WEEK 1: SHORT ANIME -liner notes by n. chazan
KICK HEART
On October 31st, 2012, anime history was made when the crowdfunded short film Kick-Heart ended its campaign with 200 000 dollars raised and over 3000 backers. Directed by Masaaki Yuasa and crafted by a small team of international animators, Kick-Heart tells the off-beat story of a masochistic wrestler and his sadist opponent, a strangely heartwarming tale of finding victory in defeat, like Tokyo Fist by way of Yellow Submarine. Yuasa is one of the most imaginative directors working in Japanese animation today, and uses the colorful, metaphoric visual style previously explores in works such as Mind Game and The Tatami Galaxy to craft a vibrant, vivid piece of animation, both a cunning character study and a resoundingly enjoyable piece of entertainment. Similarly crowdfunded projects have recently emerged to great success, such as Mirai Mizue's trippy experimental short Wonder and Studio TRIGGER's incredibly fun magical girl riff Little Witch Academia.
JE T’ AIME
Premiered at Annecy in 2010, Je T’ Aime is a short film directed by Mamoru Oshii as a tie-in for a pop song by boy-band GLAY.. Sometimes referred to as “the Stray Dog of Anime,” Mamoru Oshii is one of anime’s few great auteurs, whose most famous film, Ghost in Shell, explores the dilemma of human consciousness in world of cybernetic enhancement that makes it possible for people’s minds to be hacked and controlled. To give you an idea of how bizarre this director making a short for GLAY is, imagine David Cronenburg were making a video for One Direction. However, as this is Oshii’s final animated work to date, it must be seen as the fruition of themes Oshii has been exploring from the beginning of his career. The short portrays a basset hound (a recurring motif in his films, based on his own dog; dogs to Oshii seem to signify a compassion and humanity that is perhaps not found in actual humans) in a strangely depopulated world attempting to get a robot girl to play catch with it. It leaves offerings of tennis balls by a temple that she hovers in front of, until a thumb print on one of the balls triggers an shower of bullets from the robot, which then explodes. The dog, clearly disappointed yet toughly indifferent, goes on his way. The short is making a statement on faith which has preoccupied Oshii and is also present in earlier films such as Angel’s Egg. The dog’s devotion to the robot is clearly a form of worship, and the robot’s violent outburst leads to the destuction of the dog’s belief in a reward for his offerings, a loss of faith leading to the robot’s destruction. The dog was never going to get to play catch with the robot, but now it cannot even hope for this game that he is unable to play alone.
ON YOUR MARK
On Your Mark is the Studio Ghibli music video. The song, by pop group Chage and Aska, was given to Hayao Miyazaki to set to animation by the artists’ request. The video premiered in 1995 alongside the Ghibli feature Whisper of the Heart. The short is unique in the Miyazaki catalogue, working in an atypically pop cultural milieu with design elements straight out of Blade Runner. On Your Mark also comes at an important turning point in Miyazaki’s career, having recently completed his manga expansion of Nausicaä. Indeed, the angel bares a passing resemblance to Nausicaa, and the short can be seen as a farewell to the character. It is also the first Ghibli work to make use of CG components.
JUMPING
Osamu Tezuka is the God of Manga (manga no kamisama) and the Father of Anime, having drawn hundreds of massively popular and influential manga from 1937 to his death in 1989, and revolutionized Japanese animation with Astro Boy, the first ever televised anime series. Starting in the ‘60s with Tales of a Street Corner, Tezuka began to work outside of the typical constraints of children’s programming, producing a number of more experimental and artistic films, perhaps most notably the Animerama (“Animated Drama”) movies he made with Eiichi Yamamoto (often mistakenly referred to as the first hentai for their mature content), intended to bring animation to a more mature audience but eventually driving Tezuka’s studio, MushiPro, to bankruptcy. However, Tezuka kept going, and in the eighties, concurrent with work on his manga opus Phoenix and more, founded a new animation studio, TezukaPro, to facilitate further work in animation. Jumping is one of these later works, and although smaller in scope than his Fantasia-esque Legend of the Forest, is no less of a masterpiece. With a simple conceit of a boy jumping around the world, the short features Tezuka’s trademark mix of humour and pathos, with a strong anti-war message as with every sight the jumping boy moves closer and closer to nuclear war and a descent to hell that follows. When the boy returns home with a sigh of relief, it can be seen as a metaphor for a desire for piece in the wake of atomic devastation. Obsessively animated by Junji Kobayashi, Jumping is one of the most fascinating productions of Tezuka's animation career.
DAICON IV
In 1981, a group of Japanese college students put together a short animated fan-film for a biannual sci-fi convention called DAICON. This short, very referential cartoon caught the attention of Studio Nue, who hired most of the team that had crafted the short to do some minor animation work on a television program called Macross (later brought to North America as Robotech). With a bit of professional work under their belts, the Daicon team reunited for a second fan-film (with a little help from some friends they made at Nue, particularly Ichiro “missile circus” Itano) in ’83 and made anime history. The short they produced is a not only love letter to nerd subculture, packed to the gils with cameos and nods to beloved cartoons and movies, but an incredible piece of animation, a work that displays a craft, dedication, and care that anticipates the wonders that would be produced in anime over the following decade. And indeed, the Daicon team would be participants in these wonderful creations, as the group became animation superstars (particularly Hideaki Anno, for his work on the God Warrior sequence in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä), culminating in the founding of their own studio, GAINAX, in 1987, which would produce modern classics of anime such as The Wings of Honeamise, Gunbuster, FLCL, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
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