NFAJ: YAMAMURA RETROSPECTIVE

Independent animation artist Koji Yamamura has spent his career exploring a range of techniques and media, producing a body of work that is, as the National Film Archive Japan so aptly puts it, “uninhibited and full of poetic sentiment.” To honor Yamamura’s donation of original film prints from his student days onward, NFAJ will be screening 47 films across six programs divided by decade, marking the most comprehensive — and exciting — overview of this dazzlingly innovative artist’s work ever held. Although just a few of the films are subtitled in English, many are either silent or comprehendible without subs, so plunge in and enjoy!

Yamamura burst on the international scene in 2002, when he won the Crystal Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival for the brilliant Mt. Head, which also went on to score an Academy Award nomination. Creating each imaginative frame by hand since he was a student, whether in clay painting or stop motion or more traditional animation, Yamamura has continued to expand the expressive realm, accumulating a vast number of pictures and drawings.

Having started his career as a background artist at an animation studio, he left to form Yamamura Animation in 1993, where he writes, directs, edits, animates, and sometimes produces his own short films. He also collaborates on music videos, TV advertisements, title sequenc­­es and station identifications, as well as illustrating children's literature and textbooks. He is also a professor in the Animation Department of the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he’s lent his wisdom and passion to a generation of students from around the world.

Along with the acclaim for Mt. Head, his A Country Doctor (2007) won the Ottawa Grand Prize and Ofuji Noburo Awards, while his 2011 Muybridge's Strings was one of five animated shorts nominated for the Genie Award for Best Animated Short Film.