Tokyo Loop: Mixing animation, manga, illustration, and graphics

13 Dec 2006 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Film / Animation, Japan, Music

Tokyo Loop: Mixing animation, manga, illustration, and graphics

From the Tokyo Loop collection: Yoji Kuri's clip “Funkorogashi” is a really funny one with a dog, several dogs, leaving a lot of dog dirt on the street and eventually plastering the whole city. The scenario ends with the excrements amounting up like a snowball similiar to the Katamari Damacy PlayStation game.

Tokyo Loop is a delightful compilation of 16 outstanding clips that not only show the rich variety of Japanese graphics, design, manga drawing, animation, and illustration but also reveal a bit more about Japanese culture and Tokyo city life. The colorful mix of animation styles will be presented from December 23rd until January 12th at Image Forum - the established filmmakers’ collective in Tokyo. PingMag talked to program director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita about the difficulties in organizing such events in Japan and how they managed to bring such different artists together to collaborate.

Written by Verena


Tokyo Loop flyer

Takashi and Koyo - Image Forum first came to life in 1971 as ‘The Underground Center’. It was then renamed to ‘Image Forum’ in 1977 when you established the institute including your filmmaking workshops. What was your original idea behind Tokyo Loop?

Koyo: 2006 is the 100th anniversary of Stuart Blackton’s animation “Funny Faces”, so we talked to renowned filmmaker Taku Furukawa about gathering a collection of clips to commemorate this event in animation history in Japan. Furukawa is in his 60ies and has been known as an organizer of independent animation screenings in Japan for years. That’s why we asked him and he was happy to join and collect all the artists.

Tokyo Loop program director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita

I heard that it has always been difficult to promote independent film in Japan…

Koyo: It’s basically very hard to make feature films here – and to show them. So in 1971 the filmmakers gathered to have several screening rooms to show their work. Then other filmmakers from Kyoto asked us to do the distribution of their work, too.

The basic structure established back then has been like this until today: we have an art house cinema in the basement and a weekly program for experimental independent films called ‘Image Forum Cinemateque’ that we show in our workshop space. Furthermore we distribute and have our own independent festivals.

Classic simplicity: As Masahiko Sato’s and Mio Ueta’s clip “Tokyo Strut” serves as the collection’s opener, it surely is the first to catch your attention. In a laid-back manner it plays with the most basic elements of 3D generating software: A mesh and the preview of several connected objects that serve as body parts, here a walking person and his dog. What a stunningly basic reduction!

Takashi: With ‘Tokyo Loop’ we wanted to show the fastness as well as the broadness of this kind of artistic media, so we asked various animators, artists and experimentalists to join in for our festival.

Mika Seike’s distinguished graphic style made its way to several international film festivals, including Rotterdam, Vancouver, and Oberhausen. Still from “Fishing Vine”.

How did you find the artists as some of them come from totally different genres other than filmmaking, like manga, illustration, or graphics?

Takashi: In addition to the animators we knew already through our festival, there were several others which we thought could make some interesting results - if only we would let them. But as we didn’t want to make a children’s animation we asked some contemporary artists that work in the field of modern art. Primarily we thought about some connecting symbol in the clips, like for example you could do with a Berlin collection and hence having the TV tower as connecting link. But regarding Tokyo there wasn’t anything that would fit exactly for this kind of mixture.

Kotobuki Shiriagari is a renowned manga artist. Apparently he doesn’t seem to like games too much – how would he else made fun of them in such a superb way in “Dog & Bone”? Shiriagari drew a minimalistic cartoon showing a game setting with a dog as the main character, or the player so to say. He encounters several really funny impediments on his way to win the game.

Koyo: So we have now 16 artists and their own version of the city, most of them live in Tokyo. Except for example Seiichi Yamamoto that did the overall score, a famous musician from the underground scene in Osaka.

The connecting tie is obviously the “Tokyo” theme – how freely could the 16 artists express their ideas around that?

Takashi: We didn’t give much restrictions to the artists and just told them to make a piece that is inspired by the city of Tokyo.

What about the soundtrack?

Takeshi: As we have very different visuals we thought we need something to keep the flow and the music could serve as an overall structure. So the soundtrack for all the different clips is supposed to be the connection.

Three years ago animation artist Koji Yamamura was nominated for the 75th Academy Awards’ Oscar for his animation Mt. Head. With his short “Fig” he yet again shows his brilliant anime skills.

Since it was only one guy composing the overall music theme for the various animations - how did he collaborate with the artists?

Takashi: Musician Seiichi Yamamoto never actually saw the clips before – but he imagined what could come up from each artist. The artists would make up a title or draw some images or stills and Yamamoto would then work with that material to compose the score based on that. After receiving the finished clips he cut his tracks according to the time frame of the clips. The result sometimes fit very well, sometimes it’s a bit difficult…

This is amazing! When you see the whole collection you instantly get the feeling that sound and visuals were created together.

Atsushi Wada’s animations have been seen at festival all over the world. With “Manipulated Man” he cleverly places his critique of Japanese society at the center of a carefully illustrated story.

Back again to the filmmakers: why did you choose to work with some artists that never tried animation before?

Takashi: We wanted to see how people make some movement for themselves. Also we wanted to see some new expressions from manga artists like Kotobuki Shiriagari.

Tabaimo is said to visualize the ‘dark side of Japanese society’. I see her clip “Public Convenience” more as a description of daily life with a good portion of black humor. Note that for the interior of a public toilet she uses patterns for the walls that resemble game settings. Furthermore in the clip the girls in the restroom seem to switch their clothing several times just as you would choose your weapon in a first-person shooter.

Koyo: Masahiko Sato is a commercial director originally, who became famous with his quite minimalistic works using rhythm. He made some PlayStation games, had a program on NHK (national TV) and made several short films. But this animation for Tokyo Loop was his first animation ever, I believe. Toshio Iwai is basically an animation structured media artist and also a TV programmer. He’s most known for a very avant-garde children’s show he conducted in the 90ies. This has been his first animation in a while.

Media artist Toshio Iwai uses a clock to reflect in a 3D manner on the invention of the phenakistoscope, an early animation device that didn’t make it through the 19th century.

Taku Furukawa’s “Hashimoto”: This acclaimed animation director was the driving force, inviting all the artists.

One of your artists is said to be quite old…

Takashi: Yoji Kuri! He’s 78 years old. In the sixties he made various animations going away from the ‘only for children’-theme. For that he asked other artists from different genres, like for example Taku Furukawa (“Hashimoto”), to contribute to an animation festival. So, choosing him for this collection could be a kind of tribute to his 60ies festival.

Nobuhiro Aihara’s “Black Fish”

As far as I perceived it, in Europe artists of different fields, like game developers, illustrators, or designers, don’t usually mix so much. Watching the Tokyo Loop collection - this doesn’t seem to be a problem in Japan?

Takashi: I think that over here artists don’t have such narrow ideas about ‘genre’ in general. The same applies to the younger audience. Still, this kind of mixture is not so common. For example Yoji Kuri (“Funkorogashi”) is regarded strongly as a credited animator and known for his animation festival. The same goes for the animation artist Koji Yamamura (“Fig”).

Maho Shimao’s “Tokyo Girl”

Koyo: Now this is our view, our own new view so to speak for this kind of mixture. People used to think only within the boundaries of animation, but we tried to broaden it with ‘Tokyo Loop’.

Thank you so much Takashi Sawa and Koyo Yamashita!

Kei Oyama’s “Yuki-chan”

Now here is what you need to put into your schedules: *Tokyo Loop screenings are from December 23rd until January 12th at Image Forum in Shibuya. Each screening is accompanied by a talk show at 7pm presenting the artists involved.*

For a detailed schedule and more information about the screenings, please visit the lovely Tokyo Loop website with all clips woven into a hilarious animated patchwork.

For fans: the Tokyo Loop CD is out at P-Vine Records with Yamamoto Seiichi’s soundtrack, besides Image Forum has just published a cute little book (also called Tokyo Loop) published at Dagereo, that fondly shows lots of stills of every single clip with more artists’ info.

The first screening has Taku Furukawa and Toshio Iwai as guests.

Next screenings are: December 28th with Maho Shimao as talk show guest

December 30th with Keiichi Tanaami and Nobuhiro Aihara

January 6th with Kei Oyama and Mika Seike

January 10th with Kotobuki Shiriagari

January 12th with soundtrack composer Seiichi Yamamoto

33 Comments

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  2. I really want to join but I wonder if there is English subtitle or …
    can I understand the animation without good knowledge of Japanese?

    (I have been in Tokyo for months but as you know second language is tough (in my case, third language.))

    Posted by: puri on December 14th, 2006 at 2:50 am

  3. me too. i have been in Tokyo for months, and i second you, third languange is tough.

    Posted by: Soyuzno on December 14th, 2006 at 3:28 pm

  4. a quick glance at the web site tells you that there’s no option for English text, so that should give you a hint regarding in which language the film will play.

    Posted by: erik on December 28th, 2006 at 6:31 pm

  5. Folks, these are actually clips with an overall score and rarely have any dialogue. So it shouldn’t be a problem at all, really.

    Posted by: verena on December 30th, 2006 at 3:15 pm

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  7. I’m very impressed! Yoji Kuri, Masahiko Sato and Mio Ueta, Mika Seike, Kotobuki Shiriagari, Atsushi Wada, Tabaimo, Maho Shimao, Kei Oyama… Their representations are brilliant and ingenious! Thanks because you introduced them to me!

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