Asian Cinema - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2003

Asian animation is in the throes of change—rapid change—with shifts in loci and methods of production that have turned the field upside down. No longer is animation the exclusionary domain of East Asia, no longer is it produced almost solely for overseas clients, no longer does it depend only on traditional materials of production. In the past five years, India has become a large production center of animation; service companies have entered coproduction agreements and have begun to make domestic fare, and increasingly, computers have wholly or partly replaced cel and other means of production.

Japanese animation is thought to have started when three animators (Oten Shimokawa, Jun-ichi Kouchi, and Seitaro Kitayama) released separate works at more or less the same time in 1917. However, very little research has been conducted so far on their personalities or their professional achievements. A major reason for this is that hardly any of the works they created have survived to the present day. So far, most research in Japan on these three pioneers has taken the form of literary searches. (Midorikawa, 1993: 1-42; Yamaguchi, 1978; Yamaguchi and Watanabe, 1977). But this research is inadequate from the viewpoint of the history of the development of animation -- i.e. how their work influenced the subsequent development of animation in Japan.

Kihachiro Kawamoto was born in Tokyo in 1925. He has made puppets since his childhood. In middle age, he started to create his animations by mainly using puppets. His puppet animations are descended from a Japanese puppet show, Bunraku. Jiri Trnka, Czech animation director, advised Kawamoto to learn it while Kawamoto was staying in Prague. Kawamoto realized that souls were inspired into puppets, when Japanese puppeteers operated them. In Kawamoto's animations, passions doomed to die were put into puppets. His animations were awarded many times in several world animation festivals.

Miyazaki Hayao's fourth feature length film, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), became an instant popular and critical success which proved fundamental in establishing both Miyazaki's and the Studio Ghibli's reputation as producers of the finest Japanese animation of the last two decades, a position confirmed by Miyazaki's triumph at the Berlin Film Festival this year. My Neighbor Totoro, like most Miyazaki's films, is centered on the world of children, and usually is marketed and discussed as a children's film. However, the film has also proven extremely successful with the international audience for Japanese animation, one that is characterized by (and often denigrated for) its preference of more mature, or definitively adult, subject matter.

Animation in China, stretching across an 80-year period, has had many milestones, including what have been described as the two golden ages––1957–1966 and for about a decade from 1978 to the late 1980s. This essay concentrates on the beginning years, 1920s–1940s, since Asian Cinema has already dealt with post-1949 Chinese animation (see Lent and Xu, Fall- Winter 2001; Xu, Fall-Winter 2002.)

The reason why Chinese animation has been identified with the fame of a Chinese School lies in its distinguishing characteristics. Chinese animation attained its typical characteristics in the second half of 1950s, and maintained these for the following three decades. These characteristics can be classified into two sections: those concerning an aesthetic dimension and its educational value concerning function dimension.

In December 2001 Just as Japan's "Disney" master animator-cum-director, Miyazaki Hayao, released his much awaited animation feature film, Spirited Away, in Hong Kong, My Life As McDull was also promptly released as promised by its production team. In retrospect, when Tsui Hark's much-talked about animation feature film, A Chinese Ghost Story was screened in 1997, it also encountered the lurking presence of Miyazaki's so-called retirement epic animation film, Princess Mononoke, which also went on screen just days after the historic handover of Hong Kong to the mainland Chinese government.

Taiwan's Cuckoo's Nest (aka Wang Film Production Inc.) was established by James (Chung-Yang) Wang in 1978 with help from Hanna Barbera. In less than a decade, it grew from a basement studio to two multistoried complexes and increased its output of 17 cartoon episodes to more than 200 yearly in the 1980s (Lent, 1998). As a result, Taiwan became one of the world's largest producers of animation in the early 1990s. The animation industry in Taiwan, however, was and still is, positioned in a dependent relationship within the subcontracting environment.

I met Malaysia s premier animator by chance. I had interviewed print cartoonists Rejab Had and Jaafar Taib all day July 21, 2000, and was escorted back to my hotel by Rejab. I was ready to relax after a tiring day.

In October 2001,I was lucky enough to be able to visit Laos for about ten days. Actually, the purpose of the visit had nothing at all to do with researching the film industry. Nevertheless, I obtained a certain amount of information on the situation of film and animation in Laos from the tourist guide who accompanied me during my stay there. Since the guide was no expert on film, the information he gave was fragmentary and included some gray areas. But this is a country where hardly any information has previously been obtained.

As such, I gave credit to the rarity value of the information I was given, and decided to reproduce it here.

Thai animation has come a long way in a short time. Writing the chapter on Thai animation for Animation in Asia and the Pacific in the late 1990s, I said one man, Payut Ngaokrachang, was responsible for much of the development of the field. That, he was, for Payut was one of the two earliest animators, directed the first and only feature-length animation, "Sudsakorn," in 1979, and trained many of those who followed. More recently, he has been largely responsible for Thai Anima 2003: The First International Animation Festival, has helped in the conceptualization of an animation association, and has lent his name to an annual award for best animation sponsored by Thai Film Foundation.

The three things which impressed me most about Indian animation during my two-year tenure as Festival Director of the Week With the Masters Animation Celebration, in Trivandrum, India,1 were the student films from the National Institute of Design (NID), projects commissioned by MTV-India and Channel [V], and the work of Famous's House of Animation, in Mumbai, a division of Famous Cine Labs & Studios Ltd. –– all of which are related.

Due to the excess of foreign television channels available to the city-dwellers of Nepal, animation characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck have indeed become regular household names. Even before cable networks had spread themselves through the maze of these cities, local video stores already provided a sizeable collection of western animation. Surprisingly enough, the same Nepalese audience found very little to talk about concerning their homemade animated characters Shyam or Meena. While an in-depth analysis of animation in Nepal is required to understand why these characters are not as popular as their Western counterparts, an inspection of the patterns and nature of the animation created in Nepal can certainly provide preliminary insights.

For several years until the beginning of the 1990s, Turkish cinema seemed to be suffering from a paucity of ideas, or a synthesis of experiences in relation to life as it is lived. Following the impact made by Yilmaz Guney and courageous works by a number of talented filmmakers, such as Ali Özgenturk and Erden Kiral, the momentum was gradually lost, taking with it creativity and originality. Several rural films were made — mostly by urban directors--as if to cash in on a successful formula, and leftist ideology was used almost as if following a fashion, without sincerity or conviction.

In 1958, Keisuke Kinoshita adapted Shichiro Fukasawa's Narayamabushi-ko into a movie with a strong flavor of classical kabuki, an attempt which met with great success. Some 25 years later, Shohei Imamura adapted the same novel for the screen with the same title, hereafter referred to by its English title, The Ballad of Narayama, which was awarded the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 1983. Keiko McDonald (1994: 124) comments that compared to Kinoshita's classical theatrical approach, Imamura's version is deeply rooted in realism.

The Philippine movie industry has been reported dying for several decades now. It was reported dead in the 1960s with the advent of fly-by-night companies and the proliferation of sex movies called bomba in 1970. It died again, according to reports, in the 1990s with the reincarnation of bomba into bold movies and the rising competition of humongous Hollywood high-concept movies.

The economic reform and commercialization of the cultural industry in the last two decades have greatly changed how film is made and consumed in contemporary China. From the in-flow of Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and foreign investment to the annual import of ten Hollywood blockbusters (starting in 1994); from independent film production companies to new regulations in 2002 which allow any citizen to apply to make a film; from film crew members getting involved in the production of TV soap operas and MTV to a new breed of underground art-house movies, the formal monopoly held by the state-run studio system has gradually disintegrated and the Chinese film industry, like other cultural sectors, is undergoing a profound transformation with more and more diversified products.

This interview took place at a cafe in New York City on August 19,2002 during Seong-Wook Moon's first trip to the US. He was in New York to screen his most recent film at the 2nd annual New York Korean Film Festival, and also to scout locations for his next-planned feature, a New York-based film on US/Korea bilateral relations. Ordering his espresso, Seong-wook Moon explained that he does much of his work in Seoul cafes, and parts of New York reminded him of the Korean city. We then spent the next few hours asking director Moon about his other cross-cultural experiences and impressions: Polish film school and movie-making in Korea; his thoughts on the state of contemporary Korean cinema; his status as an independent; as well as international directors and writers who have influenced and inspired him; the joys of digital filmmaking, and the latest feature he wrote and directed: the dystopic-but-lyrical Nabi {The Butterfly).

The Seventh Pusan International Film Festival was held from Nov. 14-Nov. 23 2002 in Korea's second largest city, Busan (Pusan). In its few years of operation, PIFF has established itself as one of the premiere film events in Asia. This year's festival saw a large increase in attendance, with more than 65 percent of the 226 films from 57 countries completely sold out; foreign guests and members of the press were present in unprecedented numbers. As in past years, the pedestrian mall designated as PIFF Square (where most of the screening venues are located, as well the bronze hand-prints of honored film luminaries) was filled with food vendors, soju tents, and booths promoting all manner of products and services related to film, creating a festive atmosphere day and night.