
Hiroyuki Imaishi collection no. 9
Re: Cutie Honey op/ep 1 (also published by Hiroyuki Imaishi himself)
Fractal (genga by Kota Fumiaki, Toru Yoshida, et al. on various shows)
Fumiaki Kota

I should also mention that the Roman Album books for the Ghibli films contain a smattering of genga. (although not by any means a large number - that is something Ghibli should rectify by putting out genga books like Gainax does) One thing I really liked on the Kemonozume DVD box set was a collection of genga that you could click through. I wish this would be done consistently for series with good animation.

As people digest the news, we're seeing more posts and things about Yoshinori Kanada's recent passing, and as I expected, that includes more videos being uploaded covering his work. A nice new video was just uploaded containing extended clips from five key series Kanada worked on in the late 70s, in chronological order: a clip from an episode of Gaiking (1976), a clip from the same episode of Zambot 3 (1977) I mentioned yesterday, a clip from ep 2 of Daitarn 3 (1978), and a longer and better-quality clip from the ep of Don De La Mancha (1980) that I linked. It gives a good slice of some of his best work of this period, and shows his evolution over the years towards even freer forms and richer and wilder movement. One example is the background animation. Birth is rightly famous for its scads of lively background animation. In this sequence of clips you gradually see background animation becoming more and more prominent, culminating with the full-fledged background animation of Don De La Mancha. It wasn't long after this that Urusei Yatsura began broadcasting, and a young Masahito Yamashita picked up Kanada's torch and created some of the wildest background animation sequences of this era. Kanada was probably one of the first ones to make an art of background animation, to turn a background animation sequence into a platform for showing off his animation skills, and to really go crazy with the animation. You feel watching the sequence that he was having as much fun animating it as it is for us to watch. I also like that the clip covers just the TV work he did over this period, as I find Kanada's work more lively in the TV format. His movie work is good in that it's more worked, but it's also more constrained and less spontaneous.

Someone also uploaded the Kanada episode of the NHK TV program Anime Yawa, which is great if you understand Japanese. (no subs) Guests include Takashi Murakami and Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Takashi Murakami talks about Kanada's influence on him, showing one of his art books in which stills from Kanada's work are juxtaposed side-by-side with Murakami's paintings. I like Murakami's positing that single stills of Kanada's intricately gnarled fire dragon or other effects can be taken apart and still stand on their own legs for their abstract beauty and the latent energy they emanate. That's an aspect that seems to have been inherited, consciously or not, by animators like Shinya Ohira - the compelling paradox of animation that is beautiful art in motion as well as frame-by-frame (in an abstract sense quite apart from the question of resemblance to a deliberately designed character).

Zambot 3 is a classic example of a decent series dragged down by bad animation. It's easily the worst animated of the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino shows. And yet, it rises above the shoddy drawings and movement to be one of his best pieces due to the good directing, hard-edged story and surprise ending, which were a milestone in the day and certainly influenced a a number of popular shows in later years. It's not that I blame the animators, although many of them probably weren't that talented. None of the episodes had an animation director (sakkan), and many of them were drawn by a single person, presumably in about two hours. The series has some touchingly dramatic moments thanks to Tomino's storyboard, but their impact is unfortunately lessened by the crude animation.

Standing out dramatically amongst this cavalcade of botchery are the episodes with animation by Yoshinori Kanada - 5, 10, 16 and 22. The most notable of these in terms of the animation, among other reasons, is episode 16, the infamous "human bomb" episode, which is still shocking even seen today. If you only see one episode, it should be episode 16, because it was only animated by two people - Yoshinori Kanada and Kazuo Tomisawa - whereas these two are joined by Osamu Nabeshima and Masakatsu Iijima in the other episodes. It's the episode with the most distilled essence of Kanada in the series, or of anything I've seen by Kanada from this period. (his work on Gaiking from a year earlier in 1976 is also among his best and worth checking out)

Kazuo Tomisawa had worked as an inbetweener on an episode of Dokonjo Gaeru with key animation by Kanada a year or two before. The credits in Zambot only say "animation", without splitting it into key and inbetween, so I'm not sure what the breakdown is - whether Kanada drew the keys and Tomisawa inbetweened, or they both just drew straight animation - but I'm willing to bet that it's more the former, because the episode looks and feels like it was entirely drawn by Kanada.

This episode is one of the best episodes to watch to get a sense of what Kanada's style was like in the mid-70s period, when he was already starting to develop his personal style and really having fun with the TV work, but hadn't quite reached full maturity. The drawings are rough and quick like most episodes, as befitting uncorrected animation, but the facial expressions and poses are always rendered skilfully rather than sloppily as in other episodes, and more than anything, there's lots of fun little movements and gags littered everywhere.

This episode happens to contain one of my favorite sequences of animation by Kanada - this one. I love this sequence because of its combination of dynamic action with bold line work and quick cutting. The timing and choreography of the movement here shows what it was that set Kanada apart from the other animators of his day. He had an instinct for creating motion that felt exciting to watch, and his animation communicates expressly via movement and drawing. His movements and drawings were always doing something, and were a delight to watch, even when they weren't particularly highly worked. Kanada could do a really quick and sloppy drawing that felt spot-on and was absolutely hilarious. Most animators in TV anime in the 70s used limited repeats and jumps of the kind that Kanada uses, but none of them quite seemed to know how to make them interesting and fun until Kanada showed the way.

It's instructive to compare the movement and drawings of this episode with the other episodes. It will show you immediately what I'm talking about. You don't see the characters in the other episodes making the kind of amusing faces and little movements you see them doing here. An example is this shot of the robot swinging the sword, in which he inserts lots of drawings with a zippy timing that makes it fun to watch and interesting as animation, followed by a funny pregnant pause before the laser swats him away. It's a world apart from the stiff, boring animation of the robot battles in the rest of the series. It's an innocuous shot, but it distills the essence of Kanada's innovation - the attitude of having fun with the work, and of turning what many animators seemed to treat as rote drudgery of having to churn out TV animation quickly and badly into an opportunity for personal expression and fun. Kanada showed that even limited animation could be an art form. Kanada's masterful manipulation of timing and drawing developed over the course of the early 70s to me exemplifies Japan's unique contribution to animation.

It's a sad day for the world of animation. One of the best and most influential animators of the last 30 years in commercial Japanese animation has reportedly passed away at the age of 57. The news comes from Anido. I don't know how many times I've written about Yoshinori Kanada in these pages. It's not just that I loved his inimitable and delightful work; he was simply that important and influential, and anime would look and move differently today if he hadn't existed. He was really the linchpin figure of the last 30 years in many ways. So many people either became animators because of him or were influenced by him in anime, it's almost impossible to quantify who he influenced or in what way he was an influence. Something like Guren Lagan would be unthinkable without him. Aside from his influence, though, he wasn't just a historical relic. He was still putting out interesting pieces of animation every once in a while, and I was always happy in the knowledge that we could expect continue to see the occasional piece from him. Far from being a distant echo of his past work, he was continuing to develop his trademark style. In many ways, his work was better than ever, as witness the freewheeling awesomeness of the Hanjuku Eiyu 4 game opening. He had numerous very talented followers, but to me, Kanada was always #1. Nobody else could nail that style of animation like the man who invented it, and I never tired of watching his work, old or new. I'm deeply saddened by the thought that we'll never get to see another new piece of Kanada animation. RIP, Yoshinori Kanada.

Here are some related posts.

Karisuma Animators bio
Happy Birthday, Yoshinori Kanada
The Kanada School
Birth
Kanada revisits Gaiking

Here are some Youtube vids featuring his work:

Luckyman opening 1
Luckyman opening 2
Scenes by Kanada from the OVA Download
Hanjuku Eiyu 3D game opening
AMV for Kanada's magnum opus, Birth
Unusual line animation sequence from movie Talking Head
Kanada's animation from the climax of Genma Taisen
A half episode of Plawres Sanshiro by Kanada

On NicoVideo there are two videos collecting opening/ending sequences drawn by him (early ones in full, later ones obviously in part):
One
Two

And here's a short clip from one of Kanada's best pieces, episode 6 of Don De La Mancha.

The first episode of Bones' new show Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 went over well with me. The directing and animation were solid and left a strong impression, without needing to resort to any sort of silly antics or extravagantly animated action. It stuck to a very even and carefully poised tone throughout. In that sense it reminded me of Mamoru Hosoda's first Digimon film - the short one in which we see the big brother and little sister wandering around Tokyo alone. The situation was similar, of course, with this time the big sister chaperoning the little brother, but more than that it was the approach to the directing that struck as similar. I don't recall seeing such an approach elsewhere since Hosoda. Denno Coil had that same feeling of calmly depicting the reality of children in the streets, but it was different, with more antics, more sci-fi, not that it wasn't massively successful and fun at what it did. It's something I've been wanting to see more of in anime generally - the act of deliberately sidestepping of all the overacting, the implausible reactions, the stereotypical facial expressions and so on that you only find in anime but that have become so commonplace as to virtually become synonymous with anime, the lingua franca of the industry. What I felt watching this first episode was that it was refreshing and liberating to see an episode that didn't feel the need to insert all sorts of extraneous gags, misadventures, sweat drops, little swirls twirling on the screen, and similar tools that have become secondhand. I liked Osamu Kobayashi's Beck, among other reasons, because it deliberately avoided such things. I think doing so helped a lot in making the characters more easy to relate to, at least for me. The rest of the series will not have the wonderful feeling of calm reality of this episode, I suppose, and the dramatic reasons why this episode needed to be this way are obvious (establishing the blessing of calm normalcy to which the girl is oblivious, and which is about to vanish abruptly), but it was still a pleasing episode and I'm glad it exists. I think it's testament to how believable the situation felt in comparison with most anime that when the remote-controlled robots came out I was a little disappointed that they had to insert an element that felt like a tired anime cliche into an otherwise fine episode. I'd like to see an episode completely devoid of such material. I was reminded of my disappointment when suddenly giant walking robots came into the picture in the otherwise comparatively real-word-based Flag.

The concept may not be particularly original, and may have been depicted any number of times on the big screen, but it's nice to see an anime take on it, and I'm curious to see where they take it. I hesitate on the one hand because the concept seems to underestimate children's ability to understand the world around them and appreciate how good they've got it, and comes across as kind of preachy. It seems like every generation bemoans its youth as disaffected and spoiled. But I don't doubt this generation faces its unique issues, and I find that the little girl's plight feels universal to a extent - I'm sure there have been times in everyone's life when as a child you felt the way the girl does in this episode, at least to an extent (maybe not wishing everything would be destroyed). I know there was a long period in my childhood when I was an ungrateful brat who didn't appreciate the loving family he had. That part of the episode was particularly convincing and successful - all of the little irritations that seem inconsequential taken one by one but that, over time, pile up and can tear a sensitive child to shreds. I know that feeling all too well, and I give major kudos to the director for pulling off that aspect of the episode successfully without merely making the child seem like an irritating anime character. Her behavior and reactions are fairly believable for a child. The only thing that I felt was unnecessary was timing the earthquake precisely at the moment of her text-message. It felt silly and needlessly confusing, as if it were foreboding that everything we're about to see is in fact merely a dream or an illusion, which only lessens the potential impact of the situation. I think it was a good idea to make this series, though, and director Masaki Tachibana seems to have been a good choice of first director. Depicting such a scenario, and putting in the effort Bones has to make it convincingly real enough to have the intended effect (which is obviously crucial in this case - otherwise who cares? it's just anime), seems worthwhile because it's compelling material that is grounded in reality, and it's a refreshing change from the type of material that has come to dominate the industry.

I mostly enjoyed the designs and animation, not despite but because there wasn't anything particularly extravagant in the animation. Instead, they kept everything low-key. I like that they didn't go overboard in attempting to make the animation realistic. I've noticed in some shows or animators a misconception that adding lots of unnecessary movement will automatically make the character feel more alive, when mostly if not done well it just feels ludicrous and annoying. The realism here seems achieved by the measured pacing, excellent layouts and subdued character acting. I don't know many of the animators, other than that they're names I've seen here and there in recent anime, but most of the animation feels nice; it feels apropos. I wish the girl had had a slightly more realistic design, but overall I really like the general direction of giving the kids non-cute designs. Note only one white highlight in the eyes. I wish they had opted out on even it, but I guess it was the least they had to put in to not seem lifeless. I particularly liked the drawings of the passengers on the train, and felt like that's what I'd like to see more of. I think the main characters have to be made more appealing and generic, and the real potential comes out in the side-characters. I remember Koichi Arai drew alot of really cool-looking side-characters in 3x3 Eyes. Norio Matsumoto, too, drew some great side-characters in one of his clips. Animators sometimes do much more interesting work when they're not drawing the main characters. Actually, the animation also reminded me of Digimon - that pared down style, with that particular shape to the face and eyes. Of course, a lot of children's anime adopt this particular look to appeal to children. I think it's possible to use the pared down look to be both appealing and realistic, and that was achieved to an extent here, but not quite enough. If it doesn't have at least some character it just comes across as bland.

I received my Tadanari Okamoto box set on the 24th, and I've been sampling films here and there slowly, to drag out the pleasure. I'll probably write a post later about the films I haven't seen, as there are so many. Okamoto's subjects may not necessarily be oriented towards adults or striving overtly for artistic effect, but I find that despite that his films are consistently deep, every shot consistently inventive, with care and love put into every bit of animation, spare though it may be. I find nothing's wasted, and every shot of every film is a delight. He's got that rate lightness of touch that conceals great wisdom.

Japan has a lot of good talent working in animation. Most people just don't know it, because without knowing what you're looking for, it's hard to locate the good work amongst the flood of productions released every year. In Japan, as anywhere, the nature of this talent is multifaceted. The focus of this blog, of course, has been mostly on talented animators, though I've also quite often talked about directors, artists, etc. who caught my eye. (I talk about basically anyone who I feel is doing standout work.) But talent is speckled around in every facet of production in anime. From one project to the next, you might find some talented people doing good work in one or another aspect of the production, while you might not be particularly satisfied with the whole. Ideally, the talent will come together to realize a project in which every aspect of the production is top-notch, creating a perfect whole.

Genius Party, a two-part omnibus of animated shorts from Japan's Studio 4C, strikes me as being an effort to bring together some of the best representatives of talent in Japanese animation under one roof to show off the multifaceted nature, and the unique range of predilections, of animated talent in Japan. Although my own personal assessment of each particular film varies, as I feel that some are more successful than others, I think the set achieves the goal of showcasing, to whatever extent is possible within the span of a two-plus-hour omnibus, a fairly broad swath of the variety of talent that exists in commercial Japanese animation. It's mainly for this reason that I think the set is not only successful, but important - because it represents an effort to bring attention to the existence of this multifaceted array of talent, and to get it to work together in a way that truly does it justice and allows it to achieve its true potential, rather than allowing the talent out there to be diffused over the vast galaxy of industry productions. I think that it's important to recognize talent in this way by singling out what makes it special, and to me that is one of the functions of this project.

There are various approaches as to how to go about doing this, but Genius Party is the most prominent such project in many years. Its most obvious predecessor is A.P.P.P.'s 1987 omnibus Robot Carnival, which came along at the tail end of a decade in which the anime industry rewired itself into a more creator-centric mindset, with the name value of talented creators like Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Dezaki becoming the driving force behind projects. Genius Party seems to pick up that torch, spotlighting the new generation of talented creators, but allowing them complete freedom this time around, rather than being bound to any particular theme or style.

There is an even more direct and intentional way in which the two films are connected: Atsuko Fukushima, who animated the opening sequence of Genius Party, animated the opening and ending sequences of Robot Carnival. The same year as Robot Carnival, Madhouse released a three-part omnibus entitled Manie Manie: Labyrinth Tales. A few years later, Studio 4C similarly released a three-part omnibus entitled Memories. Each of these omnibuses features some of the best work by many of the creators involved. Of course, there are innumerable examples of the omnibus form outside of Japan, and the approach to the anthology can vary dramatically in both intent and style of execution.

I think this focus on highlighting creators and allowing them to do work in the mode best suited to their talents has long been one of Studio 4C's defining traits, and fortes. It's this mindset that resulted in the creation of my own favorite animated movie, Mind Game, in which a talented animator who had never directed a film before was given the opportunity to direct his first film based on the merit of his past work, and based on the gamble that his particular talents would be a match for the material in question, and the results were spectacular.

Studio 4C has left behind any number of other projects of different lengths and styles that are clearly endowed of that mindset. So Studio 4C seems ideally suited to finally bring to the world a new omnibus that really represents the best of the best of Japanese talent to the world, because that seems to have been their driving purpose in many ways from the beginning. In that sense, Studio 4C acts more like a nexus of talent for this project, rather than this being a showcase of a particular studio's talent. Although of course, a good proportion of the staff involved, including several of the directors, are 4C staff. I would certainly have come up with a different selection of directors if I were putting together such a set, but it's a representative selection in its own way. (open question to readers - who would you have liked to have seen make a short here who wasn't invited?)

Another thing that this project seems to drive home to the viewer is that, in animation, talent comes in many forms. It can be in the animation, the directing, the art, the CGI - you name it. Genius Party is interesting because it gathers together talent in various fields, and gets them each to make a film. As a result, each of the films have different approaches that arise from the particular nature of their talent. For example, flamboyantly individualistic animator Shinya Ohira's film is all about the exhilaration of animated movement, whereas art director Shinji Kimura's film is more about the fantastic mood created by his evocative art, and director Shinichiro Watanabe's film is more about creating a pregnant atmosphere and eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.

Studio 4C goes into considerable detail about the production of each short in the extras on the DVD set and in accompanying publications. The coverage is by no means limited to the directors. Every aspect of each production is covered, revealing how the production environment of each film was dramatically different due to the working style of the creators and their material. Besides shedding some welcome light on the working methods of some of Japan's best talent, more fundamentally, the broad-ranging nature of the coverage illuminates the unique nature of each creator, and the considerable expressive freedom afforded by the medium of animation.

I get the impression that this is where the word genius in the title fits in. I think what they meant by 'genius party' was really 'talent celebration' - as in, a celebration of the many forms of talent in Japanese animation. It was an unfortunate choice of words, as the wording makes you think they're calling the directors of the shorts geniuses, and nothing is more laughable than self-proclaimed genius. But actually, in many of the interviews with the directors, they go out of their way to make the caveat that they by no means consider themselves geniuses. I think most of the directors here are extremely talented - some of them even what I might quality as downright effing brilliant - and they each have a genius for what they do, and in that sense the word fits. If you go back to the root meaning of the term genius, it's more of a general term for the innate skills that each of us has. The Webster definition puts it thus:

The peculiar structure of mind with which each individual is endowed by nature; that disposition or aptitude of mind which is peculiar to each man, and which qualifies him for certain kinds of action or special success in any pursuit; special taste, inclination, or disposition; as, a genius for history, for poetry, or painting.

I look at Genius Party in the light of this definition: as a celebration of the unique talent lying dormant within each of us, rather than an elitist attempt to demarcate a set of directors as geniuses.

And genius in animation isn't necessarily about being flamboyantly individualistic. That's a narrow definition of the concept. Some of the films in the set are stylized or animated in a way quite different from most anime, while some have a more conventional anime aesthetic. It's more about doing something well in a way that only you can do it - which is one of the few running threads throughout the 12 wildly divergent short films that happen to sit side by side under the banner of Genius Party.

One of the things I feel from this set is a sense of community. Animation in Japan has something unique at the present time: a group of artists who are flourishing and developing in a way that seems uniquely informed by their own history, as opposed to global trends. Many of these artists have worked together on the same projects in the past, and there has undoubtedly been a lot of mutual influencing over the years. It feels like a self-contained artistic culture. This set comes across as a snapshot of this very particular community of human creation, at its best. There is a certain base aesthetic that can be said to underlie most of the films, but I think the impression that most general audiences would come away with is the sheer variety of the set. Every film is very different, attesting to the way the Japanese animation industry has nurtured some truly individualistic creators over the last few decades in the shadow of the vast majority of anime production. That's something to be celebrated, and that's exactly what this set does.

I think the thing that sets this omnibus apart is not some kind of superficial stylistic difference, or that the content is more cutting edge or something. Several of the pieces were in a style I wouldn't normally associate with Studio 4C. It's the underlying conception driving the project - to give industry animators a rare chance to create what they want for once - that seems to give Genius Party its character. Such a stance is an inversion of the conventional procedure in commercial animation, where 'in the beginning is the project', and after is the staff, which has to adapt itself to the project at hand. I'm not saying it's a bad method - real pros should undoubtedly be able to pride themselves on being able to handle different commissions. But it's important to have an outlet from the conventions on occasion to allow talent to really express themselves. Genius Party, then, is unique because it's basically putting commercial animators in an indie framework, and seeing what they can do. The results are interesting in this sense, showing that some animators, even in a framework of total freedom, remain tied to the conventions of commercial Japanese animation or their own style that they have developed over the years, while others explore a new direction for them and create something they would never have the opportunity to create in a commercial environment.

Without further ado, here is a rundown of my impressions on each piece.

Genius Party ~ Atsuko Fukushima

Kicking off the party is an eponymous opener by Atsuko Fukushima, one of the animator legends of the last two decades or so in Japan. Fukushima has been anything but prolific since creating the masterful animation in Labyrinth Labyrinthos, which opened Manie Manie: Labyrinth Tales, and the opening and closing segments of Robot Carnival in the late 80s. One of the rare more recent pieces in which her style comes through is Jack and the Beanstalk. It's wonderful to finally see another piece from her in her own unique style - especially here, as her prior work sort of embodies the whole spirit of the endeavor, with its fertile imagination backed up by solid animation skills, and the set would have been incomplete without her presence.

Her short piece succinctly evokes the themes of the project: imagination, creativity, and inspiration. Visually, the piece is one of the most satisfying in the set. The images are lush and highly worked, the movement throughout rich and exciting. The drawings achieves a very handmade look due the considerable effort that was put into transferring the feeling of the pencil-drawn keys into the final product. The combination of CGI with hand-drawn animation is seamless and achieves a beautiful effect. The interaction of the creatures is lovingly portrayed in the little details of their behavior, convincing you of the veracity of mysterious natural laws at work.

But more importantly, the piece is formally elegant and works on several levels. What at first sight looks like a nature program about the mating rituals of some strange creatures on an imaginary alien planet, gradually transforms into a beautiful metaphor about creation and inspiration, and the miracle of the human brain, with its array of neurons activating one another. All of that is achieved without the message being forced down your throat in a preachy way. Thus it serves as a perfect opener for the set. It's great to see that she hasn't lost her touch after all these years. I just wish she would get back into production full-time. She's without a doubt one of the best talents Japanese animation's got, and we could use more good work like this. There are a lot of talented people in animation in Japan, but too few with her combination of fecund imagination and animation savvy.

Like Tatsuyuki Tanaka, Fukushima originally wanted to animate her piece entirely herself. Both are great animators, so I would have liked to see that happen. But as it happens, they didn't have time, so they had to get other animators to animate their films, although both did some of the animation, and Tanaka served as the sakkan (animation director) for his own film. Fukushima was aided by several excellent animators, and it shows up in the results, whereas Tanaka's piece comes across as slightly weaker on the animation front, which is quite disappointing, as he himself is a superb animator. Here's a full list of the animators in Fukushima's piece: Yumi Chiba, Takase Nishimura, Tokuyuki Matsutake, Shojiro Nishimi, Hideki Hamasu, Jamie Vickers, Atsuko Fukushima.

Shanghai Dragon ~ Shoji Kawamori

This piece perhaps best captures the mixed feelings I have for the particular combination of films in Genius Party. I respect Kawamori's particular talent, and I enjoy his work for what it is. He has a unique voice, and he is indisputably one of the major figures in anime history since the 80s. He represents much of what anime stands for. This piece is well enough made and entertaining. I think that the inclusion of more conventionally styled films like Kawamori's Shanghai Dragon and Shinichiro Watanabe's Baby Blue is consistent with the objective of Genius Party (at least as I interpret it), namely to spotlight the various forms of talent in the Japanese animation industry, insofar as those directors are among the most talented directors working in the industry, and they have an individual voice and vision. It's just that, in style and concept, their work is comparatively conventional compared with most of the other films in the set.

Is that jarring contrast an asset or a liability? That will depend on each viewer. But personally, while watching it, all I could feel was that it was out of place, and that it was kind of embarrassing to watch. I screened the whole set with a non-anime-watching person to get a neutral third-party opinion, and this film was the only one in the entire set that this person found really irritating. My impression is that most of the other films in the set spoke on the authority of their creators' unique vision - be it Shinji Kimura's unique art, or Shinya Ohira's thrilling animation - and thus their works are exciting and interesting in their own right, whereas to a person judging the film entirely on its own merits, this one migth feel a little too plain jane anime, with a directing style and story that aren't especially unusual in their own right.

The piece wasn't 'pure' Shoji Kawamori, anyway. Kawamori wrote the script and was the director, of course, but Toshiyuki Kubooka did the storyboard and 'enshutsu' or actual processing/line directing, so the details of the directing are of someone else's hand. Shingo Suzuki was character designer/animation director. The key animation was by the small team of Hiroshi Okubo, Jiro Kanai, Shingo Suzuki and Tomoyuki Niho. Okubo also did mecha design together with Kawamori, and Niho did object design. I know Okubo did the chase over the rooftops in the 3-wheeler, and presumably Shingo Suzuki handled the character scenes and Niho did the dragon, as Niho designed the dragon.

It's a shame that the publisher of the Genius Party Beyond mook, Geibun Mook, didn't do the one for Genius Party, because Geibun Genius Party mook is far better arranged and laid out and contains a lot more interesting materials and notes and things than the mook for Genius Party. If they had, I might know a bit more about who did what for Shanghai Dragon and the other films in the first volley (i.e. Genius Party as opposed to Genius Party Beyond) with good animation for which I'd love to have a detailed breakdown (mostly Happy Machine). The Geibun mook contains lots of genga and other raw materials, with good descriptions. Heck, even the printing of the first mook is shoddy - mine's coming apart at the seams already, and I treat my books pretty carefully.

The Deathtic Four ~ Shinji Kimura

From the beginning Genius Party sounded like it would be an interesting project because they had invited such a disparate array of people onto the project - including an art director, a manga-ka, and foreign animators. I appreciate the willingness to approach individuals in different fields to create a piece of animation, because I like seeing creations by people who haven't been inculcated into the conventions of industry practice. There's a certain freshness in their work, even if it's pretty rough around the edges and not entirely successful. That's the feeling I got from the film that was made by a screenwriter for one of Studio 4C's previous omnibus productions, Amazing Nuts.

Well, it's somewhat the same feeling I get here. It's a very fun and interesting piece, but I wouldn't call it the most successful or convincing. Shinji Kimura is a fantastic art director with amazing breadth, running the gamut from the realistic baroque detail of Steam Boy to the wild, byzantine coloring of Tekkonkinkreet. The Deathtic Four has him directing his first film, and creating it from the ground up for that matter. His characters and the design of the world are quite appealing. The most successful part of the film strikes me as being the shots where we fly over and through the CGI maps of his art over the city. There is a very nice atmosphere in those shots. It feels like a silly-creepy gothic horror version of the city in Tekkonkinkreet.

What I didn't find as convincing was the CGI movement, or the style of the dialogue. For some mysterious reason he made the characters speak Swedish with Japanese subtitles. It doesn't feel necessary, and it's distracting having to read the text the whole time. I would have preferred to see a piece that showed off his skills as an artist, rather than a CGI film, as CGI isn't his area of 'genius', it's art, and I felt that the CGI distracts from his art more than it contributes here.

That said, I think it's a fit within the set, and it's an enjoyable enough piece with a style all its own, which is what I wanted to see, regardless of whether it works completely. There was a little bit of animation in the film, and that was done by Tomonori Murata and Takayuki Hamada. Besides his major contribution to Masaaki Yuasa's Happy Machine, Hamada seems to have lent a helping hand here and there in various other films in the set.

Door Chime ~ Yoji Fukuyama

Yoji Fukuyama is unmistakably a creator with a 'genius' for his particular niche - namely, manga with an exactingly rendered caricatural style somewhat similar in sensibility to early Katsuhiro Otomo. (Otomo seems to have been influenced by Fukuyama.) His droll sense of humor and predilection for 'dajare' (bad puns) can get old, I find, but his drawings are always a real pleasure to look at, and his humor is very well suited to the one-panel comics he publishes in newspapers, in which he skewers Japanese politics and culture.

For that reason, I can see why he was invited, and I think it was a very interesting choice to invite him. It's not rare to see manga adapted into anime, obviously, but Fukuyama's particular style is quite far from what you typically see adapted into anime - and far more interesting in many ways. And of course, although manga are adapted fairly often into anime, having the creator given carte blanche over every aspect of the production, as Fukuyama was here, is far rarer. He has a style of rendering faces that, if adapted carefully by a team of artists of real talent, could result in some very interesting character animation of a kind we've never seen before in anime. So I was excited when I heard that Fukuyama had been invited.

The film that was produced unfortunately does not do what I would have hoped they would try to do given the opportunity of having such a great manga-ka onboard. Rather than focusing on his drawings and creating a film that adapted those drawings into an animated mode of expression, the locus of interest in the film that was made is the mildly interesting story of an anonymous young male character who finds himself dogged by a doppelganger in modern-day Japan. Fukuyama, who of course had never been involved in animation before, was given the opportunity to draw the storyboard. Takahiro Tanaka helped him fill out the storyboard with the requisite timing, special effects markings and so on, and designed the characters for animation and acted as sakkan. The problem is that the pacing is somewhat slow, the visuals bland, and the story not affecting or interesting enough to really pull it off and make it work. I wonder what other approach could have been adopted to result in a more successful adaptation of Fukuyama's unique style into animation.

Limit Cycle ~ Hideki Futamura

The person who came up with what I think is the most interesting interpretation of the concept of the project, and on top of that managed to make by far the most genuinely surprising film in the entire set, is Hideki Futamura. It's kind of shocking, considering the rare opportunity each of these creators were given - to create literally anything they wanted "without any restrictions" (the catchphrase of the project was "seiyaku zero", which means zero restrictions) - that Limit Cycle was the only film in the set that really went outside of the bounds of conventional anime expression, with a visual ethos verging on the abstract and consisting mostly of CGI and processed footage, rather than conventional animation, and a narrative style verging on pure visual poetry. I understand that it makes perfect sense for most the creators here to have done work in the style for which they've become known, and in which they are the undisputed masters. I would have been disappointed if Shinya Ohira and Masaaki Yuasa hadn't made films in their patented style, and their films are films only they could have made. But it just strikes me as food for thought that, given literally zero limitations, this is the set of films that resulted. Obviously, this is a commercial endeavor, and it would merely have alienated audiences to create films that ignored the audience altogether. In that sense, I greatly admire Futamura's film, because it treads the fine line between experimentation and entertainment in a way that few of the other films do.

The mystery to me about Limit Cycle is not what it's about - it's why the film is so damn fascinating despite me not knowing what it's about. I've watched it three times, and I've enjoyed it just as much every time. I think this is the film with the most rewatch value in the set. I can envision myself revisiting it over the coming months to bask in the lush cascade of glowing images, and probably discover something new that I hadn't seen on a previous viewing. It's easy enough to layer random images on top of one another, but Futamura's film seems to have a method to the madness, hidden somewhere in the chaos, like good poetry, or like a model of a complex molecule.

Limit Cycle has no dialogue, and no obvious narrative. At first sight it appears to be simply a visual poem with random quotes narrated quietly over a rich medley of glowing visuals, and random numbers projected across the screen. In fact, the quotes are from 17th century French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal's Pensées, and the numbers indicate the passage in the Pensées. There is no one-to-one correlation between text and visuals. Occasionally you will notice a clear correlation between a spoken word and something that has just happened on the screen, but for the most part the nature of the nominal protagonist's journey is left intentionally murky and nonliteral. Mostly the viewer has to surrender to the images and extrapolate as best they can what is happening to the protagonist, who appears to embark on a metaphysical journey through time and space.

Pascal, of course, is one of the true 'geniuses' of western history. I like how Futamura undermines the assumption that the films are supposed to be directed by creators of genius, by instead making a film where the genius is the subject of the film. Futamura is one of the ones who, in the mook interview, goes out of his way to say that he doesn't look at himself as a genius, contrary to what the title of the project might imply.

If you've ever tried to educate yourself a little about advanced sciences like chaos theory or quantum mechanics, maybe you'll have had the same experience I have of feeling that you've run headlong into a wall of impenetrably dense verbiage vaguely reminiscent of old philosophical or religious texts. Something of that ilk seems to have been the epiphany that led Hideki Futamura to meld Pascal's religious treatise with cybernetics and the mathematical concept of the limit cycle. (viz. Wiki entry) The concepts mesh surprisingly well, creating a philosophical echo chamber where scientific and religious, past and future bleed into and amplify one another.

Futamura Hideki has had a decent-sized career, during most of which he was active as a conventional 2D animator. Among his more notable work would be animation director of Second Renaissance. It's in the last few years that he seems to have veered in a different and very interesting direction, blending lush digital effects with hand-drawn animation. The first time I saw this new tack of his was in the two clips he did for Studio 4C's Fluximation music videos. In these and Limit Cycle I find that Futamura shows himself to be good with non-narrative work, at creating a flow of abstract digital images that holds the viewer's interest. The rather lengthy film doesn't grow tiring, remaining engaging at all moments, with a clear sense of development and progress, although the exact nature of that development may not be clear. The music by Fennesz is the perfect aural analogue for the images, with its dense buzz of electronic sounds and harmonic shards. The bewildered-looking James Dean-like protagonist serves as a good surrogate for viewers to latch on to. Without him, it might indeed be a bit of a daunting piece. And even the narration by actor Hiroshi Mikami (Swallowtail) is spot-on and a perfect choice for the film. I find that every aspect of his film works and benefits the whole.

Happy Machine ~ Masaaki Yuasa

There are two standout films in Genius Party for me. I don't think it will surprise many readers to learn that those two films are Happy Machine and Wanwa. Neither film afforded me the surprise of Futamura's piece, because I fully expected them to be incredible, and they were. They afforded instead the intense pleasure of being able to see among the most perfect creations yet by two of the very best creators working in animation in Japan today.

Both pieces have a very different and equally inimitable style. Yuasa's minimalistic Happy Machine is the yin to the yang of Shinya Ohira's hyperkinetic Wanwa. But both share the trait that they are filled head to toe with incredible animation that at every moment is the voice by which both films communicate, albeit in their very different ways. These creators represent to me the pinnacle of the rare 'genius' of being able create animated films that are able to communicate a clear story and thrill and move viewers purely by dint of the visuals.

Although Masaaki Yuasa was already known for his incredible talent as an animator and an imaginative concept artist, since directing Mind Game he has gone on to direct two TV series that each revealed a new side of his multifaceted talent. They revealed that he has the ability to create unpredictable, edgy, moving stories and imaginative, never-before-seen worlds populated by lots of interesting characters. I've come to admire how Yuasa always challenges himself to take a new approach with each new project. With Happy Machine he's again created a film unlike anything he's done before, not to mention unlike anything else out there.

Happy Machine is a spare film whose light touch conceals a somber core. On the surface it plays out a fantasy full of odd creatures, while underneath boils a psychologically complex rumination on the theme of the human need for companionship. The film is highly formal in its shape and in the deliberate spareness of its presentation. At every moment our attention is focused on only one object on the screen, with very little in the background to distract us. The theme is also focused, leaving the viewer with a clear but complex and potent emotional aftertaste of a kind that raises Yuasa's work above mere visual playfulness. The scene where the protagonist realizes that his latest animal companion has just left him and is floating away towards certain death, prompting the protagonist to overcome all logic and physical laws and put on wings and fly towards him, is almost overwhelming in its emotional power.

At the most basic level, the film is the ultimate in wordless storytelling, with a considerable amount of goings on conveyed exclusively through the animation, background, music and sound effects. It's striking how Yuasa is able to create a story that comes across as having so many layers of meaning out of something so deliberately pared down in every way. But moving the film is - it's by far the most moving film in the set, and really gets you thinking. It's not that the story is hard to figure out. Quite the opposite. The story is the epitome of clarity, and every little element has a profound significance that you grasp immediately. Rather, I find that Happy Machine gets you thinking about the most basic and important things in life, though I can't figure out why that is.

I find Yuasa's work amazing because he can evoke so many different complex emotions without even seeming to try, and in such a short span. And on top of that, he does so by way of a seamless unity of imaginative designs, ingenious concepts and rich animation. He creates a momentum of visual storytelling that at every moment is alternately and/or simultaneously beautiful, wildly imaginative, deeply felt, terrifying, moving, funny, and unpredictable. It's a cliched expression, but this film really feels like a small diamond, for the way there isn't anything extraneous, and it achieves so much in such a small package.

The animation of Happy Machine was done by only four people, headlined by the talented ex-Telecom animator Takayuki Hamada: Takayuki Hamada, Takamasa Ishikawa, Yasuyuki Shimizu, Nobutake Ito. I don't know much about Takamasa Ishikawa, although he was in Tekkonkinkreet, but Ito and Shimizu need no introduction - they were regulars in Yuasa's two TV series. There were so many animation drawings for some shots in the scene with the fire creature, for example, that a single shot had to be divided up for storage in two separate cardboard boxes. This is a classic example of a small, talented team of animators providing a film with a uniform high level of quality.

Baby Blue ~ Shinichiro Watanabe

Shinichiro Watanabe has done a lot of great work in anime over the last decade or so - as a music producer. He also happens to have directed a considerable amount of anime, usually supported by very talented staff. I think he did a bang-up job choosing the music for the films in Genius Party.

Watanabe's film was a fairly enjoyable, if somewhat cliche, youth drama, capped by a touching sequence at the climax that plays out in strobe effect over a Chopin Etude. Watanabe is particularly good with moments like this. I would have been prepared to enjoy this short were it stand-alone, but to be brief, it felt unnecessary. It's not what I was looking for in this set. I think Watanabe chose to create a film in this style because he knew that many of the other films would be vivid, fantastically-inclined films, and wanted to do something different, in a more atmospheric, realistic style, perhaps to give the audience a breather. Personally, I didn't feel that a breather was needed or called for.

More importantly, perhaps, I felt that the characters were dead and boring to look at. Eiji Yasuhiko was the character designer and animation director, and I think the characters in the film are its main liability. They look amateurish and bland, and there wasn't a moment where I felt that the characters had a facial expression or an instance of body language that communicated a living, breathing character I could believe in, which would have helped if I was supposed to empathize with their emotions and plight. I think that is what would have been called for to make a minimalistic, low-key story like this work, entirely focused as it is on two characters.

The brief moments of absurd humor that intersperse the film came across as lame-brained, forced attempts at levity. The casting of two famous actors in the role of the two characters struck me as nothing more than opportunistic, because I didn't find their performances apt or nuanced, merely flat-toned and seemingly deliberately drab. I love atmospheric films. This one did have its moments, but unfortunately, atmosphere alone does not necessarily make a great film. I guess mainly it bothers me that space was taken up by a film like this when there are any number of other creators with a more unusual and interesting style who could have made a more compelling film.

Gala ~ Mahiro Maeda

Mahiro Maeda is one of the most talented people in anime, and I have tremendous respect for him as a creator, so I was happy to see a film from him in the set. At first sight, the film seems more conventionally styled than the most interesting films in the set, and so I was a little hesitant going in, but once I sat down and watched it, and listened to Maeda's words about his film, I was very happy with the result. If you can make a film as satisfying and layered as Maeda has, then I find that lack of a particularly idiosyncratic visual concept isn't necessarily a death blow.

Gala is interesting and satisfying for all the right reasons. Maeda strikes me as an intellectual filmmaker in the good sense. He's intellectual not in the sense of making highbrow art films only he can understand, but in the sense of having a healthy curiosity about everything out there in the world, and effectively applying what he's learned to create films that are worldly and informed and come across as very respectful of the viewer's intelligence.

Maeda's brilliance as an 'animated filmmaker' comes through well in the very cinematic Gala, which speaks not in the language of dialogue, but through the pacing and the actions of its characters. He maintains a seamless arc of building tension right through to the exhilarating climax. The very satisfying conclusion makes you see everything that came before in a new light without coming across as a cheap trick.

Maeda's intelligence comes through in the way he is able to take old Japanese gods and other motifs and put them into this new context of the various bacteria and other small microorganisms that inhabit the soil. He pulls off an interpretation of the animist gods of old Japan that is new and interesting, and that makes sense logically (the old Shinto beliefs seem prescient of modern discoveries about the microorganisms and bacteria that inhabit the soil) and conveys a spiritual reverence for the miracle of life. It's a blend of concepts and ideas from far-flung corners that make a wonderful metaphor for the ether of life that surrounds us. Maeda's genius is to do all this and wrap it up in a very entertaining package.

Another major element in the film is the music. After having already drawn the storyboard, Maeda ran across composer Akira Ifukube's symphonic poem Rhythmica Ostinata for piano and orchestra, which struck him as just what he needed. The piece was rearranged a bit to fit, but in the final product lends the film a unique sound world that immediately sets the film apart, as well as a providing a strong driving beat during the frenetic climax. The film also achieves a nice match between image and music, which was one of the challenges that Maeda set himself for Gala. The instruments in Japanese composer Ifukube's piece are all western, but the instruments shown on the screen all Eastern. Maeda did this deliberately, and draws interesting parallels between the two by showing, for example, a koto being played when the piano is heard playing in the music, since the piano is, after all, just a big harp. I really like how Maeda layers interesting concepts and ideas into every aspect of the production.

The importance of music to Maeda can be glimpsed in the fact that during his school days, Maeda participated in the famous Geinoh Yamashirogumi folk music collective. He designed all the instruments himself based on traditional instruments from around the world. This gives another glimpse into his multifaceted talent. I've had the opportunity to glimpse quite a lot of his designs and image boards for various series over the years, and I'm continuously impressed by the richness of his imagination.

Moondrive ~ Kazuto Nakazawa

This film serves as a good contrast with Gala - it's all style and no substance. And I mean that as a compliment. This film oozes style, and it's great fun to watch. Nakazawa has a unique talent as an animator and an illustrator, and that comes through perfectly here. I would have liked to see more films like this in the set, by creators with an interesting visual or animation style.

Nakazawa drew all the key animation himself. As that suggests, this is an animator's film first and foremost. What story there is is merely a coathanger for Nakazawa's silly gags, snazzy animation and intricate drawings. This is perhaps emphasized by the way that Nakazawa doesn't bother to hide the borders for each background painting, and he leaves in the borders on the layout sheets he drew the backgrounds on (you even see written instructions on some of them). Nakazawa seems like quite a character, and this was apparently a late-game decision he made after having first done so by mistake. He though the results looked cool, so he left it in. His wierd gag sense comes through in this and in the playfulness of the backgrounds, which are packed with little details that make them fun to pore over.

The film is essentially a road movie showing the band of inept bandits travelling from one location to another in search of a treasure map. One of the unifying techniques he adopts for some reason is to use a flat stage layout for most of the shots, and to have the characters arrayed accordingly. The screen is still most of the time, plastered with the detailed backgrounds that fully occupy your attention and maintain interest, while the animation bursts out here and there in quick flashes. Another thing is that the exterior of the buildings are always done in this crazy, fantasyland style, while the interior of the buildings have a more realistic old musty look. He maintains a sense of unity through the odd little rules like this.

Wanwa ~ Shinya Ohira

What we have with Wanwa is also, in its own very different way, an animator's film. This film is a paean to everything that animation stands for, an explosion of animated energy like none I've ever seen before. It's by far the most awe-inspiring achievement of the entire set, both technically and artistically. There are good films in this set, and there are even some great films, but if you only see one film from this set, this is the one. This is animated filmmaking that makes me want to shout my love of animation from the rooftops. I hesitate to call anyone a genius, but if anyone fits the bill, it's Ohira.

This is one of the few films in the set that is more of an 'experience' than it is simply a film. That's due largely to the unremitting intensity, volume and quality of the animation, which blasts by at a hundred miles an hour almost non-stop throughout the film. Single shots of this film reportedly contain several thousand animation drawings - the amount of animation in an average TV episode. The film is a fascinating contradiction in that it's a simple story for children, about a little boy who one day wanders off, led by his puppy, into a fantasy land inhabited by the red and blue demons of his imagination, yet at its peak it achieves such a density of expression that it comes across less like a children's film and more like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life.

Which is not to say that the film is nothing but animated energy. All of that animated energy is channeled into a film with a very big heart, and Ohira achieves what is very hard to do, namely creating a film that feels borne of real, unfeigned innocence. It doesn't feel like an adult making a film pandering to children, so much as a film made by an adult who retains something of the unbridled imagination and freedom of a child as a creator. The images are modeled after his son's drawings, and the story development has the random-walk aspect of a child's fantasies. The only other film I've seen that achieved such an unfeigned, honest childlike tone was Kitty's Graffiti of 1957 by the late great Yasuji Mori. The film is conceptually united around the theme of a child's unbridled imagination in every sense.

Wanwa is a special achievement because it doesn't feel like a mere 2D animated film. It is combined with CGI in some places, of course, but that's not what I mean. It's more that by sheer will power, Ohira somehow manages to create animation that seems to explode the bounds of 2D animation, while at the same time remaining quintissentially hand-drawn, with its constant shapeshifting. Ohira also created many of the film's backgrounds by using yarn, crayons and other materials that his young son used to make his own art, and for some of the closeups of the boy he went through a laborious process to achieve a style that looked as if it had been colored by crayons. Ohira thus truly made a film in which every single aspect of the production seems to be imbued of a child's touch. All of the images in the film are magnificent compositions in their own right, like a living and breathing painting, with every scene designed with its own uniquely dazzling color scheme.

The animator list of Wanwa reads like a list of my favorite animators: Shinji Hashimoto, Kenichi Konishi, Masaaki Yuasa, Ko Yoshinari, Hisashi Mori, Shinsaku Kozuma, Osamu Tanabe, Atsuko Fukushima and Shuya Ohira. Every one is a top-notch animator of the highest order. If you've never heard of the last one, it's Ohira's son. His drawings are featured in the film somewhere. He even lent his voice to Gala and Tojin Kit. Hashimoto did the part around the appearance of the red oni in the candy shop, Yoshinari did the part around the appearance of the blue oni later on, and Fukushima just helped out a little with the shots with the father near the end. Hashimoto, Tanabe and Yuasa, of course, are regulars with Ohira, but it was Ohira's first time working with Yoshinari. Yoshinari's shots were among the densest turned in, and greatly impressed Ohira, which is saying a lot. This small but superb selection of animators goes a long way to explaining why the animation in the film was so amazing. Each one of these animators is a highly talented, individualistic, maniacal animator in his or her own right.

Good news: In the interview in the mook, Ohira says he's interested in creating another film for children, this time a full-length feature. I'll be able to sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that another Ohira film may be forthcoming, and finally a full-length feature at that. Knowing his working pace, that may be many years down the line, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I want him to spend as much time as he needs to create something that the world has never seen before. His films are a treasure, and he keeps evolving and getting better.

Tojin Kit ~ Tatsuyuki Tanaka

Tojin Kit is interesting to me because, intentionally or not, it raises some interesting questions about the process of creation in animation. It seems to embody a contradiction inherent in animation: Animation is necessarily a pure product of the artist's imagination, but the amount of work implied requires diffusion of duties, which seems to inherently place a limit on the control any single artist can have on the result. Tatsuyuki Tanaka's long odyssey with Tojin Kit, the legendary short that he's supposed to have been toiling away at singlehandedly for so many years trying to complete (although it turns out that wasn't really the case), seems to represent the sisyphean struggle that results when you try to rail against that imposed limit. (which of course is vaguely reminiscent of Norstein's latest decades-long effort, although obviously their work methods, philosophy and style are very different)

An artist with a style and vision as seemingly self-consistent as Tanaka's has been over the last decade or so of his activity as an illustrator and occasional creator of animated shorts doesn't just happen across his style. It's the result of a clear set of underlying goals and concepts he is exploring. I don't normally like artists who are limited to a certain style or look, because more often than not it's just indicative of a lack of curiosity and flexibility, or worse, of superficiality. But I don't feel that way with Tanaka. I get the feeling that his work isn't just about style; there's a underlying structure there. Structure is what separates good contemporary classical music from random noise.

In a way very different from Happy Machine and Wanwa, Tojin Kit is also a film that could only exist in animation. It's an animated film first and foremost. The lavishly intricate sepia backgrounds that make Tanaka's work so distinctive, with their characteristic reek of decay and dark humor, are the ultimate products of the imagination, despite their extreme level of detail. Backgrounds in animation are quite often based on material gathered by scouting actual locations in the real world. In extreme cases, and surprisingly often (due presumably to the tight schedules in anime) backgrounds are faithful reproductions of photographs. In other cases, backgrounds are products of the imagination, but helped along by lots of reference material. Tanaka's art is different. Tanaka's only reference material, he asserts, is his memory multiplied by imagination. One of the structural elements underpinning Tojin Kit is that the decorations are assembled strictly from his memories of the little details of the tenements in which he grew up as a kid. The backgrounds are assembled, to be precise, from his memory of the little details that people would generally overlook, out of habit, or out of human instinct - the way we overlook a shattered corner of pavement, the unfinished underside of the sink over which we arrange ourselves in the mirror every day. This is what seems to give his backgrounds their particular character - they're confusing in that they seem familiar, yet obviously are products of the imagination. At first it just seems like he just likes drawing decay, but there's a pattern there, and it's conceptually interesting.

Tanaka has no illusions in his assessment of the results of his film. As was expected of the digital revolution, it has provided individual artists with the ability to control more of the tasks, resulting in animated films in which the various tasks were handled by the same person. Tojin Kit represents the problems that can result from getting what you wished for. In Tanaka's case, the ability to handle the backgrounds for his own films meant that, in addition to being able to spend more time on the animation, he spends more time drawing the backgrounds in order to achieve exactly the effect he is aiming for, being very much the perfectionist. This has the ironic consequence of slowing his productivity to such an extent that he's forced, at the last minute, to enlist other staff to help him complete the animation and backgrounds, which goes against what he was trying to achieve. Of course, given much more time, he could probably have made the entire film himself, and it would have had more unity than it does. His work is so distinctive and precisely imagined that work by another hand, even good work, stands out, which is what I find happened with the animation of this film.

One of the reasons I feel this deficiency hurt the film is partially that one of the themes of the film is to create the feeling of a living and breathing illustration. To that end, the backgrounds are not supposed to be 'backgrounds'. They're supposed to be an extension of the animation. I know I'm being nitpicky when I say this, but it's only because I admire the work so much and would have liked the film to succeed to the greatest possible extent. Needless to say, much work was put into the animation, and the film has some of the best animation in the set. The animators who aided him are no hacks - Koichi Arai, Takaaki Yamashita, Takaaki Wada, Yasuhiro Aoki, to name but the most obvious. The film lacks any music, and making a film in which the lack of music is as successful as this one at creating rather than detracting from the atmosphere is no mean feat. The film achieves exactly the unique atmosphere it sets out to achieve, and Tanaka's smart, precise directing, superb layout skills and the mysterious and evocative story unmistakably make this one of the main reasons to watch Genius Party. At least Tanaka the perfectionist will be relieved to know that he isn't allowed to rest yet in his goal of achieving perfection. He needs to keep trying, and make even more amazing films that only he can make.

Dimension Bomb ~ Koji Morimoto

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to the collaborative art of animation - provide animators lots of freedom to create, or use the animators to realize the vision of the director. Tatsuyuki Tanaka obviously falls at one end of the scale. Despite Koji Morimoto seeming to logically fall at the same end of the scale, since he's such a unique artist, I find that he actually falls on the opposite end of the scale, the good team worker end. His very particular vision is paramount in his films, of course, but I like how he always enlists great animators to realize his worlds, and he provides them with freedom for a degree of interpretation that undoubtedly makes it a more rewarding effort for them, but more importantly, enriches the results. It can be hard to make a film with an excessively unified tone and look that doesn't feel brittle as opposed to strong.

I don't know quite where else to start with this film, which is enigmatic even by Morimoto's standards, which is why I start with that. I find that perhaps this gives a clue to the essence of this film - that he wants his collaborators to have a degree of interpretive freedom, and the audience too. There is probably a very simple love story hidden beneath the chaotic but extremely beautiful storm of images that comprise this film, but it was shattered in time and space by the dimension bomb of Morimoto's wonderfully mad mind, and the audience has to reconstruct it as best they can. That's my interpretation. Morimoto is the main creative force behind Studio 4C, and in this way perhaps his film best encapsulates what this set should have been about - the explosive atomic power of the imagination unleashed through animation.

I find that I don't really want to try to parse every little detail into sense. The film is perfectly constructed in its ambiguity as it is, although honestly I found it slightly frustrating on my first viewing. I thought maybe it was striving a little too hard for incomprehensibilty. But in retrospect, I think we need more films in animation that aren't linear, that aren't easily comprehensible, films that make the audience work a little. Or rather, films that are an experience the way this film and Wanwa are. Films like that are often more rewarding, just as it can be more rewarding for animators to have a little freedom of interpretation.

Rather than trying in vain to figure out the story, I prefer to simply revel in the richness and intensity of Morimoto's imagination. He's got that knack animators-turned-directors have for thinking visually, in a language of gorgeous, imaginative, never-before-seen designs and narrative forms. I don't think it would be possible to succeed in creating such images without the help of equally talented animators, and as it happens, Yasuhiro Aoki played a major role in the animation of Dimension Bomb. There were plenty of others, including Takayuki Hamada, Shojiro Nishimi and Jamie Vickers, but apparently Aoki played a particularly important role. Aoki did a lot of the animation in Morimoto's Fluximation music video, so he's obviously a figure Morimoto feels he can trust to come up with interesting ideas to fill in the deliberate ellipsis in his storyboard.

Morimoto is a real creator of his age, though, in that this film is not merely a showcase of traditional animation. CGI plays an important part, and not just functional - he uses it as an expressive tool. His powerful images are equal parts CGI, background painting and animation. He's one of the best directors in Japan at coming up with aesthetically interesting rather than merely functional uses of CGI. The driving techno music is really well used, too. It doesn't just go full-bore throughout. The music ebbs and flows in sync with the hills and valleys of the dramatic pacing. Another thing I found very appealing in his film was the combination of meticulously rendered realistic backgrounds with the strange imagery. The film contains any number of memorable images, such as the body floating across various random everyday scenes, and the character transformed into pure energy. The juxtaposition of these images with the shots of the boy and girl interacting, which emanate a believable youthful sexual tension, makes for a satisfying balance.

Anyway, I think that'll do. Turned out a lot longer than I expected it to. And I was trying to keep things brief.

Why do Gobelins films move so fast? It's an overgeneralization, but I often find the actions seem too fast to me. I love their work, and the action in itself is usually amazingly lush and excitingly choreographed, but the zippy speed is the one thing that nags at me when I watch it. I guess it's not just Gobelins work, either. I remember thinking the same thing of the actions in late 2D Disney movies. I find myself thinking a lot of the animation would be much more effective if it moved 3/4 as fast. Norio Matsumoto's acton scenes seem to move half as fast (in terms of the timing) and be ten times as effective as action. Just a random thought that hit me watching their Annecy clips of recent years.

Fantastic news on the Tadanari Okamoto DVD box front - it's coming out (like, actually coming out, for real this time) on June 24, and you can pre-order it from Amazon.jp here. I just did. I can't wait. It will have not only all of the films included on the old 2-LD Pioneer Animation Animation set, but also every one of the many films that weren't, including the engravings-based A Restaurant of Many Orders, as well as rare commercial and early films. As a big fan, I thought I had seen most of Okamoto's films already, but looking over his list of films, I realize that there are over 10 films between 10 and 20 minutes in length that I still haven't seen - to say nothing of a bunch of the shorter ones. And this incredible deal is available to you for the amazing price of only 7382 yen!! It's really too bad they didn't include English subs (I'm assuming they didn't), as I would like for the English-speaking animation community to finally get the chance to appreciate Tadanari Okamoto's body of work in a complete form, rather than just unsubbed snippets, which can't possibly convey what the fuss is all about. (although it's hard to say whether the fuss would be 100% conveyed by subs anyway) Someone should definitely fansub at least the documentary that will be included on the set, which is a reprint from the old LD set. It's a great little documentary, and it's a perfect introduction to this great animator's work method and personality, narrated and explained as it is by the man himself, often on camera showing his work methods.

My favorite film from last year was Tropical Manila, a film shot in the Philippines on a shoestring budget by wild first-time South Korean director Lee Sang-woo. It depicts the squalid life of a Korean fugitive and his kopino family living in the slumbs of Manila. I don't know whether I was more disgusted or amazed while watching the film and in the immediate aftermath, but all I know for sure is that it had the most impact on me of any film I saw that year. It was a real cinematic jolt of the kind I hadn't felt in a long time, and not just because of the lurid and gruesome images. The film is visually extremely accomplished. It's dense and masterfully shot in a way that packs its message home with an incredible wallop. A while back I read somewhere that he'd wrapped on his next film, called Politically Sexy, but the French-language Asian Cinema blog where I read the info (HKmania) now appears to be blocked as a malware site whenever I try to reach it to confirm, and I turn up zero hits in Google when searching for mention of the film, so now I'm kind of starting to wonder if it was all just a fever dream cooked up by my overeager brain... and I was really looking forward to his next film. I hope it turns out to be true.

Along with pre-ordering the Okamoto box set, I also finally bought the Genius Party Beyond DVD box set, and I intend to write my thoughts about the whole thing once I've watched it and absorbed all the amazing extras. I knew they'd include tons of extras, and I wanted to wait until I could buy the box set so as to support at least this release, even though I hardly watch or buy much anime anymore, which is why it took me so long to finally get around to watching it. I've been dying to see Wanwa, so it's been hard holding off watching the copies floating around out there.

One thing I watched recently was Violence Jack. It's not something I would recommend to anyone I like. It was interesting for the stark contrast between each of the three volumes in terms of style and production values, showing how style evolves each year in anime, and also how staff and production values can make a big difference. But otherwise it's pretty dumb and forgettable. The extreme violence and gore was mostly laughable, except for in the last volume, where the higher production values made it somewhat more squirmy. The first volume has very little of interest in terms of animation or drawings, with a very 80s style. It was co-produced by Ashi Productions. The second is more interesting in terms of the drawings than the first volume, although very little of the animation stands out. You can see a considerable evolution in terms of the style. The third volume had several excellent bits of animation, but otherwise the jump in quality of drawing wasn't as stark as it was between the first and second volume. The good bits were courtesy of Shinya Ohira and Shinsaku Kozuma, and others. There were several other good animators - Norimoto Tokura, Hirotoshi Sano, Osamu Tsuruyama, Atsushi Wakabayashi, Hirotoshi Kawamoto, Kenichi Onuki, Takashi Hashimoto, Takahiro Omori, Kazuto Nakazawa - but I haven't tried to identify their work, as it's not as patently obvious as someone like Kozuma. I doubt Kazuto Nakazawa and Takashi Hashimoto were as easily identifiable (or skilled for that matter) back then as they are now anyway.

The part that most stood out to me was the opening chase, which I immediately thought was the work of Kozuma. It has an excellent and very peculiar sense of timing and form, and even looked at today is fun and exciting to watch, unlike the rest of the animation in the entire series. Ohira supposedly did the final bit where the boss gets his legs cut off with a thrown knife as he's speeding away on his motorcycle, although I wasn't able to identify it myself. I had information that he did that part. After I looked at it knowing that it was supposedly done by him, I could sort of identify the way of drawing humans as being similar to the style he had in the Curio Shop short he did. It also had a lush, dynamic, rich feeling that set it apart. That feeling lasts only three or four shots, which is typical of his dense work of this period. Ohira was also in the second episode, but I couldn't identify what part he might have done. The episodes date from 1986, 1988 and 1990, respectively, so the second episode would have been around the time he was in his Akira/Captain Future crazy-detailed effects phase, and I don't see anything like that in the second episode (maybe I missed it - help here?). I would like to say that the show is worth re-visiting, but other than these standout pieces of animation, there wasn't much that was interesting in terms of the directing and story. In fact, the directing and story were mostly just shoddy and cliched. The films certainly represent the preoccupations of the period. You can sense that the creators were really indulging in the freedom to do things like depict sex and violence offered by the OVA format, which was new and refreshing and edgy to them at the time.

Before I write a few thoughts on anime I've seen recently, behold Felix's Machines, one of the most ingenious concepts, constructions and videos I've seen in a good while. Felix Thorn, a young electronic musician living in the UK, has been putting together a DIY orchestra of cannibalized instrument parts in his apartment for the last few years, which he connects to his computer, and somehow coerces to play music he has programmed on his computer. Felix's Machines are fascinating on any number of levels. They create a marvelous show of twitching machinery - piano hammers hitting xylophones, a synaesthetic light show, and mediating the coldness of electronic music, which perhaps puts off many people to some of the best music made in the last decade, through the warmth of instrumental sounds. You can see two rawer videos of Felix's Machines in action playing Felix's Music on Youtube.

I've been meaning to write my thoughts about the exit of the last season and entry of the new one, but I've been so uninspired by everything I've seen of the new one so far that I haven't been able to muster the energy yet. Until watching episode 2 of IG's new show Sengoku Basara, that is. Quite obviously, it's been a while since I've been inspired to a post by something I've seen, but this episode is what I was waiting for. Funny it should come not in episode 1 but in episode 2. Episode 1 was fun, but not mind-blowing. Episode 2 was splendiferous. It was a fantastic, entertaining episode jam-packed with the manic energy of which only this form called anime is capable. It was directed by Naoyoshi Shiotani, whom I first noticed now quite a few years back with some animation in the Tsubasa Chronicle movie and the opening of Blood+, I think. He's since done numerous items, each one consistently showing him to be one of the most talented up-and-coming faces at the studio. I wrote about his episode of Chevalier, but not about Tokyo Marble Chocolate, which I really enjoyed. I admired how successfully he managed to pull off its daring structure, and also to create endearing characters in such a short span.

Ep 2 of Sengoku Basara has him on storyboard and directing, with Kyoji Asano on AD. He's backed up by animation from none other than Norio Matsumoto and one of my favorite younger animators, Shingo Natsume, whom I haven't seen in quite a while actually. This episode reminds me of his episode of Chevalier in the feeling of tightness of directing it has. When he's able to focus exclusively on these two tasks, Naoyoshi Shiotani does great work, just like another director who this season debuted as series director - Atsushi Wakabayashi. His Guin Saga so far is pretty much what I was expecting: weak and disappointing from a director who in the capacity of lone episode director was able to do such brilliant work.

Shiotani started out as an animator, and I think it shows up in his work in this episode, in the most basic sense that he creates scenes that have a riveting effect on the viewer by dint of their combination of great animation with exciting pacing and staging. He uses Norio Matsumoto fantastically in the showdown in the field, adding these incredible colors and sketchy effects to convey the intensity of the gimmick of the series, where the battles between the heroes, which might elsewhere have been portrayed by something so mundane as a sword fight, are here magnified to ridiculous, landscape-destroying clashes of brightly colored light. I've never seen anything like these sketchy drawings from Matsumoto before, so I wonder if he himself did them or whether Shiotani modified his work in the studio. He uses Shingo Natsume for the exciting charge of the castle, and creates another great scene. I thought I was seeing Hisashi Mori at first when I saw that scene, but later figured it must be how Natsume is drawing these days. He seems to have been influenced by Mori over the last two years. The showdown with the old man also has the hair-raising intensity that is a perfect match for this series' overtly silly and anachronistic re-visioning of feudal Japan, with all its off-the-wall nekketsu energy, and looks like it might have been animated by Shiotani himself. I recall he seems to have animated the scene with the old man in his Chevalier episode, so he seems to have a fetish for animating old men. A refreshing change of fetish for anime.

I've never been particularly interested in Kenji Kamiyama as a director, mainly because he's so far been devoted almost exclusively to directing Gits, which never did anything for me and I never watched, so I've never really had the chance to examine his work as a director in a neutral context. I was given that chance this season with another show from IG called Eden of the East. In spite of its obvious title, the first episode turned out to be quite enjoyable and intriguing and got me wanting to find out more, which no other first episode this season did (including Sengoku Basara - I only watched it because it was fun). He has a unique perspective that comes through in the odd situation, with its very subtle hint of a political tinge coming through already. The character designs by Satoko Morikawa are very cute, but not cloyingly so, and a refreshing change from the typical cookie-cutter 'cute' that riddles the rest of the season. I've long associated her exclusively with the World Masterpiece Theater, as I learned her name from the amorphous, blob-like characters in Lassie. But she's come a long way, and I like how that lineage has evolved in new directions (although of course she adapts someone's design concept). The fact that Yoshihara Masayuki is co-director makes me particularly eager to see where it goes. I recall liking his work on the sniper scene in Kamiyama's Gits film, so the two appear to be joined at the hip these days. At first glance the show seems to be IG's answer to Denno Coil, with its round kid designs and its tone and content, but I'm sure it will develop in a very different direction.

I enjoyed the first episode of Cross Game at first, despite entering with skepticism about the need to create yet another Adachi Mitsuru anime in this day and age. It was a well paced and had a simple, classical story setup that was a welcome change from everything else I've had to watch, and it had an unexpected punch at the end. But thinking about it, I was turned off by the manipulativeness and ease of hinging the emotional impact on the death a child. I also disliked how the faces were impassive and unchanging across every emotion, as it seems like a good design, one that would warrant more freedom with the expressions, kind of like Ayumu Watanabe's revamped Doraemon. But I still liked the directing by Osamu Sekita, and it's a refreshing change from the look and material that dominates today's anime environment, so I might watch a bit more to see if it's worth it. It's been a long time since I was inspired to watch an entire series based not on its merits in terms of the animation or directing, but on the story and characters. It's interesting how, even in the spring of 2009, we can still get a new baseball anime. It's like without a baseball anime on air, people feel a vacuum that needs to be filled. Do young kids today still enjoy this sort of thing the way young kids (heck, back then the entire country) watched Kyojin no Hoshi in the 1960s? The tenacity of certain genres is impressive to me.

I think I watched or sampled over 20 shows, but that's about it in terms of stuff that was remotely bearable. Nothing too exciting this season. And I probably missed it, but I didn't notice any Madhouse shows this season, which was a real surprise. Instead, IG takes the spotlight this season in terms of interesting shows. Madhouse has been in the spotlight with great shows for quite a while now, so perhaps they're preparing for the next wave. I was honestly kind of sad not to see some more good new Madhouse shows.

I just watched Erick Oh's latest film, Symphony (2008, 5 mins), and I was happy to find that despite the difference in subject matter, it's just as wonderful a film as Erick's previous film, Way Home (2008, 8 mins), which so captured me a few months back when I saw it at a screening in Beijing. Erick has again created a short that feels like a perfectly honed combination of stylistic elegance, richly worked hand-drawn animation and theme simultaneously cosmic in scale and microscopic in character.

The transition from his previous film to this one felt like a kind of test. Namely, a test as to whether what made Way Home an enjoyable film was just its 'cute' (?) characters. I had no doubt that that was not the case, but this film confirms it. The characters in Symphony are not the cute bug characters of Way Home, but rather impersonal, shape-shifting blobs as far removed as one could imagine from the characters of the former film. And yet, the film remains just as compelling, and just as immediately identifiable as an Erick Oh film, revealing that Erick's skills were indeed the real star.

In Symphony we find ourselves plunged into a strange microscopic world, a sort of amniotic ether where protozoan-like blobs dash about the rocky crags in an elemental struggle to eat or be eaten. Suddenly, one of the anonymous blobs seems to awaken from its precambrian slumber, dashing off on a danger-fraught journey that has presumably never ended.

In terms of the animation, there is just as much nuance in the 'acting' of the blob as it dashes across the screen as there was in the acting of the dung beetle in Way Home, which is quite impressive, as it has no eyes or hands to emote with. A great feeling of three-dimensionality is created in the ether through simple layering of pure black lines and shapes. There are no shades or color in the film, just a gorgeously organic mesh of black and white spaces and forms. Just like in Way Home, Erick makes remarkably effective use of such spare means, resulting in a film of great visual clarity. The animation is tied closely to the movement of Vivaldi's Seasons that provides the background music, creating a symbiotic unity of music and animation.

In terms of the theme, the film comes across as thematically related to Way Home. Although Way Home did feature conventionally identifiable characters and a clear narrative, the film didn't strike me as being about those things as about a much more cosmic theme. Rather than being about characters, or a story, or even a message, both Way Home and Erick's latest film strike me as compelling explorations of a very basic concept that permeates every aspect of our lives and of the universe we inhabit: the macroscopic versus the microscopic. The films strike me as humbling reminders that we are not the center of the universe, that we are but part of a continuum that reaches far above us and far below us. It's just clearer in Symphony than it was in Way Home.

What fascinates me about Erick's work is that a film like Symphony, which is otherwise rather ephemeral in terms of narrative and characterization, somehow manages to get across a very clear narrative, and the audience can follow what the 'character' is feeling at every moment of the film, entirely through the nuances of the very active and emotive animation - such as when the blob recoils in fear, stretches out tentatively in curiosity, or soars through the ether joyously exploring its new-found freedom. The same could be said of the dung beetle in Way Home. I love Erick's films because he creates films that are not only beautifully animated and have a compelling and intelligent theme, but the animation is the voice in which his mute characters speak to the audience.

Way Home was made in Korea, where Erick obtained his BFA, while Symphony was made at UCLA, where Erick is now completing his MFA in animation. Since making Way Home, Erick has also made a very nice short film entitled Welcome to Vokle for a new social networking site entitled Vokle, which just opened its doors to the public last month. Welcome to Vokle is compelling both technically and thematically, continuing as it does to explore grand themes, this time examining no less than the history of humankind in one and a half minutes. Welcome to Vokle can be seen in its entirety on Erick's web site here. Clips from Symphony and all of his other films can also be viewed on his web site, erickoh.com.

Erick was kind enough to answer a few of my questions by email, so I'm happy to be able to present a short interview with this great young animator.

What made you choose animation?

As an artist who has a background in fine art with experience in other mediums like painting, illustration, etc, I consider animation to be one of the greatest art forms to convey my thoughts and feelings to others. It allows me to express whatever I want with the message as well as the style, ranging from narrative to abstract, traditional to experimental. One of the best things about animation is that the tool itself inspires me to blur all the boundaries between all the mediums. It mixes up all the great art forms like music, images and the narrative. The more experience I gain in animation, the more respect I find I have for the art.

What was it that made you turn to hand-drawn animation in this day and age, instead of CGI?

I just like hand-drawn images because usually I can feel the artist’s ideas and feelings sincere. However, I also admire CG-based animation and video art and would love to apply some CG effects to my projects in the future if it’s necessary. It’s all a matter of how effectively I use these tools. I’d like to be someone who uses these tools to create his own world, rather someone who just follows the tools.

Your films are wonderfully animated, with great technique, and a very unique style. How do you do it?

I made my first animated film in my senior year for the graduate exhibition. Since I was in a painting-based fine art program, I had to self-teach using all the references and video I could get online and offline. It was extremely difficult to learn all the techniques by myself but I think that experience helped me a lot with establishing a foundation in animation strongly and firmly in my own unique style.

What's your stance towards animation in your work?

Animation is a device that connects me to the world. I think my 'ego' projected onto the final product in the form of animation is the most sincere reflection of myself.

Any animators or filmmakers who influenced or inspired you?

Everything I see and hear inspires me. To specifically talk about one of the directors who directly influenced me with ‘Way Home’, I’d like to mention Michael Dudok De-wit, the director of ‘Father and Daughter’. I was very impressed by how amazing a film he made using the contrast between light and shadow and the beauty of blank space with his charcoal. Understanding how he made this beautiful film, I’d like to create a whole new world of my own with the oriental calligraphic brush. Leaving the ground in white color, I showed the passing of a day with just the change in the color of the sky and the tone of the shadow.

Can you tell me about the production process for Way Home and Symphony?

Pretty much every animation I did is traditionally hand-drawn animated. I usually use 30 frames per second to make the animation more fluid. For the camera and composition, I don’t really use any particular technique. After Effects and Premiere are basically all I use. There is some stuff I did in Flash or Maya though.

How did your approach change between Way Home and Symphony?

First of all, the message or the story I’d like to tell is always about my thoughts and outlook on ‘life’. As for the style and the approach, the project I just finished always influences the next project I plan. After finishing ‘The Bag’, my very first animation, I wanted to make a cinematographic film because the world described in ‘The Bag’ is totally surreal. The land becomes the sky, the food chain goes backward and everything is awkward in this animation. That was the start point with the style in ‘Way Home’. As you can see, the way I set the camera, the transitions from shot to shot, etc, all come from studying film. After 2 years working on ‘Way Home’, I was exhausted from dealing with all the cinematography. I decided to make a film that breaks the rules and blurs all the boundaries between everything. Because the interaction with the viewers is the most important thing I consider while making films, it was extremely hard to achieve both goals. After lots of experimenting, finally ‘Symphony’ came out as a film that is somewhere in the middle between abstract experimental and narrative character animation. ‘One’ is another experimental work I collaborated with media artists on as a sequel to ‘Symphony’. It’s more like installation art, but I think it’s meaningless to categorize things. These two works have received attention not only from theaters and film festivals but also art galleries. ‘Welcome to Vokle’ or ‘Gunther Sausage’ are pretty commercial and entertaining compared to other films. But I believe that the viewer will still be able to find my style and philosophy in these films as well.

Why did you leave Korea to study at UCLA? How does animation education in Korea compare to animation education in the US? And on a related note, how is the situation in the Korean animation industry? We don't get to hear much about that industry over here.

I can’t deny the fact that there is more opportunity in the US. It’s not about the education, it’s about the environment. Especially this city of Los Angeles is where all the studios and industries are all gathered around. I can’t really compare animation education between Korea and US since I studied fine art in Korea. But in my opinion, the faculty in Korea are not that experienced in animation because the history of Korean animation is quite short, compared to Japan or the US. Everything including the animation industry, education and culture grew up so quickly overall in Korea that it feels like we didn’t have enough time to put the right instructors in the right place. For example, most of the faculty in college animation programs are designers, cartoonist, filmmakers, critics and so on. They can still teach students, but the education can’t have depth. It is slowly changing and getting better and better. The facilities in Korean schools are really good though.

As for the industry, Korean animation studios have been doing other people’s work for the past 20 years. As far as I know, all the Disney movies and other Hollywood animations are actually produced and animated in Korea. That made Korea have really good technique and skills in animation but no creativity in it. We are definitely at a turning point right now. Various Korean’s own productions are coming out going over all the trials and failures. But we need this process to grow up.

What are your current projects, if you can say? And what do you plan to do once you get your MFA?

I’m working on this film as another story in my ‘Life’ series following after ‘The Bag’, ‘Way Home’ and ‘Symphony’. It’ll be traditional character animation just like 'Way Home'. My grandfather passed away last April in 2008. While experiencing all this sadness and missing him, I came up with lots of fragments of ideas. I developed a story out of them. The title is ‘Tree’ but it might change. I just started animating so I’m not sure when this journey will end.

After graduation, hopefully I’ll stay in the states working on this and that. My ultimate goal is to be left as an artist, not an animator or filmmaker. Of course the animation would be the main medium I use, but I’d like to always be flexible to borrow from other art forms or try different things blurring the boundaries of art.

One of the animators I discovered while watching Dirty Pair was an animator named Saburo Sakamoto, who died around age 61 in 1996. He was an interesting figure for the fact that he was originally involved with the famous Tokiwa-so manga group from the 1950s that included luminaries like Fujio Fujiko and Fujio Akatsuka. Instead of continuing down that path, he changed careers and became an animator, much like fellow Tokiwa-so member Shinichi Suzuki, who eventually went to work for Ryuichi Yokohama at Otogi Pro before co-founding animation studio Studio Zero in 1963 with many of the members of Tokiwa-so. Saburo Sakamoto was primarily involved in Toei and Sunrise TV shows throughout the 70s and 80s, having perhaps most famously been heavily involved as an animation director in the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino productions of the early 80s. In Dirty Pair, he was an animator in episodes 3, 5, 6, 13, 20 and 23 of the TV series.

I've mentioned several important animators who have passed away recently here in the blog, including Reiko Okuyama (1925-2007), Daikichiro Kusube (1934-2005) and Koichi Murata (1939-2006). Not surprisingly, many of the important figures of the very first generation of Japanese animation production are no longer with us - including Yasuji Murata (1896-1966), Kenzo Masaoka (1898-1988) and Noburo Ofuji (1900-1961), perhaps three of the most important figures from the very first generation who paved the way for everyone who came after. Kenzo Masaoka lived to a respectable 90, so he got to see a considerable many of the changes that overtook the industry since he left the world with masterpieces like The Spider and the Tulip (1943) - and not all of them good. More than 60 years later, the latter remains an unsurpassed achievement in many ways.

Two of the important figures of the next generation, Ryuichi Yokoyama (1909-2001) and Masao Kumakawa (1916-2008), also lived into their 90s. Masao Kumakawa worked under director Kenzo Masaoka as an animator, having animated the ladybug in The Spider and the Tulip among many other of the best pieces of animation from the 1940s and 1950s, even going on to work as an animator in the first few classic Toei Doga films until around 1964. Ryuichi Yokoyama, meanwhile, famously founded animation studio Otogi Pro, which I touched very briefly upon way back when and would like to expand upon eventually.

Otogi Pro notably featured one of the great animators of the next generation after Ryuichi Yokoyama: Shinichi Suzuki. Also from the generation of Shinichi Suzuki, but following a very different path from the latter, was Yasuji Mori (1925-1992), who seems to be one of the successors of the work of Masao Kumakawa and Kenzo Masaoka at Nihon Dogasha. Mori in turn went on to train and influence many of the figures of the next generation who worked at Toei Doga in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Daikichiro Kusube and Reiko Okuyama. Chikao Katsui was another now-departed animator of this generation who started out at Toei Doga and went on to work at Mushi Pro. At Mushi Pro, meanwhile, an animator named Shinji Seyama passed away at a prematurely young age just a few years after drawing, among other things, the animation of Aldin walking out into the desert in the very last shot of 1001 Nights. Thankfully many of these animators have lived full lives, but there have been a number of tragically premature deaths, and Seyama's is among the first one that stands out.

Both Koichi Murata and Kazuo Komatsubara (1943-2000), among the founding members of Oh Pro and among the greatest animators of the 1970s and 1980s in Japan, passed away what feels like too early, as did one of the greatest animators of the generation afterwards, Yoshifumi Kondo (1950-1998), who left behind some of the best work of each decade in which he was active right since the year of his debut in 1968.

A number of figures from the next generation have already left us in tragically early deaths, including Junichi Watanabe (1962-2007), a director who started out at Tomonori Kogawa's legendary studio Beebow; Hiroshi Osaka (1963-2007), who was very prolific and much relied-upon for his drawing skills as an animation director, leaving behind much great work as an animation director and animator, including work on most Bones shows of the last decade; and Toshiaki Tetsura (?), among whose most memorable work was his work as visual director, mechanic director and layout supervisor on one of Akiyuki Shinbo's best early works, Soul Taker. Among his last contributions was animation in the first two episodes of Shinbo's masterpiece, Cossette. Among other scenes, he animated the scene in the cafe at the beginning of ep 1. He was also heavily involved in Yamamoto Yoko under Shinbo on the mecha and effects side of things, as well as in the movie Shin Kaitei Gunkan (1995). He had a sharp, refined style as an animator that immediately set him apart.

TV Series (1985)

Movie (1987)

OVA (1990)

Dirty Pair was one of the big titles for me back when I was first getting into anime. It probably doesn't get much attention anymore, as the last 'real' installment was made more than 18 years ago, but for people like me who got into anime through fansubs in the early 90s, the Dirty Pair one-offs were fresh and new and among the various titles from the 80s that embodied the mysterious attraction of the form. The movie in particular pushed all the right buttons in terms of what I was wanting to see in my anime at the time, and was stylishly directed and well animated.

Well, I had myself a little Dirty Pair marathon over the last few weeks, and I've now seen every Dirty Pair item ever made. It's a pleasant show to revisit - among the few I've lately been able to watch in its entirety - and its evolution over the five years in which the various installments were in production from 1985 to 1990 offer some insights into the industry during that period.

The director of the TV series from 1985 and the last OVA from 1990 was Toshifumi Takizawa, who more recently will be remembered for having directed Samurai 7, so he serves as a good starting point for examining the series. His directing work seems to act as the guiding spirit for the show, setting the tone at the beginning and making the last statement in the very nice final OVA.

I personally remember Toshifumi Takizawa as having been the line director of my favorite robot anime, the terminal Ideon: Be Invoked movie. Tomino Yoshiyuki is the one who is generally remembered as the director of Ideon overall, and rightfully so. But when it comes to the last movie, reading has led me to realize that, besides animation director Tomonori Kogawa, it's line director Toshifumi Takizawa who was in large part responsible for giving the movie its legendary power and tension. He's the one who did the work of what we usually term director, or 'enshutsu', namely checking the genga, putting together all the material, etc - basically everything after the storyboard.

Takizawa wasn't long after having debuted when he directed the film, having been heavily involved in the TV series drawing storyboards and directing episodes. He relates that episode 39 of the TV series, which he storyboarded and directed, is the one on which he feels he finally achieved what he wanted as a director. He clearly learned much from the speedy, cinematic flow of Tomino's storyboards, and in the film he builds on that to create one of the most terrifyingly tense and perfectly built dramatic flows of any anime movie. This is clearly when Takizawa established the tight and speedy directing style that has come to define his later work. At his best, he is unbeatable at creating a seamless flow that threads breathlessly between drama and exciting action. Notable is that he himself volunteered to direct the film. It was his first great achievement, and remains one of his most impressive.

His next major job would be on that other classic Sunrise 'real robot' anime of the 1980s, Votoms, on which he served under chief director Ryosuke Takahashi as the 'enshutsu chief', in which capacity he drew storyboards and focused on polishing the final quality of the episodes in terms of achieving the right dramatic flow - having just proven his talent for just that on the Ideon film. It's not long after this that he directed the Dirty Pair TV series.

Takizawa only storyboarded the first episode of the Dirty Pair TV series, and directed none of the episodes. He appears to have focused his skills on directing the directors and maintaining the overall tone for the show rather than been in there doing things himself. The first episode is definitely identifiable as his work in terms of the nimble pacing and variety of the scenery and action, and the rest of the series shares something of this feeling, although it's overall not as tight as his own work.

The Dirty Pair series is unique among Sunrise's shows from the 80s, for the obvious reason that it's not a robot show, and for its more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek tone that sets it decidedly apart from the more serious and 'realistic' tone of the usual robot shows. There are transient moments of seriousness, of course, and people die, but the tone is something akin to that of the Roger Moore James Bond movies, in that the seriousness is subsumed within an encompassing atmosphere of nonchalant whimsy. It would just be ludicrous if they took themselves seriously with stories about cartoon madmen armed with laser satellites out to take over the world. It feels the same with Dirty Pair, and Toshifumi Takizawa is probably the one who guided the show in this direction as the director. He has stated explicitly his his dislike for dark, serious stories, and Dirty Pair provides a unique and grandly entertaining side-show on the menu of 80s Sunrise productions. And of course, this was a seminal show for its unusual protagonists and 'buddy movie' format. It had female protagonists, but was aimed at boys rather than girls, and they were strong female protagonists in commanding roles, rather than the docile girls of love comedies.

After directing the series, Takizawa was away from Dirty Pair until 1990, when he came back to direct the last OVA in the series. In between, he worked on various Sunrise shows, including drawing storyboard for ZZ Gundam and directing the Dunbine and Crusher Joe OVAs. Crusher Joe was originally a movie released in 1983, and it's in this movie that the first anime adaptation of Dirty Pair appeared briefly, showing up as a program on TV. Going back further, Dirty Pair was originally published as a novel in 1980.

While Takizawa was away, quite a bit of Dirty Pair got made by other directors. Right when the TV series was about to end in December 1985, an OVA entitled The Nolandia Affair was released. Revisited today, it's the blandest entry in the series, and not interesting in terms of the animation. The protagonists have a more adult design that comes across as a departure from everything else. The TV series had ended prematurely on episode 24, even though the script for the last two episodes had been written, so the last two episodes got produced and released as an OVA just prior to the release of a movie in March 1987, as a lead-in. Episode 25 in particular features some of the better animation of the entire series.

As much as I like Takizawa's work on the show, if you only watch one item of Dirty Pair, it'll probably be the movie, which is itself quite well directed by Koichi Mashimo, but just in a very different style. His distinct style with garish color schemes and loud musical interludes is on full display here and has actually never worked so well. The film also has the richest animation of the series, featuring plenty of great animators like Hitoshi Ueda, Sachiko Kamimura, Koji Ito, Koichi Hashimoto and even Satoru Utsunomiya.

A few months after the movie came a 10-episode OVA series released over the first few months of 1988. The OVA series is also directed by a different director, but holds up quite well nonetheless, and comes across as a higher quality version of the more light-hearted, variety-style TV series. Surprising names like Shinji Hashimoto and Norimoto Tokura even turn up.

Finally, after completing his work on the Crusher Joe OVAs, Takizawa returned to direct what turned out to be the final installment of the series in an OVA entitled Conspiracy on Flight 005. There was technically an OVA series entitled Dirty Pair Flash made a few years later, but it looks and feels nothing like the rest of the series, and comes across as a failed experiment to take the series in a new direction. The 005 OVA comes across as the true final word, the ultimate expression of how the Dirty Pair universe should be handled.

The final OVA is quite a nice OVA, and is one of the most satisfying installments in the series. It benefits from five years of added experience for the entire staff that was involved, including the director, the animators and the animation director, and so things have the assured feeling of the work of people who have learned how best to handle material they've been handling for years. Takizawa's directing is tighter than ever, with a dramatic finale that recalls the action of the Ideon movie, and most of all, the designs and animation are perhaps the most refined in the series. Character designer Tsukasa Dokite had by then continuously honed the character designs, and he brings to the drawings as animation director a more controlled line that gives the drawings new strength. The line and form of his work by this time kind of reminds me of Tomonori Kogawa's best work a few years earlier.

Which brings us to the other, more obvious, star of the Dirty Pair series - character designer Tsukasa Dokite, the man who created the sexy, daringly costumed designs that made the characters iconic and undoubtedly played a big part in making the series the hit it was. Dokite had worked extensively on Urusei Yatsura and then Maison Ikkoku, and this clearly influenced the development of his style, as the drawings in the TV series still have a whiff of Maison Ikkoku about them in terms of the arrangement of the features and the jawline. Dokite's drawings continued to evolve over the course of the series. The characters took a sharp turn towards the older and more realistic in the Nolandia Affair OVA, while for the movie he returned towards the younger TV series design, changed the costume a bit, and honed the design in a more cartoony direction. He continued to soften the edges over the course of the OVAs, and the 005 OVA represents his final word on the designs. You can see this evolution clearly in his character design drawings from each installment above. This evolution is obviously not something that's limited to this series, and probably to some extent is simply a reflection of evolving stylitic tendencies in the industry.

The opening for the TV series and OVA series, incidentally, are nice little films that showcase Dokite and Takizawa at their best at each particular period - Takizawa creating richly conceived, dense flows of entertaining imagery, and character designer Tsukasa Dokite providing some of his best rendered drawings of his own characters.

One of the things that most interested me in watching the TV series and examining the contrasting styles of each animation director is that so many different studios were involved in the animation of the show. Everybody knows it's common practice for the various parts of anime episodes to be outsourced, and I know it happened on other Sunrise shows of the same period (Anime R in Osaka and Nakamura Pro were major collaborators throughout Sunrise's history), but I was surprised at the extent to which this show seems to have been produced largely by outside staff, in looking up the names. It's obvious that this was not the Sunrise of today, with its ten studios allowing it to run any number of productions simultaneously.

I've been able to associate animators with no less than 10 different studios, partly because many times the studios are actually credited, and partly because I've been able to identify certain animators who were affiliated with certain studios at this time. I'm sure there are other animators who I haven't listed here who may have been affiliated with some studio at this time, but at the very least, from what I've been able to gather, the following studios were involved in the animation of the TV series. I list it here because it's an interesting list. It's testament to the intricacy of the web of interconnections that underpin anime production in Japan that they were able to produce a TV series using a small handful of animators scattered around at a dozen different studios.

Dove
  5, 8, 9, 12, 25, 26
  KOIZUMI Hiroshi, NISHIMURA Masayoshi, MATSUSHITA Yoshihiro, KANEMORI
  Kenji
Gallop
  10, 15, 17, 19, 24
  SATO Yuzo, TSUJI Hatsuki, ICHISHITA Satoshi, KOBAYASHI Kazumi,
  MATSUSHITA Tokuhide, SHIMURA Izumi, TSUKAMOTO Atsushi
Artland
  6, 7, 11
  MORIKAWA Sadami, OZAWA Naoko, YOSHIMOTO Kinji, YUKI Nobuteru,
  FUTAMURA Hideki
Mu
  13, 16, 25
  MURANAKA Hiromi, NAKASHIMA Miko, YAMAMOTO Sawako, KISE Kazuchika,
  OSHIMA Yasuhiro
Minamimachi Bugyosho
  2, 3, 7
  YAMASAKI Osamu, ONUKI Kenichi, TSURUYAMA Osamu
Kugatsusha
  1, 5, 8, 12, 21, 25, 26
  TAKAHASHI Kumiko
Hibari
  ISONO Satoshi
Graviton
  2, 4, 7
  SHOICHI Masuo
Doga Kobo
  18
Last House
  2
Anime Roman
  22

The proliferation of studios is enough to make you wonder if any of the show was actually produced at Sunrise, but there are plenty of staff I can't account for, and I'm sure that many of them must have been in-house animators. The first four studios listed were obviously the big ones in this series. The rest were more piecemeal. Some episodes appear to have been wholesaled out to certain studios, but mostly it's more of a mix of different animators from different studios. For example, episodes 10, 15, 17, 19 and 24 appear to have been entirely wholesaled to Gallop, whereas Dove animators handled only a portion of the episodes they're involved in. The same applies to the other studios listed above.

Studio Dove perhaps deserves special mention, as its members are credited by studio in every installment of the series from the TV series to the movie to the OVAs. The reason for this is pretty obvious - Dove was founded by an ex-Sunriser who had to move back to his hometown due to illness, where he continued to work for the company, and eventually started his own subcontractor. His company was the training ground for two of my favorite animators - Nobutake Ito and Susumu Yamaguchi. They've got numerous other Asian branches, including Seoul Dub, Shanghai Dub and Vietnam Dub.

Although some studios like Dove are credited, in other cases it took research to figure out that a particular animator was involved at a particular studio at this point in time. Dove is credited, but Gallop is not. I was able to figure out that those animators are probably Gallop animators because just the year before, most of them are listed under Gallop in the credits of Sherlock Hound, which was itself a Gallop production.

Studio Mu, the sister studio of Anime R in Osaka, is credited, and under the Mu credit you find the names of the animators involved from the studio - most famously perhaps Kazuchika Kise. Artland is credited in episodes 6 and 7, but not in episode 11, but episode 11 involves Nobuteru Yuki and Hideki Futamura, who were either credited under Artland in the previous episodes or I know to have started out at Artland. This is of course early in the career of these two animators who since this went on to make a name for themselves elsewhere with two very different approaches.

Osamu Tsuruyama and Kenichi Onuki, two of the main animation directors on the TV series, were among the founding members of subcontracting studio Minamimachi Bugyosho, whose ranks also include an animator named Osamu Yamasaki, who was involved in episode 2, 3 and 7 alongside one or the other of the former. Kugatsusha I don't know much about other than that it was Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's studio and it's where Kumiko Takahashi started out a few years earlier and was presumably still involved at this point in time.

Hibari isn't credited, but animation director Satoshi Isono of Hibari is present. He debuted as an inbetweener on the TV show and was one of the staff most ubiquitous throughout the various productions, working as an animator on the movie, as an animation director and animator in the OVA series, and as an animator in the final OVA. Anime Roman, Last House and Doga Kobo are credited, but at the bottom, so I don't know which animators credited, if any, were involved in those studios.

I wrote about Shoichi Masuo recently, and he was involved in the TV series. He was at Studio Graviton at the time. There are a few great mecha/missile action shots in episode 7 of the TV series that I suspect might be the work of Masuo. Other members of Studio Graviton were involved later in the series - Koji Ito and Tomohiro Hirata in the movie, Tomohiro Hirata and Toshiyuki Kubooka in the episodes 3, 6 (Hirata AD) and 8 of the OVA series, and Tomohiro Hirata in the final OVA.

The OVA series was similarly the product of a number of different studios. Studio Mu animators Harumi Muranaka, Sawako Yamamoto and Kazuchika Kise were involved in episodes 1, 5 and 9, credited as Studio Mu. DAST is credited in episode 4, Tatsu Production in 7, and Kino Production in 8. Katsuhiko Nishijima of Studio Live was in the movie and in episode 5 of the OVA series.

An animator named Tatsuyuki Tanaka is credited in the final OVA alongside Akira animator Hitoshi Ueda. The thing is, the last kanji in his name is different from 'the' Tatsuyuki Tanaka, so I can't be sure it's really him. But Hitoshi Ueda was involved in the TV series and movie, so it would certainly jive if he had discovered Tanaka while working on Akira between the movie and the final OVA and brought him onboard.

As far as the animation goes, there are numerous nice bits throughout the show. In the TV series, I quite liked the work of Atsushi Tsukamoto of Gallop, whom I presume to have drawn the handful of peculiarly timed but tasty mecha action shots that grace episodes 10, 15, 17 and 19. Masuo's work I mentioned before. Episode 25 of the TV series and 9 of the OVA series are two of the eps with the most interesting overall animation.

Dokite created his own home page over ten years ago, and put up a page featuring the cover sheet for the design sheets for each episode. Normally this isn't done for a TV series, but they had fun with it and got a different person to draw the cover for each episode's sheets. You can see drawings by a lot of the names mentioned above here - 1 is Dokite, 2 is probably Kenichi Onuki, 3 is probably Hiroaki Goda, 5 is Hiroyuki Kitakubo, 6 is Yuji Moriyama (who Dokite says drew one shot uncredited), 7 is Shoichi Masuo, 12 is Yuki Nobuteru, 13 is Hideku Futamura, etc... Surprising to see what kind of drawing certain figures were doing at this time.

This isn't a very original thing to write, and I usually don't pay it too much attention, but I was quite happy to see Kunio Kato win the Oscar for his latest short, as I've been a fan since his Traveler series, so a hearty congratulations to him for this. This award comes right after Kunio Kato just won the grand prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival. And more generally, it's great to see the Japanese indie scene get some attention. I'm sorry and bemused, albeit not surprised, that Waltz With Bashir didn't win. As nice a film as Wall-E is, it would have been justice to give this award to a truly great animated film that doesn't already have massive name recognition and the backing of major western studios. I don't know what to think about it not having been nominated as an animated film. I suppose it's testament to the unique position the film occupies - it could have equally well found itself in the documentary category.

I just re-watched Rojin Z (1991) for the first time in probably over a decade, and it was much better than I remembered. I knew looking at the staff that it must be quite nice, but it's been a long time, so my memory was hazy. Now that I've re-watched it, I'd almost say I like the animation here as much as in Akira. They're very different styles of animation, so it's probably not right to compare the two. But I find the more limited and rough style of the drawings and movement here, with its thick and obvious lines and rich and fun but not overly fluid or nuanced acting, more appealing somehow.

One interesting thing about re-watching Rojin Z 18 years after it was made is that almost every single solitary person involved in there has gone on to make a name for him or herself, although some may have already been more or less well known. The staff is just incredible, and I can't think of a better-endowed film: Mecha design by Mitsuo Iso, art concepts by Satoshi Kon, storyboard by line director Toshiaki Hontani, Tatsuyuki Tanaka and chief director Hiroyuki Kitakubo, and animation by Hiroyuki Okiura, Koichi Arai, Manabu Ohashi, Satoshi Kon, Kazuchika Kise, Toshiyuki Inoue, Hiroyuki Morita, Takeshi Honda, Koji Morimoto, Kazuto Nakazawa, Tadashi Hiramatsu, Michio Mihara, Atsuko Fukushima, Norio Matsumoto and Koichi Hashimoto... to name but the most obvious. It reads like a who's who of the best Japanese animators of the last 20 years.

And it shows up in the film. There is no end to the great shots of animation in there. One of the aspects of Japanese animation I've come to realize that I most like is the combination of spareness, interesting drawing and fun acting, as opposed to spending an inordinate amount of time and money to make things extremely smooth and polished. I can certainly appreciate finely worked animation, but it's only in Japan that you can find the former style honed to the sort of perfection it has been in the hands of a handful of great animators. This film is a classic example of how it's still possible to create animation that is interesting and alive enough to work in the context of a theatrical film, where normally one would expect more fluidity and cleanness, with an approach at the opposite end of the scale, using a spare number of drawings with more personality, although of course great work can be done with all sorts of different approaches. But it's just that this is the kind of animation that Japan is good at, and like how it's made an asset in this film. I just love the kind of animation such as that here where you can savor every drawing in a movement. It's a theatrical production, and I'm sure they used a ton of drawings, but the animation comes across as lighter and more in line with the typical concept of Japanese animation. Clearly this was a film to let loose and have fun with after Akira for Otomo, and I think that answers for the style of animation to some extent.

Be it the character acting in the first half or the crazy mecha morphing in the second half, I find that the animated element is always an inordinate pleasure to watch in this film, and clearly it's because the animators are good, not because an inordinate amount of time was spent on the animation - although I'm sure some of the animation in the second half must have taken quite a bit of work. I like the clarity and directness of the character designs apart from the heroine, with each of the old men having his own very unique wrinkly features and the various Japanese characters throughout the film drawn in a very appealing caricatural way that doesn't require them to be drawn in a distinctly Japanese manner for them to be nationally identifiable. That's something Otomo was very good at in his manga, coming up with new ways of rendering the Japanese face in a way that was realistic yet stylized in his own unique voice. And that's something we've seen virtually no one take up in anime.

In that respect, and in respect to the subject matter, with its focus on an issue of relevance in contemporary Japanese politics and culture - in other words, on a concept of reality that anyone outside of a particular Japanese sub-culture could comprehend - I find this film to be a beacon. It handles this subject not in a preachy in-your-face moralizing manner, but while being riotously entertaining and action-packed. I wish more films would be made like this, dealing with something of relevance to real life, especially with anime these days seemingly increasingly dominated by visual schemes and stories that bear little relation to most people's concept of reality. After he made the great Memories, rather than embarking on a 10-year Snark hunt that turned him into the Axl Rose of the animation world, I wish that Otomo had continued making films like this based on his innumerable interesting stories and idea concepts, using different crews to bring his work to life.

I was also very happy to find that Fumio Iida, AKA Suezen, was the animation director, as I've been a fan of his ever since the adorable Yad