#mt. head

“Animação, hoje é sexta!” (Mt. Head)

“Depois de um homem vil e mesquinho comer algumas sementes de cereja, uma cerejeira começa a crescer-lhe na cabeça e é aí começam lhe começam a nascer verdadeiramente um monte de problemas.” Esta é a animação que vos proponho para hoje, que é sexta. Um filme de 2002 intitulado Mt Head, de Koji Yamamura, numa interpretação moderna de Atama-yama, uma história tradicional Japonesa Rakugo de Tóquio…

This week’s short film is Mt. Head (Original title: Atama Yama), an approximately 10 min long animated film by Koji Yamamura. Born in 1964 in Japan, Yamamura made his first animated film when he was just 13 years old. Over the years, he has done a variety of work in animation, illustration, music videos, etc. You can read more about him and see his other works here.

And here is the oscar nominated film (in 2003) which is a dark comedy/fantasy .

Animation here:

Whether they be underground career-starters like Makoto Shinkai's brilliant She and Her Cat (1999) or confident masterworks such as Koji Yamamura's Oscar-nominated Mt. Head (2002), Japan's experimental animated short films get little publicity in the US. Yet this "genre"--taken in the loosest possible sense--has produced some of the most interesting art house animation of the past decade and a half. 

Kunio Kato is among its very best contributors. His work is painterly. He has an eye for detail and composition such that still frames from his films would not look out of place on gallery walls. Often, his output is painterly in a second sense: it quotes directly from surrealist works. Magritte's influence, for example, permeates The Apple Incident (2001), which opens with a reproduction of The Listening Room.

This brings us to the work named in the header. Kato's The Diary of Tortov Roddle (2003) is a surrealistic short film made up of brief vignettes, the contents of which are by turns sad, touching, disturbing and awe-inspiring. Visually, Kato takes clear inspiration from Dalí, whose The Temptation of St. Anthony is referenced via Tortov's pig-like pet. This writer will leave the rest for the reader to discover in the embedded video below.