Bunraku to Butoh: The Japanese Puppet, the Modernist Marionette, and Physical Pain

2007

2021

Creative Arts in Education and Therapy, 2022

Film International, 2007

An overview of stop-motion and pupper animation in Japan with a focus on the works of Tadahito Mochinaga, Kihachiro Kawamoto, and Tadanari Okamoto.

This article looks at the production Shank’s Mare, a collaboration between North American puppeteer Tom Lee and Nishikawa Koryu V, master of the Japanese kuruma ningyō or cart puppetry traditions and shows how the production and creative process blended different models of puppet performance, while also contributing to Nishikawa’s greater project of finding new ways to invigorate and preserve his traditional art. It offers a brief history and understanding of kuruma ningyō, a puppetry form less well-known nationally and internationally than Japan’s bunraku tradition, and an account of Shank’s Mare’s creation process and international tour to New York and two venues in Japan. It invites consideration of a tree as a model for understanding traditional forms and how they might maintain a recognizable core while also drawing from various roots and giving birth to new works.

Dojoji Temple (Dōjōji, 1976) is a short puppet animation directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. Influenced by Bunraku (Japanese puppet plays), emaki (painted scroll), Noh theatre and Japanese myth, Dojoji Temple tells of a woman’s unrequited love for a young priest. Heartbroken, she then transforms into a sea serpent and goes after the priest for revenge. While Kawamoto’s animation is rich with Japanese aesthetics and tragedy, his animation is peopled by puppets who do not speak. Limited and restrained though the puppets may be, their animated gestures speak volumes of powerful emotions. For our article, we will select several scenes from the animation, and interpret their actions so that we can further understand the mythical world of Dojoji Temple and the essential being of puppetry. Our gesture analysis will take into account cinematographic compositions, sound and bodily attires, among other elements.

Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 2018

CGI has led to a theoretical revolution in media studies. What is cinema when reality can be created on a computer? What is animation when superflat 2D aesthetics are becoming haunted by 3D digital graphics? This article adds a third term to the debate: rotoscoping. The author analyzes the first exclusively rotoscoped Japanese anime, Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil), a contemporary reinterpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal that reflects on postmodern malaise, rural decay and depopulation, and otaku escapism, in order to examine the aesthetic of the rotoscope in relation to cinema and anime. He argues that rotoscoping is an uncannying of the cinematism and animitism, or a polemical response to both the ideologies of Disney immersive realism and anime flat animation. The article investigates the narrative’s ‘writer of postmodern life’ Sawa Nakamura in relation to Baudelaire’s modernism and the conditions of postmodernity themselves: the structure of Japanese imperialism today and its effect on Gunma prefecture, the setting of the show. Finally, the author analyzes the hostile response to the show among otaku to explore how the hauntology of the rotoscopic machine channels the ghosts of neoliberalism, the super-exploited laborers of the third world.

Visual Communication, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp 345-362, 2008.

To put it bluntly, Kazuo Ishiguro isn’t particularly fun to read. His characters suffer, and their suffering, whether by direct cause or symbolic energy, tends to determine the fate of their novel-worlds. When figuring Ishiguro’s individual works into a macroscopic constellation, however, the manner by which their suffering is expressed appears to evolve. As Ishiguro ages and transforms as a novelist, so does his literary depiction of pain. Ishiguro’s first few novels present pain as a psychological plot device; however, as his writing matures into different genres and narrative voices, pain seems to accordingly crystallize into a more corporeal motif. This migration of portrayal from the internal and narrative to the external and stylistic, in effect, works to make the pains of his novels more obvious and accessible. Furthermore, the evolution of pain throughout Ishiguro’s works necessitates a responding evolution in how his characters both acknowledge and treat such pain. Ishiguro’s novels accordingly seem to explore the comparative impact and efficacy of varying forms and relationships of pain—an ongoing, ever-evolving experiment in how pain may be best expressed, managed, and, ultimately, felt.