Pelleas.net | Masami Hata Filmography

Animated version of a hit NHK live-action drama. Excellent background art and directing by YAMAMOTO Eiichi bring to life this story set in the Meiji period about a young woman (she's a little girl in the anime) sent away from home to work as a virtual slave to feed her family. Interestingly, most of the characters are played by the actual actors from the live-action dorama, and the services of veteran character designer SUGINO Akio were even sought out to model the character designs after their live counterparts. The voice track was pre-recorded, a practice called 'presco' (for pre-scoring) which is extremely rare in anime. Isao Takahata used presco in the Jarinko Chie movie, and Yamamoto used it in the Animerama films, but other than that there are few examples. Oshin was Yamamoto's first big feature film (omitting his involvement in Yamato) since the last Animerama film, The Belladonna of Sadness, in 1973. Besides the use of presco, it is clear how much effort Yamamoto put into making Oshin a film which could stand on its own separate from the TV series. Production quality is high and the film has a taut dramatic structure considering the story was condensed from a long TV series.

Hata's character, the doctor, is on screen for only about 20 seconds about halfway through the film, but Hata jam-packs the short scene with movement and humor, and creates a memorable character in seconds flat. Hata's scenes in the Animerama films were similarly planned down to the smallest detail, and also featured characters in meticulously thought-out comic sequences such as the one in this film. (I couldn't help thinking the doctor resembles the coxswain on the boat in 1001 Nights when he laughs...) Indeed, this was the first time since the Animerama films that Hata was given the chance to actually animate a character using the "character system", rather than simply direct, so the doctor is that much more important as one of the few characters created and animated by Hata himself. He can be viewed as a distillation of the essence of Hata's style: a superb sense of comic timing, meticulous scene planning, and vigorously animated characters with plenty of body movement and highly elastic facial expression.