Finding New Visions: Yamamura Koji / Animation Artist

"Direct Talk"

Our guest today is animation artist Yamamura Koji.

Yamamura's vibrant, exquisite, and visionary animation

invites the viewer into unknown worlds

and has won widespread acclaim.

In June 2022,

his latest film won a major prize

at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.

Yamamura strives to break new ground in animation.

He shares his creative process and his sources of inspiration.

I put a lot of feeling, my emotions or what moves me

into each line that I draw on the page.

And they move around in front of me.

A completely different time and space comes into being.

It's fascinating.

I would say that's why I'm so obsessed with animation.

(Dozens of Norths)

The film that won at Annecy in June 2022 is called

"Dozens of Norths."

This was Yamamura's first feature-length animation.

It was released in 2021 after almost a decade of work.

The story features a man and a woman.

They snatch a quill from a sleeping man, and head north.

Their long journey weaves through all sorts of strange "norths."

(One judgement ruined everything for him.)

Throughout the film, aphoristic statements appear over the images,

creating a fable about the fear and suffering inherent to the human condition.

The genesis of the film was a series of cover illustrations

drawn by Yamamura for a literary magazine.

The way this all started,

the way I ended up doing this cover art,

was that it was the year after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

It had already been more than a year,

and I was living all the way in Tokyo,

but I still felt this persistent sense of dread.

When a huge event such as that occurs,

it brings society to a standstill.

And actually, when I was making "Dozens of Norths,"

the COVID-19 pandemic happened.

And it felt like the whole world was brought to a halt all over again.

Normal life became impossible.

And when that happens, we feel anxiety, we feel pain.

I didn't want to represent that sort of event in a realistic way,

but rather, my initial motivation

was to create a film about those feelings, those sensations.

I wanted to see if I could do it.

I think this is always true of my work,

that it's really based on what's happening in my life at the time that I make it.

Whatever is making life difficult, the circumstances of your life,

different conflicts, different traumas,

when something like that happens to you, how do you keep on living your life?

That was one question

that I always had in mind as I was making this film.

At the Annecy film festival,

"Dozens of Norths" won the Contrechamp category

which recognizes unique works that challenge the audience.

In summer 2022, for the first time after the victory at Annecy,

"Dozens of Norths" was screened at an international animation festival in Japan.

Images of the film play around inside my mind.

It's a rare experience, and I enjoyed it very much.

It visualizes the deepest parts of your mind.

It was really interesting.

One of Yamamura's goals with this film was to find creative freedom

not bound by a linear story.

Generally, when you talk about "story," there's an initial conflict,

a sequence of events, and then a result.

To do that, you have to include scenes that you didn't necessarily want to include

such as scenes that explain what's going on.

But my idea was that if you only include the truly important moments,

they could actually come together to create the story.

That's how I see it.

So the film is a collection of images and scenes

that I wanted to draw for whatever reason.

What was most important was my drive.

I didn't have all the answers,

but I didn't want to kill that inspiration by trying to mold it into a story.

This is Yamamura's studio in Tokyo.

He draws almost all of his art by hand and on his own.

This is a scene from the middle of "Dozens of Norths."

Typically, he draws about 12 frames for one second of animation.

A five or ten-minute short can take him over a year to produce.

But he believes this laborious process pays off.

Working by hand leaves room for serendipity.

When I make art digitally,

it's simply putting the image in my mind onto the screen.

But on paper, I'm creating as I'm thinking.

Maybe the ink bleeds, or this paint and that technique

combine in some interesting way.

It's a dialogue with my materials.

I'm always rediscovering things,

and I think that's what makes an analog approach so interesting to me.

Yamamura grew up loving manga.

Then he became fascinated by how the characters moved in anime.

He started doing his own animation in junior high.

Honestly, it just blew my mind.

I had been drawing manga, and with manga,

the finished product is just a collection of images.

But the first time I saw those images moving, projected on a screen,

it was like I was seeing my inner self projected outside of me.

The experience was utterly horrifying.

It's a very vivid memory for me, that intense feeling of shock.

Then, in high school,

Yamamura encountered more artistic animated shorts.

He saw how deep animation could go.

When you hear "animation," you typically think of cartoons.

But these pieces I saw were actual photographs that went frame by frame,

and maybe the makeup on the faces would change,

maybe it looked like they were flying.

There was no story, just these shifting visuals,

and you got drawn deeper and deeper into the world.

That was really eye-opening for me

that something like that was also considered animation.

It was totally different from the anime we had on TV

or in Japanese cinemas.

It changed my concept of what animation was.

That was a big turning point in the path that led me to where I am today.

Yamamura went on to art school where he began creating animated shorts.

After graduation, he started his professional career as an animator.

In terms of video art,

I think animation offers a degree of freedom.

Of course, you do plan things out.

But often enough, you notice something in the moment,

and that's fascinating.

It's this limitless technology for understanding the world and yourself.

Fifteen years out of art school,

Yamamura released perhaps his most famous film.

"Mt. Head."

The 2002 animated short "Mt. Head."

The main character is a miserly man.

After he eats some cherries that have fallen on the roadside, pits and all,

a cherry tree sprouts on the top of his head.

Spring comes and the tree blooms.

Large crowds come to picnic under the cherry blossoms.

The man's patience wears thin, and he rips out the tree.

But the hole left behind becomes a pond.

Now completely at the end of his rope,

the man drowns himself in the pond on his head.

This surreal tale is based on a "rakugo" story.

Yamamura's retelling became the first Japanese film ever nominated

for Best Animated Short at the Academy Awards.

There's this line in the original story that's so cryptic.

"He leapt into his head and died."

Most of all, I wanted to visualize that.

You enter yourself, infinitely.

You find yourself in a place so deep you can't reach.

A picture doesn't have to be real,

and I think the image that those words conjure up in the mind

is a good match for the imagination you can use to draw it.

I have doubts about things that are supposed to be common sense

such as the world that we exist in.

Can we really believe in our own existence?

I think at the heart of my work

is a desire to answer those questions.

Yamamura is working on a new film.

It will be a short based on a Japanese short story.

Yamamura aims to visualize Japanese characters in a new way.

He's considering how to animate the sound of a dying man.

I'm actually thinking about putting a lot of writing into the pictures.

I want to blur the line between letters and pictures,

to create a world where it's not clear which is which.

Like if I draw the Japanese letter "あ", you read it, you hear the sound,

and various meanings, images and emotions come into your mind.

When you draw a picture of a character, you also imagine different forms and meanings.

It's all just shapes on a flat surface.

On this current project, I've realized that I want letters and images to fuse,

to become exactly the same thing.

In addition to his own projects,

Yamamura is also mentoring the next generation of animators.

Here he is teaching a graduate-level class at the Tokyo University of the Arts.

They're critiquing short films that the students have produced.

This class has broadened my perspective on animation.

You can do so many different things.

It's incredible.

I want to broaden the students' horizons,

help them think of things they never would have otherwise,

put interesting work out into the world.

Taking that approach, I try to be as involved as I can.

If there's just one more good animation out there in the world, I'm happy.

Something we haven't seen before,

something that expands the possibilities of animation.

That's how this field of art I'm involved in

will develop and become richer.

(Do you have any words to live by?)

I can't say I have a motto I live by, so...

I drew this.

There's not a single saying that expresses how I see the world.

That's why I create.

You could read this as "zero," as "nothing."

Animation starts as nothing, a blank page.

In Zen, we call this kind of circle an "enso."

As a circle, it represents the self.

A kind of complete self.

But the circle isn't closed, so an incomplete self.

I always start thinking from zero.

So I thought this shape seemed appropriate.