Kihachirō Kawamoto

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kihachirō Kawamoto first walked into the art department of Toho film studio in 1946 as a young production design assistant in his early twenties. What followed was a career that would take him from the floors of one of Japan's most powerful studios to the puppet workshops of Prague, to the television screens of millions of Japanese households, to international film festivals where his haunting miniature figures moved audiences who had never imagined an art form quite like his.

  He became the second president of the Japan Animation Association, succeeding its founder, Osamu Tezuka, in 1989. He held that role until his death. He designed puppets for beloved long-running NHK television series that Japanese audiences still associate with his name. He completed a film left unfinished by the death of a close collaborator. And he oversaw a project in 2003 in which 35 of the world's top animators each contributed a two-minute segment inspired by the poetry of Matsuo Bashō.

  How did a production design assistant from a major film studio become a singular force in Japanese puppet animation? The answer runs through a Czech maestro, a set of ancient theatrical traditions, and a lifelong devotion to making small figures feel alive.

• 2. The Toho Years and a Pivot

  ›

  So Matsuyama was the man who gave Kawamoto his first professional foothold. Under Matsuyama in Toho's art department, Kawamoto learned the craft of production design. It was there he met Tadasu Iizawa, and that meeting changed the direction of his life. In 1950, Kawamoto left Toho entirely to collaborate with Iizawa on something quite different: illustrating children's literature using photographs of dolls arranged in dioramas.

  Those illustrated books found audiences well beyond Japan. American publishers including Grosset and Dunlap and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint brought out English-language editions, meaning Kawamoto's meticulously staged miniature scenes reached children in the United States.

  His training in stop motion filmmaking came through two teachers. The first was Tadahito Mochinaga, who is described as Japan's first puppet animator. The second was the Czech animator Jiří Trnka, whose work had captivated Kawamoto before the two ever met. Seeing Trnka's films planted the seed; studying directly under him would eventually make Kawamoto's art bloom.

• 3. Prague and a New Direction

  ›

  In 1958, Kawamoto co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television. It was a practical enterprise, but commercial work alone could not contain what he was becoming. In 1963, he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation directly under Jiří Trnka for a full year.

  That year changed him. Kawamoto later described his puppets as having truly begun to take on a life of their own only after the Prague training. Trnka gave him more than technique. He encouraged Kawamoto to draw on Japan's own cultural heritage rather than imitate European styles.

  Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia and took that advice literally. He looked to Nō theater, to bunraku-style puppetry, and to kabuki for the aesthetic foundations of his independent work. His first independently produced short film under this new direction was Breaking of Branches is Forbidden, known in Japanese as Hana-Ori, released in 1968. It launched a series of highly individual artistic works that would win prizes internationally across the following decade and beyond.

• 4. The Independent Shorts

  ›

  The Demon, released in 1972 and known in Japanese as Oni, arrived four years after Kawamoto's debut independent short. Dōjōji Temple followed in 1976, and House of Flame, or Kataku, appeared in 1979. These puppet animations drew on the haunting, ritualized aesthetics of traditional Japanese performance and won numerous prizes internationally.

  Kawamoto also worked in a different medium during this period. Travel, or Tabi, came out in 1973, and A Poet's Life, Shijin no Shōgai, appeared in 1974. Both are cut-out animations, using kirigami-style techniques rather than three-dimensional puppets. The French-language short Farce anthropo-cynique, made from a story by Riichi Yokomitsu, represents yet another strand: a mixed-media work that gave Kawamoto an international identity quite separate from his Japanese television work.

  In 1990, Kawamoto returned to Trnka's studios in Prague to make Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty, closing a circle that had opened with his student year in the city nearly three decades earlier.

• 5. Television and National Recognition

  ›

  Japan knew Kawamoto primarily through his work on NHK television. Puppet theater, the Three Kingdoms was based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Kawamoto designed the puppets for its run from 1982 to 1984. The series ran long enough to embed itself in the memories of a generation of Japanese viewers.

  The Tale of the Heike, or Heike Monogatari, followed from 1993 to 1994. Both series were live action puppet theater productions, not animated films in the conventional sense. They demonstrated Kawamoto's range: the same man whose experimental shorts circulated at international film festivals was also the craftsman behind some of Japan's most-watched puppet television.

  His feature-length animated film, The Book of the Dead, stands apart from both the shorts and the television work. It had its world premiere as part of a Special Retrospective Tribute at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, held from the 1st to the 9th of July 2005 in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. His 1981 live-action puppet film Rennyo and His Mother, Rennyo to Sono Haha, predates The Book of the Dead and occupies its own category: a feature-length work, but not an animation.

• 6. Collaboration and Loss

  ›

  Tadanari Okamoto was another independent Japanese filmmaker, and his friendship with Kawamoto shaped a significant chapter of both men's careers. In the 1970s, they worked together to bring their films to audiences in an unconventional way: booking private halls and showing their work under the shared name "Puppet Animashow."

  Okamoto died before he could finish his final film, a work based on Kenji Miyazawa's short story "The Restaurant of Many Orders." Kawamoto completed it. The act of finishing a collaborator's last work is one of the quieter forms of tribute one artist can offer another, and Kawamoto undertook it.

  The 2003 Winter Days project placed Kawamoto in a different kind of collaborative role: that of overseer. Thirty-five animators from around the world each produced a two-minute segment drawing on the renka couplets of the poet Matsuo Bashō. Kawamoto was responsible for bringing that project together, adding the organizing hand of a senior figure in world animation to a work that was, by design, a collective creation.