Animation of the Analogue Era - Cel, Cut Out, Stop Motion, Puppet, Pixilation, Cameraless, Sand, Pinscreen... Plus Experimental Films + TV, plus Assorted Visual Weirdness.
"If you want to see the West as you’ve never seen it before, go to Japan. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been few big Western phenomena in which Japanese creators have not taken an interest, then turned around and made their own. One of the most powerful imaginations among those creators belongs to Keiichi Tanaami, who came of age surrounded by the likes of Mickey Mouse and Elvis after doing much of his growing up amid the chaos and devastation of war. Born in 1936... he’s produced a body of work whose earliest pieces go back to the 1950s, and even the variety of media he’s used — illustration, graphic design, paintings, comics, animation — can barely contain his ever-expanding vision, a mixture of pop culture and and symbolic iconography drawn from America, Japan, and deep down in his own psyche.
“A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person,” Tanaami once wrote, a description reflected by his current work as well as that of previous eras.,..
In 1971’s Good-Bye Marilyn, Tanaami pays tribute to perhaps the most iconic woman America has ever produced; that same year’s Good-Bye Elvis and USA draws its inspiration from quite possibly America’s most iconic man. Tanami makes use of the imagery of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in a way no other artist has, though he was hardly alone in his fascination with the very fascination those figures commanded: Andy Warhol, for instance, also got artistic mileage out of them.
It was Warhol who showed Tanaami how artists of their sensibility could make a career. Tanaami first saw Warhol’s work on a trip to New York City in 1967. “Warhol was in the process of shifting from commercial illustrator to artist, and I both witnessed and experienced firsthand his tactics, his method of incision into the art world,” Tanaami once recalled. “He used contemporary icons as motifs in his works and for his other activities put together media such as films, newspapers and rock bands.” In 1975, after becoming the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy, he returned to New York to visit the magazine’s head office and took a side trip to Warhol’s Factory and took in what Warhol and his collaborators had been up to with experimental film. But Tanaami had already been making serious inroads into that field himself, as evidenced by the two aforementioned shorts as well as his 1973 animation of John Lennon’s “Oh, Yoko!” — a kind of early music video — up top.
Few artists of any nationality have hybridized the thoroughly commercial and the deeply personal as Tanaami, who got his start in advertising and not long thereafter was designing the covers for Japanese editions of albums by Jefferson Airplane and The Monkees..... Tanaami’s 2013 animation Adventures in Beauty Wonderland above shows how that integration has continued, taking as it does just as much from traditional Japanese symbols and design motifs as it does from the work of Lewis Carroll — a characteristically thrilling and elaborate aesthetic journey....
"An experimental animation created by Osamu Tezuka to explore the possibilities of expression. An animation that expresses the uncertainty of memories by combining photos and using pictures that emphasize deformation" - unknown.
(Turns out I have posted this before, and forgotten - a wry inadvertent comment on the fragile unreliability of memory in itself)
"An extremely witty and imaginative boy, he grew up in a liberal family exposed to manga and animation.
As a boy he also had a love for insects reminiscent of Fabre, and, reflecting the level of his interest in the insect world, later incorporated the ideogram for "insect" into his pen name.
Having developed an intense understanding of the preciousness of life from his wartime experience, Tezuka Osamu aimed to become a physician and later earned his license, but ultimately chose the profession he loved best: manga artist and animated film writer.
Tezuka Osamu's manga and animated films had a tremendous impact on the shaping of the psychology of Japan's postwar youth. His work changed the concept of the Japanese cartoon, transforming it into an irresistible art form and incorporating a variety of new styles in creating the "story cartoon." Changing the face of literature and movies, his work also influenced a range of other genres.
His impact on animated film was equal to that which he had on the manga world. The lovable characters appearing in works such as Japan's first animated TV series "ASTRO BOY," the color animated TV series "Jungle Emperor Leo", and the two-hour animated special "Bander Book," captured the hearts of the Japanese through the medium of television, propelling the animated film to tremendous popularity in Japanese general society.
Tezuka Osamu's work was exported to the U.S., Europe, and other Asian countries, becoming the stuff of dreams for children around the world. He also ventured into the world of full-length adult animation, exploring all possibilities of the field of animation.
In addition to his record of achievement in TV and commercial animation, he also received international acclaim for his work in experimental animation in his later years.
His enduring theme that of the preciousness of life, formed the crux of all of Tezuka Osamu's works. Tezuka Osamu, creator of a great cultural asset and gifted with an unbeatable pioneering spirit combined with an enduring passion for his work and a consistent view to the future, lived out his entire life tirelessly pursuing his efforts, passing away at the age of 60 on February 9th, 1989."
"... while still remembered as a Bauhaus designer, painter and teacher, Oskar Schlemmer’s contribution to dance gets little more than a passing reference. With one exception. His designs for his Triadic Ballet, which premiered at the Wurtemburgische Landestheater in Stuttgart on September 30, 1922 remain among the most striking and unusual ever conceived....
"The costumes or figurines as Schlemmer called them, of which nine of the eighteen originals survive, seven in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, are extraordinary. Even a hundred years later, they look strangely futuristic, like something from a science-fiction cartoon. Schlemmer only hinted at possible interpretations of them in his manuscripts. “Precision machinery, scientific apparatus of glass and metal, artificial limbs developed by surgery, the fantastic costumes of deep-sea divers and a modern soldier,” he wrote.
"Heavy and made from unusual materials such as foil, sheet steel, plywood, wire and rubber, they transform the human body into moving sculptures where movement is severely restricted.
"Gold Sphere is an armless ovoid torso. Sphere Hands is a figure whose handless arms end in swollen coloured balls. The twin Disk Dancers, whose heads and bodies are set with thin blade-like disks, move toward each other from opposite directions, appearing to slowly slice through one another as they merge together. Wire appropriately appears as a figure snarled within the coils of barbed wire. Made of wood, The Diver is armless, grotesquely deformed and comes with a strange oversized helmet. It’s original, housed in the Bauhaus Dessau, is apparently so heavy that it takes two people to carry it.
"Perhaps oddest is The Abstract, which it has been claimed was something of an alter ego for Schlemmer, who danced the role himself on several occasions. Split into unequal areas of light and dark, largely white with patches of red, black and blue, it comes with a large half-head, one-eyed mask and wields a dagger and a club. On top of that, it has a permanently outstretched white leg that cannot be bent, which reduces the dancer to limping or hopping around impotently.
"The female costumes do all bear some resemblance to a traditional ballet tutu, however. Perhaps that’s not so much a surprise when one considers that Schlemmer saw himself not so much as a radical but someone updating historic tradition for the new age with new materials and ideas.
"While detailed designs for the remaining costumes remain, the choreography is long lost. Schlemmer’s left many diaries, notes and sketches but they do not detail the steps and there is no known surviving film. Those notes do at least detail many of the floor patterns though and have been used for modern re-imaginings that challenge perceptions of dance just as much as the 1922 ballet must have done.
"Schlemmer was mooting the idea of a gesamtkunstwerk, a bringing together of visual art, dance and costume design, as early as 1912 after meeting husband-and-wife dancers Albert Burger and Elsa Hötzel....
"Having staged initial sketches for what would become The Triadic Ballet at a charity event for his regiment in Stuttgart in 1916, Schlemmer continued to design a formalised, plotless, three-act ballet, which he referred to as a ‘Dance of Trinity’. It had three dancers, one female, two male, in 12 dances and 18 costumes. There were also the three dimensions of space – height, depth and width; and three basic shapes: sphere, cube and pyramid. Finally, there were three basic colours, one for each act: yellow for the first, which was festive burlesque; then pink, solemn; then black, mystical and fantastic.
"The choreography itself was developed by Burger, Hötzel and Schlemmer in collaboration. Floor geometry and geometric shapes determined the paths of the dancers. The music was a collage by eight composers across three centuries. The programme for the opening night noted how the ballet flirted with comedy without being grotesque and brushed against conventions without becoming base. It also suggested that it might demonstrate the beginnings from which a particularly German ballet could be developed. The costumes certainly determined the movements of the dancers, who had to subordinate themselves to their rigid shapes, although, from his notes, it seems that restricting movement per se was not Schlemmer’s prime aim.
"In the premiere, Schlemmer danced under the pseudonym Walter Schoppe but, in a letter to Swiss artist Otto Meyer-Amden, he wrote, “As a dancer…I failed. I may be a dance director, but not a dancer.” The reviews were mixed, although the Frankfurter Zeitung commented, “The foundation has been laid for a completely modern ballet that is real art.”.....
"Schelmmer’s work was removed from the Staatsgalerie in 1933 as part of the now Nazi German government’s purge of art and by 1937, prominent Bauhaus artists such as him were completely ostracised.
"Schlemmer died in 1943 and the Burgers’ costumes were destroyed by fire in 1944.
"The ballet itself fell into oblivion until it was reinterpreted in 1968 as a 30-minute piece for German television by Margarete Hasting, Franz Schömbs and Georg Verden.
".... Schlemmer’s influence has reached outside dance too. lives on. Among others, David Bowie has twice worn costumes that closely resemble those from the ballet."
Bathetic ending to the piece: "in 2019, the American alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins adapted them and turned them into three giant inflatable fantasy figures that towered over the performances."
Surely this video is influenced by the Triadisches Ballett?
Ah, yes:
"The release of "True Faith" was accompanied by a surreal music video directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé and produced by Michael H. Shamberg. The opening sequence, showing two men slapping each other, is a reference to Marina Abramović and Ulay's video performance Light/Dark, shot in 1977.Costumed dancers then leap about, fight and slap each other in time to the music, while a person in dark green makeup emerges from an upside-down boxer's speed bag and hand signs the lyrics (in LSF). Other parts of the video were inspired by Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett."
I thought maybe also Fine Young Cannibals's "She Drives Me Crazy" promo but I had a look at it and not really.
Another pop-detournement, although not by the pop group itself: a fan-made video for Japan's "Suburban Berlin"
".... Freud would have had a field day with the animated shorts of the grandfather / bad boy of Japanese alternative animation Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928). His black, and often bawdy, sense of humour pervades the mood of most of his films. In his 1963 film Love (愛, 1963), a big woman with prominent breasts breathily gasps the word “Ai” (Love) repeatedly as she chases a man who is much smaller than her. The woman is depicted as being so desperate for love that she even embraces trees in frustration. In contrast, the man seems repulsed by her attention and races to keep himself out of her clutches.
"In one moment, the woman clutches the man as if he were an infant or a ragdoll and he transforms into a giant drop of water in order to slip from her grasp and escape. The man also chants the word “Ai” but in a less passionate, more matter-of-fact manner. The couple play a kind of hide-and-go-seek amongst a row of trees. The woman chases the man with a net as if he were a butterfly. Once captured, she consumes him whole, only to have him come out the other end and escape again.
"She chases him through a gallery lined with portraits of the man and through an empty café with identical tables. Their chants of “Ai” are sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted at top volume, increasing in tempo and desperation. The woman’s arms stretch out to an impossible length in order to grab the man again. In another scene, he stands on all fours like a doll on a leash and eats his food on the floor.
"The chase grows increasingly desperate with the woman beating the man into submission with a baseball bat, reducing him to a stuttering idiot in their shared bed, and putting a leash on him and taking him on a walk. The ends with the soundtrack fading out as the man leads the woman into the horizon like a dog on a leash.
:This animated short is based on a poem by Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川 俊太郎, b. 1931) with music composed by Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, 1930-96). Takemitsu is perhaps best remembered today for his composition of soundtracks for the films of great directors like Akira Kurosawa (Ran, Dosdesukaden), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes), and Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kaidan, Samurai Rebellion) and for his significant contributions to aesthetics and music theory. I am a fan of Takemitsu’s early experimental period, and his anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (experimental workshop) had a profound impact on the animator Yōji Kuri, who has used experimental composers like Takemitsu extensively in his films.
"The soundtrack of Love does not fall into the category of “music” in the classical sense, but in the postmodern sense of creating music using unconventional techniques and instruments. The recorded voices (H. Mizushima and Kyōko Kishida) have been distorted using a synthesizer. Sometimes the voices draw out, like a record playing at the wrong speed, or at other times they playback at pitches impossible for the human voice to attain. The tempo and volume is varied in order to create tension."
"Yōji Kuri is an animation artist most known for his work during the 1960's and is known to be of large importance to the history of animation. Known to be dark humored, independent and minimal artist, his work seems to capture a disturbing perspective of love and sex. Some such films as Human Zoo (1960) and Ai-Love (1963) depict this type of imagery and end fairly quickly. The time range for Kuri's work seems to be shorter then ten minutes, perhaps implying the shorts are more of a thought then a statement. He later produced an animation film The Bathroom (1970), it too was along the same subject matter as previous work. One part of the film at the end depicts butt and leg sculptures; the style and location (bathroom) reminded me of the TV show Shin Chan. Shin, a 5 year old boy whom is obsessed with human privates, frequently flaunts his rear and enjoys time in the bathroom. Yōji Kuri continues to draw today as well as teach animation at the Laputa Art Animation School." - animation blog at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"Kuri’s films have bite and he helped lift Japanese animation out of decades of cozy narrative cartoons into a new era of graphic and conceptual experimentation. His films mock and shock, attacking technology, population expansion, monotony of modern society while playfully toiling with the tricky goings-on between guys and gals. Witnessing the surrender of Japan during WW2, the devastation of his country followed by the quick rise of Western inspired materialist culture and rampant consumption, Kuri, like many of his colleagues of the time, questioned the state and direction of his society and world. One of his more experimental, stream of consciousness works is AOS (1964). Working with a vocal composition by Yoko Ono, Kuri takes the avant-garde artist’s assorted screams, moans, licks, and grunts and twisted them into a haunting and surreal series of black and white scenarios often involving discombobulated body parts of frustrated and repressed men and women who exist in cramped, isolated trappings – desperate but unable to connect or touch the other" - Chris Robinson, Animation World
"Ito Takashi’s second period, which begins with the short film Thunder (1982), adds many of these elements to the experiments of the first: light painting, superimpositions, mystical demons, ghostly voices. Although the number of techniques employed is multiplied, the principle resembles that of his previous films. Thunder is limited to a single space (what seems to be a university building), and a single gesture (the ghostly image of a woman veering and uncovering her face), and through a mathematical and arbitrary series of possibilities the film builds up expectations, disappointing them, bringing them to paroxysm and surprise each time the viewer believes the film has exhausted its systemic possibilities. A gesture of shame, of timidity thus inhabits a building like an monomaniacal ghost projected upon its walls, captured in a photograph, re-animated through stop motion, granted a half-life between the perceptible world and the imagined one.
"Thunder and the other films in this style—Ghost (1984), Grim (1985)—all portray retinal echoes of ghosts and televisions and lights, remnants of abandoned images, accompanied by insidious electronic soundtrack. And the temporal regularity of the stop-motion process in combination with the insistent sound creates a cinematic vortex through the repetition of its mantra-like image and sound.
- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).
"Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981 (Inagaki who created sound effects for the film was also a filmmaker and his classmate at the institute). He was rather a premature virtuoso.
"SPACY is consisted of 700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame according to a strict rule where movements go from rectilinear motion to circular and parabola motion, then from horizontal to vertical.
"The technique itself of reconstructing sequential photographs was already seen in the earlier Japanese experimental films during the 70s such as ĀTMAN (1975) by Toshio Matsumoto (he was Ito's teacher at Kyushu Institute of Design) and DUTCH PHOTOS (Orandajin no Shashin,1976) by Isao Kota whose influence is apparent in Ito's works. However, one finds Ito's style more complex and sophisticated, and utterly new.
" For example, in ĀTMAN the subject is a human being disguised with Japanese Noh-mask whereas in SPACY the subject is photograph itself. This, together with the last shot where the camera and the filmmaker (self-portrait) come into the same frame indicates the self-reflexive characteristic of his work. Compared to the two-dimensional "flip-book" style illusion of DUTCH PHOTOS, SPACY has vast spaciousness and dramatic sensation of movement and when it's accompanied by the sound, the film reveals the side of a fantastic film.
""Film is capable of presenting unrealistic world as a vivid reality and creating a strange space peculiar to the media. My major intention is to change the ordinary every day life scenes and draw the audience (myself) into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of films." (Takashi Ito, in Image Forum, Oct.1984)
" We were also enchanted with the fast speed of "automatic" camera as if it was computerized. The ecstasy of auto-machines which move beyond man's logic and sensation. And the filmmaker's desire to "get into" the film instead of possessing it. This ecstasy and the desire are common to all of his films including sequential photograph works as well as his other series such as THUNDER (1982) GHOST (1984) and, GRIM (1985) which are occult experimental "horror" films featuring the technique of bulb shutters and time-lapse photography. In his most recent works THE MOON (1994) and ZONE ( 1995), two styles are integrated under the motif of "dreams and memories".
"Artists by nature tend to despise their earlier works, not so much because they fail, but because these films, like adolescent loves, tend to reveal their motivations too plainly. Ito Takashi’s three earliest works shown in this retrospective—Noh (1977), Movement 2 (1979), and Movement 3 (1980)—are no exception. These early experiments reveal a desire to dissect time and space into their most basic cinematic unit—the frame—recomposing their space-time into the artifice of motion: the facets of a Noh mask, the spaces of temples, the distances between shrines…
"As these initial experiments develop, Ito Takashi’s films grow in complexity. This first architectural stage of film experiments comes to a head in Spacy (1981): the camera is placed in the center of a basketball court and progresses through its space-time at first along the four walls, the four cardinal directions of its axis. Near each wall stands an easel, and upon the easel is an animated image of the same basketball court through which the camera slides. Ito Takashi’s camera travels time and again through the reflexive image of itself through the sealed cinematic continuum, accompanied by the electronic spasms of a synth soundtrack. As the camera travels from screen to screen, from wall to wall, each moving image functions both as a screen and a portal. Ito’s animatronic camera animates the basketball court into jittery stop-motion impulses traveling joyous and playful across the court from image to image creating motion though photographic stillness.
"Play is the exact word to define Ito Takashi’s game on the court, for as in every game, this film posits its arbitrary constraints (the limited space of the basketball court, right angle turns, animated stop motions in black and white). Ito Takashi’s game begins following the filmic rules, before evolving quickly into one of inventiveness and surprise. The camera moves along invisible geometric patterns (not unlike the lines which define the game of basketball), and the spectacle of space is reinvented.
"Once these cinematic-temporal playgrounds are constructed, Ito begins to haunt them with phantom females, child-demons, light-ghosts, and plaster-mannequins. Bodies inhabit these re-constructed space-times, moving within them in skittish stop-motion spasms; animated dolls with blurry faces and limbs akimbo marking their presence as retinal imprints or analog superpositions. Throughout the rest of his oeuvre Ito returns to his animated iteration and variation in space-time as the foundation for his later experimentation, which grows in both breadth and complexity: adding variations first of rhythm and angle, then color, then frame size or shape, then adding characters and symbols, and finally dramaturgical elements woven into the formalist experiments. As his films develop, bodies find their ways into the frame, as do television screens, photographs, lights, hands, flowers always pushing Ito Takashi’s experiments into unexplored areas, however always motivated by the same obsessions.
- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).
"Yōji Kuri is an animation artist most known for his work during the 1960's and is known to be of large importance to the history of animation. Known to be dark humored, independent and minimal artist, his work seems to capture a disturbing perspective of love and sex. Some such films as Human Zoo (1960) and Ai-Love (1963) depict this type of imagery and end fairly quickly. The time range for Kuri's work seems to be shorter then ten minutes, perhaps implying the shorts are more of a thought then a statement. He later produced an animation film The Bathroom (1970), it too was along the same subject matter as previous work. One part of the film at the end depicts butt and leg sculptures; the style and location (bathroom) reminded me of the TV show Shin Chan. Shin, a 5 year old boy whom is obsessed with human privates, frequently flaunts his rear and enjoys time in the bathroom.
Yōji Kuri continues to draw today as well as teach animation at the Laputa Art Animation School."
- animation blog at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"An experimental animation created by Osamu Tezuka to explore the possibilities of expression.
An animation that expresses the uncertainty of memories by combining photos and using pictures that emphasize deformation" - unknown.
"Kuri’s films have bite and he helped lift Japanese animation out of decades of cozy narrative cartoons into a new era of graphic and conceptual experimentation. His films mock and shock, attacking technology, population expansion, monotony of modern society while playfully toiling with the tricky goings-on between guys and gals. Witnessing the surrender of Japan during WW2, the devastation of his country followed by the quick rise of Western inspired materialist culture and rampant consumption, Kuri, like many of his colleagues of the time, questioned the state and direction of his society and world. One of his more experimental, stream of consciousness works is AOS (1964). Working with a vocal composition by Yoko Ono, Kuri takes the avant-garde artist’s assorted screams, moans, licks, and grunts and twisted them into a haunting and surreal series of black and white scenarios often involving discombobulated body parts of frustrated and repressed men and women who exist in cramped, isolated trappings – desperate but unable to connect or touch the other" - Chris Robinson, Animation World
