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Master
of Short Animated Films:
Animator Koji Yamamura
Koji Yamamura wields a variety
of tools, including clay, photos, colored
pencils, felt-tip markers, and ink, when
he produces short film series for children,
TV commercials, and other animated works.
Among his productions are Mt. Head
(2002), Bavel’s Book (1996),
Pacusi (1994–95), and Karo &
Piyobupt (1993). His films have been
screened in more than 30 countries and have
won numerous awards at events including
the Chicago International Children’s
Film Festival, the Ottawa International
Animation Festival, and the Hiroshima International
Animation Festival. He is currently a member
of the board of directors of the International
Animated Film Association in Japan and a
member of the board of directors of the
Japan Animation Association. Recently his
Mt. Head won the 2003 Annecy Grand
Prix and was nominated for an Oscar at the
2003 Academy Awards. |
These days
Japanese animation is a global industry
Japan can be proud of, one whose influence
on video productions and popular culture
has spread around the world. Such is the
fame of the country’s animated films
that a name has been coined for them: Japanimation.
But they are by no means all of a piece,
and one that stands apart from the rest
is Mt. Head by Koji Yamamura. It
was awarded the 2003 Annecy Cristal, the
grand prize for short films at Annecy, one
of Europe’s leading festivals for animated
works, and it was nominated for an Oscar
at the 2003 Academy Awards.
Usually the talk of the town will be a big
production rated as a commercial success,
but Mt. Head is essentially the product
of a single artist. This is precisely the
kind of work the Annecy Cristal aims to
promote, as Yamamura himself comments: “For
any artist involved in creating short animated
films, no honor is greater than winning
the Annecy Grand Prix.” A serious believer
in the idea that “animation is inherently
a sequence of pictures drawn by a single
artist,” he personally drew the more
than 10,000 frames that went into Mt.
Head, a 10-minute film, and he put the
whole work together with only the help of
his wife and two assistants. The budget
for the film came out of his own pocket,
and the production work, which began without
any guarantee of paying off, took six years
to reach completion.
Yamamura was born in Nagoya in 1964. He
created his first animated film with an
eight-millimeter camera while a junior high
school student. The style he began to express
then, a mixture of laughter and fear, can
be seen in Mt. Head, which tells
the tale of a miserly man who, after he
eats some cherry seeds, sprouts a cherry
tree from his head. “I wanted to portray
the humor and ugliness of human beings,
which stand out in sharp relief when you
change the scale,” notes Yamamura.
He says he based the film on a comic story
(rakugo) he remembered reading as a
child. “Recalling my youth, the sight
of a weeping willow on the riverbank where
we played in Nagoya comes to my mind. Perhaps
that is what gave me the idea for the drooping
cherry tree in Mt. Head.”
When he is engaged in creative work, Yamamura
says, he sometimes finds himself thinking
about the world of his childhood. “On
occasion I make use of people and scenes
I encountered when I was young.” Thus
if you watch his films, perhaps you will
get a glimpse into what Nagoya looked like
back in the good old days.
Speaking of Nagoya, it was in this city
that Matsuo Basho (1644–94), the master
of haiku poetry, assembled his disciples
to create the famous collection of renku
(linked verses) titled Fuyu no hi
(Winter Days). Now a renku anime, a series
of animated sequences linked like a renku,
is in production. Based on Winter Days,
it will be released under the same name
this autumn. Yamamura, who is one of the
35 animators from Japan and overseas participating
in this production, observes that “though
the words of a verse in a renku do
not change, the images and world they evoke
may be completely changed by the succeeding
verse linked to it. That is just like animation.”
Here we find a connection between Yamamura,
an animator who has turned short animated
films into a sophisticated art form, and
Basho, the poet who perfected the world’s
shortest literary form. Such collaboration
has the potential to reshape the concept
of Japanimation once again. |
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