Tag: Japan Society New York Monthly Anime

Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama (ラーマーヤナ ラーマ王子伝説, Ram Mohan, Yugo Sako, Koichi Sasaki, 1992)

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Raised in a Buddhist temple after an early orphanhood, documentary filmmaker Yugo Sako became a great devotee of Indian culture and apparently fell in love with the story of the Ramayana while filming a documentary for NHK, later reading as many as 10 different translations of the classic legend in Japanese. Certain that only animation could do justice to this epic tale of gods and demons, he proposed adapting it in the style of Japanese anime which was then gaining in popularity all over the world. 

It was though a somewhat sensitive topic. Following a minor misunderstanding concerning Sako’s documentary, complaints were submitted to the Japanese Embassy on behalf of religious organisations who objected to the film on the grounds that it was inappropriate for a Japanese company to adapt their national epic, that their culture was being misappropriated and that they worried the animation format may damage the ethics of the tale. Working with veteran director Ram Mohan, Sako had wanted to make the film in India with Indian animators but given all the difficulties he faced eventually decided to produce it in Japan bringing Mohan and other consultants with him to advise the Japanese animation team how best to reflect the local culture. 

Starring a cast of Indian actors, the film was released first in an English-language audio version only later dubbed into Hindi. In essence it follows Prince Rama (Nikhil Kapoor), the seventh of Lord Vishnu’s 10 incarnations and the first son of a good king, Dasharatha (Bulbul Mukherjee), who rules the happy and prosperous kingdom of Ayodhya. Rama is first called on to deal with a cannibalistic mother and son demon tag team terrorising the local forest but must then tackle the evil demon king Ravana (Uday Mathan) who kidnaps his beautiful wife, Sita (Rael Padmasee), in an attempt to intimidate him during a particularly low point in which he has been exiled to forest for 14 years because of some otherwise fairly gentle palace intrigue. Perhaps surprisingly, each of Rama’s three brothers are also goodhearted and righteous, possessing no desire to unseat him or usurp the throne for themselves despite the machinations of some around them. Rama is also well loved by his people who can see that he is a righteous person prepared to risk his life killing demons to protect them. 

Yet the lesson he learns through his journey to defeat Ravan’s darkness once and for all while rescuing Sita, is that it’s more important to be a good person than it is to be a good warrior. He laments that so many have lost their lives in this “avoidable war” and dreams of the day such sacrifices will no longer be necessary while even Sita begins to feel guilty on realising that people from a series of different kingdoms have died to win her freedom. Rama earns the censure of his brother Lakshman (Mishal Varma) when he suggests burning the bodies of fallen soldiers on both sides together, reflecting that they are all the same now and were so even before they died as were the creatures of the mountains and the sea. 

Even so, the difference is stark between the gloomy and ominous castle where Ravan holds court and the bright and airy chambers of government in Dasharatha’s home. The animation style is strongly reminiscent of the contemporary work of Studio Ghibli particularly in its depictions of the natural world along with the various demons with whom Rama comes into conflict which may not be surprising given that several key members of the creative team were Ghibli alumni. Yet it also reflects its Indian influences, featuring a soundtrack of traditional music along with several songs performed in sanskrit, musical sequences otherwise not generally a feature of this kind of animation in Japan. Epic in nature, it also employs the voice of a storyteller to fill in the blanks as Rama progresses from one adventure to the next while chasing his quest to free the world from darkness and war as represented by venal Ravan who is not above using trickery to disadvantage his foes nor wilfully sacrificing the lives of his men. Sadly, given the controversy which surrounded it, the film struggled at the box office and was largely relegated to a handful of festival screenings before being rediscovered by its intended audience after India’s Cartoon Network began regularly screening it finally allowing the film to take its place in animation history.

Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama screens at Japan Society New York on Jan. 20 as part of the Monthly Anime series.

Restoration trailer (Japanese narration, English voice track)

Japan Society Announces January 2023 Monthly Classics & Anime

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Japan Society New York has announced the titles for its Monthly Classics and Anime strands for January 2023.

Jan. 18, 7pm: A Fugitive from the Past

World Theatrical Premiere of 4K restoration. Introduced by John David Baldwin, creator of http://www.uchidatomu.com/ and contributor to Arrow’s recent blu-ray release.

Also known as The Straits of Hunger, Tomu Uchida’s late career masterpiece stars Rentaro Mikuni as a man whose attempts to start again in the post-war era are frustrated by the reappearance of a woman from his past. Review.

Jan. 20, 7pm: Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama

Indo-Japanese co-production 10 years in the making adapting the sanskrit epic in which exiled prince Rama retreats to the forest where he incurs the wrath of the demon king Ravana. When his beautiful wife Sita is kidnapped, be becomes embroiled in a battle which will decide the fate of the kingdom.

The screenings take place in January, 2023 at Japan Society New York. Tickets priced at $15 / $12 students & seniors, and $5 Japan Society Members are on sale now via the official website and you can also keep up with all the year-round events by following Japan Society Film on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

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© 1988 Studio Ghibli

“Trees and people used to be good friends” explains a father to his little girls newly arrived in the idyllic countryside of post-war Japan seeking respite from the destructive modernity that has made their mother ill. Released alongside the harrowing wartime drama Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ, Tonari no Totoro) is a charming tale of childhood adventure if not quite without its shades of darkness in which two sisters embrace the wonder of the natural world while trying to come to terms with mortality and the uncertainties of adulthood. 

Satsuki (Noriko Hidaka) and her younger sister Mei (Chika Sakamoto) have moved into a large, ramshackle house in a rural village on the outskirts of Tokyo for the benefit of their mother’s health while she remains in hospital a few miles away. Living with their cheerful father (Shigesato Itoi), a professor in the city, the girls rejoice in exploring their new environment learning of the dust bunnies that inhabited their home before they moved in. An old lady from the village (Tanie Kitabayashi) who’s come to help keep house until the girls’ mother returns home explains that she could see the “soot spreaders” too when she was a child but presumably not anymore. The idea that the soot speakers will soon move on appears to make the sisters sad, and everyone including the parents is quite excited about the idea of living in a “haunted house” even if it’s one that rattles a little in the wind. It’s younger sister Mei who later follows the trail of acorns that mysteriously appear in their home and encounters a series of strange forest creatures she names “Totoro” that eventually introduce the girls to a parallel world of magic and fantasy. 

Their father probably doesn’t believe them, but indulges the girls’ stories and adventures while encouraging them to embrace a sense of wonder in their environment along with something deeper and older than contemporary modernity. “You probably met the king of this forest” he explains to Mei, pausing to offer a word of thanks to the ancient tree he says first drew him to the house that will be their new family home. Whether Totoro is “real” or simply a childish fantasy he helps the sisters escape their anxiety over their mother’s absence, not least by introducing them to new life in the seeds the girls plant in their garden and patiently wait to grow. The oldest, Satsuki, is perhaps a little more aware, worried that her father might not have told her everything about her mother’s condition and processing the idea that there is a possibility she won’t come home to them. She wants to protect her sister from the same fears but perhaps can’t, eventually losing her patience with her and instantly regretful when Mei goes off in a huff and gets lost.

There is darkness in the village too, a floating sandal in a nearby lake giving rise to fears that a child may have fallen in and drowned, but there’s also the gentle strength of the community in the kindly old lady and her shy grandson Kanta (Toshiyuki Amagasa) along with all the other villagers who come out in force to look for Mei fearing she may have tried to visit her mother at the hospital on her own. The old lady prays furiously while muttering Buddhist sutras and it’s probably not a coincidence that Mei sits by a row of Jizo statues after realising that she’s lost not knowing what to do. The girls are always careful to offer thanks at the Jizo shrine just as their father thanked the tree though it’s Totoro and the Catbus that eventually bring them back together echoing a sense that in a just world kindness will always be repaid. 

The countryside is in many ways closer to that just world, largely free of the evils of modernity such as the pollution of industry that has corrupted the cities. Technology is often unreliable, dad’s train is late, telegrams bring bad news, and telephone calls result in anxious waits, but life in the village is peaceful and happy and the people help each other when times are hard. It may be an idealised vision of rural living, but there’s no denying its appeal. Evoking a sense of nostalgia in its beautifully painted backgrounds, Miyazaki’s gentle drama is like much of his work an advocation for the importance of nature as a source of healing but equally for wonder in the fantastical adventures of two little girls finding strength and possibility in the heart of the forest.

My Neighbor Totoro screens on 35mm at Japan Society New York on Nov.4 as part of the Monthly Anime series. Japan Society will also be hosting a talk with puppet artist Basil Twist on Nov. 10 delving behind the scenes of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s currently running stage adaptation.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 1988 Studio Ghibli

Angel’s Egg (天使のたまご, Mamoru Oshii, 1985)

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How do you go on living in a ruined world? In Mamoru Oshii’s surrealist animation Angel’s Egg (天使のたまご, Tenshi no Tamago), a solitary young girl and a nihilistic soldier find themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide one living by faith alone and the other needing proof yet in his own way seeking signs of salvation. “You have to break an egg if you are to know what is inside” the soldier tells the girl, yet the girl knows that to break the egg open is to forever destroy what it represents however fragile or illusionary that may be. 

In a distant time, a vast ship lands in a desert on an apparently ravaged world. Meanwhile, a little girl cradles a large egg, often placing it under her dress appearing as if she were pregnant. While roaming the land, perhaps in search of something, she encounters a young man in a military uniform who carries a weapon in the shape of a cross. The pair begin travelling together, but it soon becomes clear that they are ideologically opposed. The soldier cannot understand why the girl continues to protect the egg without knowing what, if anything, it contains while she cannot understand his need to know or why the simple act of faith in its potential is not enough for him. 

The egg seems to represent something like hope for the rebirth of a world humanity may have already have ruined. Both the soldier and the girl talk of a giant egg nestled in a tree that contains a kind of saviour bird who will herald the world’s recovery. The soldier quotes at length from The Bible and in particular the story of the flood, implying that they are in a sense still waiting for the return of the dove but while the girl feels a need to protect the egg, convinced that it may one day hatch, the soldier barely believes anymore in the bird’s existence. When he strikes, it is as much to crush hope as it is to verify it because this hope is painful to him and his life is easier without it. The soldier is a representative of a wandering people, feeling himself abandoned and no longer knowing who he is or where he has come from, yet clinging to a vague memory of potential salvation in the image of a bird in a tree he cannot be certain was not part of a dream. 

The pair find first the image of a tree, but to our eyes is looks almost like a circuit board hinting a technological advance that may have been lost. The fact that it’s a fossilised skeleton of a bird that they later come across may perhaps suggest that hope is now extinct and the egg merely an empty shell that represents only false promise and delusion. But even if that were the case, it’s a delusion that allows the girl to go on living, incubating a better future in the hope of the rebirth the bird would bring with it in the restoration of the natural world. 

“Keep precious things inside you or you will lose them” the soldier claims, in a way reminding the girl that it is not the material object of the egg which she needs to guard but what it represents. The soldier’s nihilistic despair is in a sense echoed in authoritarianism which he serves and which the girl’s faith undermines. The ship’s exterior is peopled with statues which later seem to represent those in prayer, the girl later among them fossilised like the bird as symbol of a failed salvation. But then, connecting with another self, the girl births new hope for the future, fresh eggs awaiting other hands and bodies to keep them warm in the belief that they may one day hatch. 

Working closely with artist Yoshitaka Amano, the world that Oshii conjures is one of complete despair in which there is only pain and loneliness. Perhaps the girl is no different than the fishermen chasing shadowy ghosts of whales as they float through the air in what appear to be the streets of a 19th century European city. A surrealist tone poem, Angel’s Egg is defiantly obscure in its ontological questioning yet in the end may suggest that hope’s survival is in its own way a kind of salvation. 

Angel’s Egg screens at Japan Society New York on Oct. 14 as part of the Monthly Anime series.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート, Michael Arias, 2006)

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A pair of orphaned street kids attempt to defend backstreet life from the ravages of progress in Michael Arias’ adaptation of the manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, Tekkonkinkreet (鉄コン筋クリート). Though the manga was first published in the early ‘90s which is to say at the beginning of the post-Bubble era, the film looks back to a scrappy post-war Japan embodied by the moribund Treasure Town, once a lively city filled with the promise its name implies but now according to some a lawless slum ruled over by the “Cats” and contested by yakuza determined to turn it into another “Kids Kastle” theme park. 

There is something particularly ironic in the desire to turn Treasure Town, a literal playground for orphans Black (Kazunari Ninomiya) and White (Yu Aoi) collectively known as the Cats, into a walled city taking something that should be free and charging for it while displacing the street kids who live there so that those whose parents can pay can be given a temporary illusion of freedom. To Black, this is his city and he will defend it along with protecting White who has an otherworldly simplicity and makes radio calls to the universe reporting that he has preserved peace on Earth for another day. In a way he has because it becomes clear that the two boys are a two halves of one whole maintaining balance and keeping each other in check. Innocent and naive beyond his years White cannot survive alone, but without White, Black would have nothing to live for. His inner darkness would become all consuming and present a threat to all those who cross his path. 

In a piece of poignant symbolism, White attempts to grow an apple tree by planting a seed in the junk yard where they live but is disappointed that it does not seem to sprout little realising that it cannot grow where it is planted because the conditions are adverse to its development. The same might be said of he and Black who have been abandoned by their society and are cared for only by a wise old man who gives them occasional advice. Their only desire to is protect their town in a bid to avoid yet another displacement this time at the hands of corporatised yakuza who see Treasure Town only as a relic of a previous era sitting on valuable land which must be seized and monetised. Only old school gangster Rat ironically enough agrees with the Cats, confused by the desire to erase community and history riding roughshod over the feelings of all those who have ever called Treasure Town home. 

Rat’s battleground is located in the soul of his protege, Kimura (Yusuke Iseya), who first says that he doesn’t believe in anything only for Rat to tell him that he should at least believe in love. Seduced by the consumerist promises of the duplicitous Snake (Masahiro Motoki) and his giant alien minions, Kimura nevertheless comes around to Rat’s way of thinking on learning that he will soon be a father. Like Black and White, he dreams of escaping Treasure Town for a house by the sea where he could live a peaceful life with his child but is trapped by contrary codes of gangsterdom if even if eventually realising that the two things he believes in are truth and love neither of which are very important to Mr. Snake. Black meanwhile is torn between his inner darkness and his belief in White, caught between nihilistic violence and the desire to plant a seed and watch it grow even on shaky ground. 

Designed by Shinji Kimura, the backstreets of Treasure Town are a Showa-era paradise perhaps stuck in the past in the view from early Heisei but embodying a scrappy sense of possibility. It has an uncanny reality as an organic space built and lived in by human hands that is at an odds with the slick uniformity of the gangster developers who want to turn it into a children’s theme park, the very embodiment of a constructed paradise that will halt the natural growth that Rat describes in reminding Black that Treasure Town will never be what it was but will continue on with or without them. Bringing this place fully to life, Arias’ surprising, inventive direction gives full vent to the anarchy of the source material but is in the end about the heart of a place along with the bond between its two protectors keeping the peace through complementary balance.

Tekkonkinkreet screens at Japan Society New York on Sept. 16 as part of the Monthly Anime series.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Japan Society Monthly Classics & Anime Fall 2022

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Japan Society New York has announced the lineup for its upcoming autumn programme of classic films and anime kicking off on Sept. 2 with a 35mm screening of Kihachi Okamoto’s satirical chambara Kill! and closing on Nov. 14 with the much loved Studio Ghibli classic My Neighbor Totoro.

Sept. 2, 7pm: Kill!

Screening on 35mm.

Inspired by the same source material as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, Kihachi Okamoto’s absurdist jidaigeki finds a naive farmer and jaded samurai turned yakuza swept into local conspiracy when seven samurai arrive intent on removing a corrupt lord little knowing they too are merely pawns in a much grander game.

Sept. 16, 7pm: Tekkonkinkreet

Landmark adaptation of the Taiyo Matsumoto manga directed by Michael Arias and following two street kids in a futuristic city who survive through pickpocketing only to have their territory contested by invading yakuza intent on building an amusement park.

Oct. 7, 7pm: Ringu

Classic J-horror from 1998 directed by Hideo Nakata and adapted from the novel by Koji Suzuki in which a journalist with a young son begins investigating a series of unexplained deaths among teens who had each watched a mysterious videotape.

Oct. 14, 7pm: Angel’s Egg

Experimental anime from Mamoru Oshii in which a young girl patiently nurturing a mysterious egg encounters a faithless man in a ruined world.

Nov. 4, 7pm: My Neighbor Totoro

Screening on 35mm.

© 1988 Studio Ghibli
© 1988 Studio Ghibli

The much loved Studio Ghibli classic in which two little girls discover a new world of wonders after moving to the countryside while their mother is ill in hospital.

The fall season runs Sept. 2 to Nov. 4 at Japan Society New York. Tickets priced at $15 / $12 students & seniors, and $5 Japan Society Members are on sale now via the official website and you can also keep up with all the year-round events by following Japan Society Film on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.