A
version of this article appeared in The
Age,
July 14, 2012.
Think
of Japanese cartoons, and a host of stock images will likely spring
to mind: giant robots, futuristic cities, strange beasts. Yet
alongside the flourishing anime industry, Japan, like many countries,
has a tradition of “fine art” animation permitting freer
experiment with style and content.
This
year, the reliably wide-ranging Melbourne International Animation
Festival is devoting two sessions to new developments in this area –
one focused on students of the University of Tokyo course taught by
the famed animator Koji Yamamura, the other on a group of young
artists who call themselves the Calf Collective. Both sessions are
uneven but worthwhile, showing how animation has a special ability to
shift rapidly from narrative to abstraction and back again –
whether hinting at social or psychological disturbance, or for the
sake of pure play.
Mirai
Mizue's light-hearted Playground suggests a throwback to the
work of pioneer avant-garde filmmakers such as New Zealand's Len Lye.
Brightly-coloured, hand-drawn forms mutate and combine into creatures
resembling bacteria, birds or sea anemones, accompanied by a
“neo-primitive” percussive score that even includes what sounds
like a didgeridoo.
More
formally rigorous in its way is the mock-sinister Steps, a
brief skit in which the hapless hero is plagued by a tricksy demon
rendered as a luminous stick figure. Credited to a duo known as
“Tochka”, this is one of the most technically innovative films in
the program – transforming a human actor into a puppet through
stop-motion, while using long-exposure photography to record the
trail left by a penlight “drawing” in the air.
Other
filmmakers favour deliberately elusive forms of narrative,
dramatising mental processes that block and distort as much as they
reveal. In Masaki Okuda's Uncapturable Ideas,
black-and-white visual fragments evoking enslavement to routine are
interrupted by blasts of chaotic colour and noisy jazz that register
as threatening rather than liberating. Writhing like fish in a net,
the abstract “ideas” that haunt the hero are given just enough
personality to again resemble demons – or at least giggling
poltergeists.
In
Kei Oyama's comparably grim Consultation Room, a medical
diagnosis triggers an wave of traumatic fantasies, portrayed in
greyish pencil drawings that waver as if left out for too long in the rain.
A headless female body spins on a stool and splatters the walls with
blood from its many wounds; an actor in a dog mask performs on stage,
lifting a leg against another actor disguised as a tree. Everything
is studiously weird – a bit too much so to be truly disturbing.
In
contrast, Alimo's Island of Man contemplates lost time in a
corny, wistful style, with nostalgic voiceover narration backed by
piano and solo violin. The glimpses of a world left behind – a man dragging
a statue over the sand, a discarded toy at the edge of the water –
convey a conventional poignancy or a surrealism minus any erotic
charge.
Set
against a blank backdrop that recalls the parchment of a scroll
painting, Atsushi Wada's attractively deadpan The Mechanism of
Spring mocks the dream of a return to innocence, with a trio of
obese, infantile figures inhabiting a world of animals and enigmatic
rituals (the strangest image: a pudgy finger prodding at a furry,
phallic object that proves to be the antler of a baby deer).
Wataru
Uekusa's The Tender March comes closest to the tradition of
commercial anime, albeit distilled into a free-associative video-clip
format. Like a character in a platform computer game, a
schoolgirl with a backpack marches across the screen, while monsters
get on with their business of ravaging cities or simply bob by her
side. Nothing can shift the heroine from her straight-ahead
trajectory, although miniature screens that pop up around her like
thought bubbles illustrate how fragments of the passing scene are
preserved in the filing system of her brain.
The
comic-strip imagery and the bouncy repetition of the music maintain a
familiar mood of cheerful alienation. Why worry about anything,
when even the apocalypse is just another cliché? Yet the joke of
combining the bizarre and the mundane works the other way round as
well – suggesting how everyday life can feel like a scary,
bewildering struggle.
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