Film Name 冬の日 (Winter Days)
Programme Retrospectives (Kihachiro Kawamoto)
Director Kihachiro Kawamoto
Production Imagica, Dentsu
Country Japan
Year 2003
Runtime 105 minutes
Film rating NR

Showings

November 20th, 2005 - 10:00am

Summary

This anthology of short animation films is based a style of poetry unique to Japan called Renku. "Renku" consists of a series of linked haiku poems - in this style, a poet must use the last sentence of the previous poem composed by its previous poet. Thirty-five animation artists from both Japan and overseas gathered to make this film, including: Kawamoto Kihachiro, creator of the most astonishing puppet animation in Japan; Yuri Norshtein, a genius animation poet from Russia; Bretislav Pojar, the famed Czech animation artist; and Yamamura Koji, the winner of the Grand Prize at the 2003 Annecy International Animation Festival. Expressing a sense of season through their own style of animation, each artist portrays one of the haiku poems from "Winter Days" in the haiku poem collection "Basho Shichi Bushu" (Seven Anthologies of the Basho School), composed by the historical poet Matsuo Basho and his pupils in Nagoya. The latter half of the film consists of making-of footage for each animator's sequence, in which their techniques are also introduced.