Beyond anime: a short history of independent Japanese animation

In partnership with JNTO

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Japan boasts a rich history of independent animation stretching back long before the emergence of anime as a global buzzword. But the pioneers and practitioners of this tradition, seeking to explore the aesthetic potential of a variety of media and techniques, have remained all but invisible to audiences beyond specialist festival circuits and associated artistic circles.

One early trailblazer, Ofuji Noburo (1900-61), was renowned for ornate collage animations such as The Thief of Baguda Castle (1926) and A Ship of Oranges (1927), fashioned using chiyogami, a traditional hand-printed decorative paper. Japan’s first animator to gain international recognition, with his post-war shorts Whale (1953) and The Phantom Ship (1956) winning prizes at Cannes and Venice respectively, Ofuji was honoured for his outstanding artistic achievements when the Mainichi newspaper established an award in his name the year after his death.

A less heralded contemporary was the intriguing Ogino Shigeji (1899-1991), who worked in the under-the-radar field of amateur small-gauge filmmaking. Ogino’s eclectic output included stop motion (Detective Felix in Trouble, 1932), modernist abstraction (Rhythmic Triangles / Fighting Cards, 1932; Rhythm, 1935) and experiments with an additive two-colour process based on Kinemacolor, a technique used in early silent cinema (An Expression, 1935).

One fascinating title is his eerily prophetic proto-sci-fi A Day After a Hundred Years (1933), in which the spirit of its protagonist, killed in 1942 in a speculative “Great World War”, is afforded a glimpse of Japan in 2032 by means of a “Magical Television”.

The tradition of the solitary creator continued even after animation had been industrialised with the establishment of Toei Animation in 1956. The countercultural zeitgeist of the 1960s saw several notable luminaries consciously positioning themselves outside the mainstream to pursue their own distinctive approaches.

The irreverent, often risqué comic sketches of illustrator Kuri Yoji (1928-) might have been cruder in style and ruder in content than what Toei were offering, but his absurdist takes on universal human foibles, with titles such as Human Zoo (1962), Love (1963) and Man, Woman and Dog (1963), earned him plaudits and prizes at many international festivals.

Kinoshita Renzo (1936-97) was more politically pointed in satires like Made in Japan (1972) and Japonese (1976), but also created a sublimely powerful call for peace with his portrait of the A-bombing, Picadon (1979). (Kinoshita and his wife and collaborator Sayoko founded the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in 1985.)

Celebrated ‘God of Manga’ Tezuka Osamu (1928-89) kept his feet in both commercial and experimental camps, lending his name and fame to Toei’s anarchic Saiyuki (1960) – a feature-length version of Chinese literary classic Journey to the West – and producing the Astro Boy (1963-66) TV series of his own comic-book creation while directing more aspirational works, such as the delicate poetry of Mermaid (1964) and the more grandiloquent Pictures at an Exhibition (1966), which won a second Ofuji Noburo Award for his company Mushi Production.

The first win had been for Tale of a Street Corner (1962), directed by Sakamoto Yusaku and Eiichi Yamamoto (1940-), the latter of whom later made Belladonna of Sadness (1973), a hypnotic hotchpotch of sex, sorcery and psychedelia that forced Mushi into bankruptcy. Tezuka later realised his masterpiece of animated artistry, Jumping (1984), constructed from the perspective of its unseen leaper as he makes a series of vast jumps through a parade of increasingly surreal locations.

• Looping around limitations: the experimental shorts of Tezuka Osamu

Two figures working in stop motion spent much of the 1970s handing the Ofuji Award back and forth between them. Kawamoto Kihachiro (1925-2010) was known for his hauntingly beautiful takes on the noh and kabuki Japanese theatrical traditions, staged using exquisitely fashioned puppets he created himself in the likes of Demon (1971) and Dojoji Temple (1976).

• Kawamoto Kihachiro, 1925-2010

The more playful and child-friendly work of Okamoto Tadanari (1932-1990) made creative use of everyday materials: Home, My Home (1970) featured a mole burrowing through earth fashioned from crumpled newspaper, while the stars of Monkey and Crab (1972) were fabricated from crudely hewn lumps of wood. The two were close friends, and Kawamoto completed Okamoto’s adaptation of author Miyazawa Kenji’s The Restaurant of Many Orders (1993) after Okamoto died of cancer during its production.

Like Okamoto, Yamamura Koji has demonstrated remarkable versatility exploring narrative possibilities using different animation media. He is best known for Mt. Head (2002), a wry recreation of a traditional rakugo oral comic tale about a tight-fisted grump who eats a cherry pip and winds up with a tree sprouting from his cranium, which was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2003 Academy Awards. Other Yamamoto works, such as A Country Doctor (2007), based on the Franz Kafka tale, and Muybridge’s Strings (2011), evince an inspiration that is more European in tone.

• Head trip: the animated worlds of Yamamura Kôji

Blocky motifs permeate Kato Kunio’s 2008 Academy Award winner, La Maison en Petits Cubes [pictured at top of page; available to stream on Crunchyroll], portraying a lonely old man literally struggling to keep his head above water by adding storeys to a one-room house as it is submerged by rising floodwater before willingly immersing himself in the emotional comfort of earlier memories.

Mizue Mirai’s distinctive hand-drawn work pushes further into the pure imaginary, with the organic patterns that occasionally approximate something recognisable in Fantastic Cell (2003), Devour Dinner (2008) and Jam (2009) giving the sense of multicoloured microorganisms swarming across a microscope slide, while the hard Cartesian geometry of Metropolis (2009) and Modern (2010) sit at the other end of abstraction.

• Free anime: Mizue Mirai, wizard of blobs and blocks

Such works, along with those of contemporaries such as Wada Atsushi, Yamada Naoko, Oyama Kei and Kurosaka Keita, demonstrate a thriving field of artistic animation in Japan that is far wider in scope than the mass-market commercial face presented to the rest of the world.

• Watch Ofuji Noburo’s and Ogino Shigeji’s early films and read more about their peers on the Japan Film Archive’s Japanese Animated Film Classics site
• Zakka Films’ The Roots of Japanese Anime – Until the End of World War II is available from the US
• Find all Tezuka Osamu’s films at Tezuka Osamu Official
• Watch Yamamura Koji’s work on Vimeo
• Watch Mizue Mirai’s work on Vimeo
• See frames from Wada Atsushi’s films at kankaku.jp
• Watch Oyama Kei’s short films on YouTube

Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) promotes travel to, in and around the country. Check out the JNTO site for bucket list itineraries, the ‘old normal’, travel on a budget and endless ways to escape into rural Japan.

Visit japan.travel and plan your adventure today.

BFI Player has teamed up with the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) to bring you some of the best of Japanese cinema, and a serious dose of wanderlust. These five gems offer viewers a tour of the finest contemporary Japanese films and a chance to sample the country’s breathtaking landscapes.

Kitano Takeshi, 1993

Location: Okinawa

A masterful gangster film about a yakuza sent to the beautiful beaches of Okinawa where he has time to ruminate on his fate.

Koreeda Hirokazu, 2003

Location: Tokyo

A heartbreaking study of neglect about four children left to fend for themselves.

Naomi Kawase, 2007

Location: Nara

A haunting tale about an elderly widower and his young nurse who get lost in a forest.

Okita Shûichi, 2011

Location: Nagano

A lumberjack in the Kiso mountains is roped into the shooting of a zombie film.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2015

Location: Kanagawa

The living and the dead coexist in this beautiful meditation on love and loss.