If you have been reading and getting involved with Japanese animation then it is likely you have heard of Dr. Catherine Munroe Hotes (website here), an academic that specialises in film who has been working with Nippon Connection on their animation section for quite a while.
Her wealth of knowledge about animation and her connections with animators of all variety means that her remit tends to cover the more artier side rather than the mainstream anime releases found in the Nippon Animation section. With this year’s festival in full swing, fans will be pleased to see that she is back with a special section called Animation Across Borders – A Selection Of Independent Shorts. Thus, when it came time to look at this year’s selection of animated films, I thought the best way to introduce them was to ask her(!) to inform readers about her selection of short films by female animation filmmakers.
I hope you enjoy the interview and find something you like
The theme for Nippon Connection 2024 is “crossing borders” and you have stuck to the theme by presenting works by Japanese animators based in Europe and East Asian and European animators in Japan, people who have studied in America and Korea and everyone presenting a variety of animation techniques for viewers to experience.
Despite having the theme as a guide, it must have been a challenge to select films. How difficult was it for you to put together the Animation Across Borders programme?
It wasn’t too difficult, because of the fact that independent animation directors in Japan are very outward looking in their inspirations and many foreign animators are drawn to Japan to work in animation. I work together with Florian Höhr (interview with Florian Höhr) on putting the program together. Since returning to live in Japan in 2019, I go to festivals and other screening events around Japan and put together a list of works that I think will appeal to the audience in Frankfurt. They want to see works that are thought-provoking and different from the usual fare. This year, we also looked to past works by artists in order to have a variety of works that show the diversity of from artists who are crossing borders in their creative journeys.
There is a variety of styles on offer. Vision by Cagil Harmandar, Crystal Plum by Kim Ye-won, and Deforming after Transforming by Fukumi Nakazawa appear to be 2D while Izumi Yoshida’s The Bridge is puppet animation. What were the charms of the films that earned them a place in your programme?
The festival has had a long partnership with Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai)’s Department of Animation Graduate School at their Graduate School of Film and New Media in Yokohama. This is due to the fact that we could get funding each year for a guest from Yokohama thanks to the city becoming a partner city with Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Since 2012, we have had numerous guests who are staff at Geidai including Kōji Yamamura, Yuuichi Itō, and Cagil’s supervisor, Taruto Fuyama. I thought it would be a good idea to have one of the graduates of the program as the guest this year. There were numerous talented people to choose from, but Cagil’s seemed the right fit because she moved from the master’s program into doing her PhD and is doing a lot of experimentations with her art that I think the audience at Frankfurt will be very interested in. I don’t normally have a lot of recent Geidai graduates in my program because they have their own program and I want to include students from other art colleges, but this year we have many because the program is so multicultural. Kim Yewon from South Korea is one of my favourites from the class of 2014 – I loved her film Everyday Sins (2014) – and I thought it would be great for the animation fans in Frankfurt to see one of her more recent works.
Fukumi Nakazawa’s “Deforming after Transforming” has such a unique aesthetic – heavily influence by her studies in Estonia. I loved that she is boldly doing traditional hand drawn animation in a time of computer 2D animation. In fact, she is part of a collective of young animators under 30 called MOVOP who are pushing back against the trend for animation to be completely online and digital. Izumi Yoshida’s The Bridge was suggested to me by Florian who had seen it at a festival in Germany. I love puppet animation and am thrilled to see a young person who has been studying in Poland working in this medium.
When I think of stop-motion, I think of Jan Švankmajer or, more recently, Takahide Hori’s Junk Head but Maya Yonesho’s three films offer a completely different approach to the art.
She makes stop motion animation in real locations – a mix of 2D and 3D. A lot of her work comes out of the fact that she makes her living doing animation workshops in Europe. This allows her to travel a lot and work with talented people from diverse backgrounds.
When did you first encounter her and her work and what was your impression?
I first became aware of Maya Yonesho when I saw the omnibus work Winter Days (2003) led by the late great Kihachirō Kawamoto which I first saw when I discovered alternative animation practices in Tokyo in 2006. Most of the Japanese animators in the omnibus were unfamiliar to me at that time and I set about researching them. Maya and I later got to know each other when I was living in Germany (2007-2019) – at the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film and when she was a guest at Nippon Connection in 2016 for my program A Wild Patience: Indie Animated Shorts by Women.
Could you explain to readers what makes her work different from other stop-motion animations and the effect they create?
Her Daumenreisen (literally Thumb Travels) are a kind of flipbook (Daumenkino in German) postcard inside a pixilation (stop motion of a real life location). They are at once a work of art and a journalling of her migratory life as an independent artist.
Just to zoom out a bit, what makes stop-motion animation special for you?
This is difficult for me to answer succinctly, but I have always preferred stop motion to 3DCG animation because there is a warmth and tactility that I feel lacking in straight 3DCG. I like 3DCG when it uses scanned materials like Possessions (Tsukumo, Shuhei Morita, 2013) which used scanned washi paper to give texture to the 3D surfaces. Also, stop motion animators are a special breed of artist. Their attention to detail and dedication to their craft results in works that are truly pleasure to watch. The Morc Comadori Animation Festival in Asagaya last year had Anita Killi from Norway presenting her work in progress Christmas Survivors and it was incredible.
Going back to 2D animation, Cagil Harmandar will be at the festival with her work. If I were to be glib, after viewing some of her early work, I would say that the tactility and physicality of anxious bodies and pastel colours made me think of Yoko Mizushiri.
How would you introduce her and her work to potential viewers?
Cagil is a Turkish animator who has studied at Tufts in Boston and is currently studying in Japan. I would describe her as an artist who is on a journey artistically. Her works are quite personal in nature and have a sense of spontaneity about them. She started off as a painter and approaches animation from the perspective of an animator, but her current project is about pushing boundaries artistically as she grapples with the nature of animation as an art form. I saw a preview of her lecture that she will do at Nippon Connection before she left for Frankfurt and it was fascinating and very engaging. I am looking forward to hearing how the audience at Nippon Connection responds to her work.
Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions!
My thanks go out to Catherine Monroe Hotes. You can read some of her work on her site here.
Animation Across Borders – A Selection Of Independent Shorts plays as part of the Nippon Animation section on June 02 at 11:30 at NAXOS cinema. The animators Çagil Harmandar and Maya Yonesho will be present at the event.
Cagil Harmandar was also at Nippon Connection to present Tokyo University of the Arts: Animation Shorts on May 30.