KihachirÅ Kawamoto (å· æœ¬ 喜八郎, Kawamoto KihachirÅ , January
11, 1925 â€" August 23, 2010) was a Japanese puppet designer and
maker, independent film director, screenwriter and animator and
president of the Japan Animation Association from 1989, succeeding
founder Osamu Tezuka, until his own death. He is best-remembered in
Japan as designer of the puppets for the long-running NHK live action
television series of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the early
1980s and The Tale of the Heike in the 1990s but better-known
internationally for his own animated short films, the majority of
which are model animation but which also include the cutout animation
Tabi and Shijin no ShÅ gai and mixed media, French-language Farce
anthropo-cynique.Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a
production design assistant under So Matsuyama in the art department
of Toho in 1946, he met Tadasu Iizawa and left the film studio in 1950
to collaborate with him on illustrating children's literature with
photographs of dolls in dioramas, many of which have been republished
in English editions by such American publishers as Grosset & Dunlap
and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint, and trained in the art
of stop motion filmmaking under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, JiÅ™Ã
Trnka. He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another
independent with whom he collaborated in booking private halls in
which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in
the 1970s and whose last film, The Restaurant of Many
Orders(æ³¨æ–‡ã ®å¤šã „æ–™ç †åº—, ChÅ«mon no ÅŒi RyÅ riten, 1991) based
on Miyazawa Kenji's short story was completed under Kawamoto following
Okamoto's death during its production.Born in 1925, from an early age
Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After
seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiřà Trnka, he first
became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the '50s
began working alongside Japan's first puppet animator, the legendary
Tadahito Mochinaga. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make
commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when
he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiřà Trnka for
a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly began to take on
a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own
country's rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned
from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual,
independently produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking
of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968. Heavily influence by the
traditional aesthetics of NÅ , Bunraku-style puppetry and kabuki,
since the '70s his haunting puppet animations such as The Demon (Oni,
1972), DÅ jÅ ji Temple (DÅ jÅ ji, 1976) and House of Flame (Kataku,
1979) have won numerous prizes internationally. He has also produced
cut-out (kirigami) animations such as Travel (Tabi, 1973) and A Poet's
Life (Shijin no Shogai, 1974). In 1990 he returned to Trnka's studios
in Prague to make Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty. In Japan, he is
best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV
series based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (Sangokushi, 1982â€"84), and later for The Tale of the Heike
(Heike Monogatari, 1993â€"94). In 2003, he was responsible for
overseeing the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the
world's top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by
the renka couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo BashÅ . The Book of the
Dead (Shisha no Sho) is Kawamoto's only feature length animation,
1981's Rennyo and His Mother (Rennyo to Sono Haha) being a live-action
puppet film. It had its world premiere as a part of a Special
Retrospective Tribute at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film
Festival (July 1â€"9, 2005, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic).See Winter
Days.
11, 1925 â€" August 23, 2010) was a Japanese puppet designer and
maker, independent film director, screenwriter and animator and
president of the Japan Animation Association from 1989, succeeding
founder Osamu Tezuka, until his own death. He is best-remembered in
Japan as designer of the puppets for the long-running NHK live action
television series of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the early
1980s and The Tale of the Heike in the 1990s but better-known
internationally for his own animated short films, the majority of
which are model animation but which also include the cutout animation
Tabi and Shijin no ShÅ gai and mixed media, French-language Farce
anthropo-cynique.Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a
production design assistant under So Matsuyama in the art department
of Toho in 1946, he met Tadasu Iizawa and left the film studio in 1950
to collaborate with him on illustrating children's literature with
photographs of dolls in dioramas, many of which have been republished
in English editions by such American publishers as Grosset & Dunlap
and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint, and trained in the art
of stop motion filmmaking under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, JiÅ™Ã
Trnka. He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another
independent with whom he collaborated in booking private halls in
which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in
the 1970s and whose last film, The Restaurant of Many
Orders(æ³¨æ–‡ã ®å¤šã „æ–™ç †åº—, ChÅ«mon no ÅŒi RyÅ riten, 1991) based
on Miyazawa Kenji's short story was completed under Kawamoto following
Okamoto's death during its production.Born in 1925, from an early age
Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After
seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiřà Trnka, he first
became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the '50s
began working alongside Japan's first puppet animator, the legendary
Tadahito Mochinaga. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make
commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when
he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiřà Trnka for
a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly began to take on
a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own
country's rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned
from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual,
independently produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking
of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968. Heavily influence by the
traditional aesthetics of NÅ , Bunraku-style puppetry and kabuki,
since the '70s his haunting puppet animations such as The Demon (Oni,
1972), DÅ jÅ ji Temple (DÅ jÅ ji, 1976) and House of Flame (Kataku,
1979) have won numerous prizes internationally. He has also produced
cut-out (kirigami) animations such as Travel (Tabi, 1973) and A Poet's
Life (Shijin no Shogai, 1974). In 1990 he returned to Trnka's studios
in Prague to make Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty. In Japan, he is
best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV
series based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (Sangokushi, 1982â€"84), and later for The Tale of the Heike
(Heike Monogatari, 1993â€"94). In 2003, he was responsible for
overseeing the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the
world's top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by
the renka couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo BashÅ . The Book of the
Dead (Shisha no Sho) is Kawamoto's only feature length animation,
1981's Rennyo and His Mother (Rennyo to Sono Haha) being a live-action
puppet film. It had its world premiere as a part of a Special
Retrospective Tribute at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film
Festival (July 1â€"9, 2005, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic).See Winter
Days.
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