Animation Travelers! Collaboration between Japan and Singapore through Workshops
November 5, 2016@ New Chitose Airport Terminal Building 4F Oasis Park
Speakers: Featuring Eri Kawaguchi, Asami Ike, Masanobu Hiraoka, Kapie Eipak
Moderator: Nobuaki Doi
Nobuaki Doi
Thank you all for joining us today. I am Nobuaki Doi, Festival Director of the New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival. Today we are doing a debriefing session about the first year of ANIME-ASEAN.
The ANIME-ASEAN project fosters exchange among independent animation artists from Japan and Southeast Asia. The project is funded by the Japan Foundation Asia Center and sends Japanese artists to Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian artists to Japan in order to facilitate animation production and the exchange of ideas.
I think Southeast Asian animation is pretty unfamiliar to Japanese people. So, this project is an opportunity to learn about Southeast Asia animation. Also, I think that independent animation has a longer history in Japan than ASEAN countries, and so this exchange project can help ASEAN independent animators learn how the independent scene can develop. Alternatively, when viewed from a global perspective, there are times when animation from countries without deep historical roots are able to uncover animation’s hidden potential. I think it would be great if new approaches to animation can in turn influence Japanese artists, leading to the vitalization of independent animation production in both Japan and Southeast Asia.
For this event, we’ve invited artists from Singapore and Japan who participated in the program. I hope we can hear about the fruits of the workshops held in each country and impressions of the differences in animation culture experienced in each country.
First we will hear from Kapie Eipak from Singapore, who will talk about his stay in Japan. Kapie came to Japan for the first time this past May and spent a month visiting Tokyo and various cities in Japan. What were your overall impressions of your travels?
Kapie Eipak
Hi, everyone. I would like to share a little bit of my experience during my first time in Japan. And thanks to the ANIME-ASEAN Program and I get to visit like several cities, including like Tokyo, Yamaguchi, Sapporo, and Nagano. And the general impression was very good. Everything was really amazing and pretty different from what I encountered in Southeast Asia or in my country in particular. And I realized that the animation and the art in Japan, in general, are very diverse and in a sense, very developed as compared to Southeast Asia.
Nobuaki Doi
What was your impression of Japan, especially Japanese animation before you visited Japan?
Kapie Eipak
Before I visited Japan, the impression about the animation in Japan was mainly about Anime and Manga because they have great commercial values and are appealing to the mass public, hence, they appear more often in the mainstream media, where most people including myself get such impression from, and that was what I knew of before I visited Japan.
Nobuaki Doi
When we did the exchange program in Singapore in September, you got to see Japanese animation pieces and interact with Japanese animation artists. Later I want to hear about your impressions of Japanese independent animation.
Next, I’d like to talk about the workshop held by Japanese artists in Singapore in September. Today we are joined by three artists who visited Singapore, namely Eri Kawaguchi, Asami Ike and Masanobu Hiraoka. They shared their methods with students from the animation departments at Lasalle College of the Arts and Nanyang Technological University’s Digital Animation Program.
I want to hear about your experiences. I imagine that you found it to be different from teaching at Japanese schools, but can you share your impressions?
Eri Kawaguchi
In particular, when I visited Lasalle College of the Arts, the third-year students were in class and I got to take a look. It seemed like the curriculum was set so that three people worked together on a single piece. That right there seemed quite different.
Asami Ike
They were aiming to create animation in accordance with a model that followed flow charts, like a commercial animation production in North America with storyboards covering the walls. And, their equipment looked more expensive than what we have at Japanese schools (laughs).
Nobuaki Doi
So they have funding (laughs).
Eri Kawaguchi
At Nanyang Technological University, everyone got LCD tablets and there was a motion capture studio, which gave me the impression that the school has a lot of resources.
Masanobu Hiraoka
I thought the schools were a little different from Japanese arts universities in that the classes were conducted with future employment in mind, similar to technical colleges.
Nobuaki Doi
You could clearly sense that the schools are aiming to develop talent that can contribute to the industry.
In contrast, the three Japanese artists here with us today work on animation that is more individualistic and artistic. I got the impression that your workshops put a lot of emphasis on those areas. Things like having participants search for their secret terrain within… I’d like to hear more about this topic. What kinds of workshops did you hold? First, let’s hear from Kawaguchi and Ike. You did a stop-motion workshop together.
Eri Kawaguchi
For our workshop, I started out with a screening of my piece Flower and Steam. Then, I talked about how I came up with the idea for the work. One night, I was riding my bicycle and saw a white garbage bag that looked like a bride. I saw the world very subjectively, like I was experiencing an optical illusion. I started making Flower and Steam because I think it’s interesting how people mobilize their own memories to look at things in ways that are convenient for them.
So, I picked “Let’s Make the Sky Together” as the title because I wanted it to be a workshop where you start from scratch and look for some movement or something that is going on inside yourself. The participants brought different materials and we had some cotton, and they did the photography on animation stands in groups of four. Nanyang Technological University has numerous splendid animation stands. But, apparently they don’t have many opportunities to use the stands, so I showed them how to use the equipment and had them divide into two-person teams and each create a sky. Next, we screened the results, and then one person created a one-second animation, and then the next person took over and did another second, and so on, so they were doing an exchange.
Nobuaki Doi
In a sense, it’s like you were trying out an approach that involves searching your unconscious mind. What were your impressions after doing the workshop?
Eri Kawaguchi
Throughout my stay in Singapore, it seemed like I was constantly being asked, “What is original about animation in Singapore?” I felt like there’s a trend of searching for originality in characters and stories. In the workshop, I wanted people to realize that their originality can also come from discovering things that other people have yet to discover. Actually, this is what they managed to accomplish through the workshop.
Asami Ike
Right. I was worried about how the workshop participants would respond to creating something without a plan, but they were more flexible than I’d expected and there were numerous instances when they exceeded my expectations.
Nobuaki Doi
You’ve shared experiences from the workshop that left impressions on you. You both come from Graduate School of Tokyo University of the Arts, and you’ve said, “At our school, if you do something well you get zero praise, and if you do something that no one has ever seen before, you get praised a lot.” I viscerally felt that the workshop conveyed this different way of thinking about animation to the Singaporean participants.
Hiraoka did a drawing animation workshop. Students from Lasalle College of the Arts and Nanyang Technological University used 20 pen tablets for the workshop.
Masanobu Hiraoka
One person did a 1.5-second hand-drawn animation loop, and in response another person created the next animation. As the process continued, the loop kept on getting bigger. So the workshop was about enlarging the world within the animation through the involvement of other people, instead of making the animation entirely on your own.
Nobuaki Doi
What was the intention behind that idea?
Masanobu Hiraoka
When you make animation on your own, you end up getting into the pattern of doing everything by yourself. In other words, you fall into some kind pre-set form. With the approach in this workshop, other people react to your animation and do things that are completely unexpected. My goal was to have people get a sense of how interesting it is to create new kinds of movement and expression.
Nobuaki Doi
What were your impressions of the resulting animation?
Masanobu Hiraoka
It was interesting to feel the animation expand in real time with animation that started off as abstract shapes but then developed into very concrete ones, or animation that was in between concrete and abstract, or animation where a completely unexpected element would transform the story.
Nobuaki Doi
You talked about your own style of creating metamorphoses, right? Can you tell us about that, too?
Masanobu Hiraoka
When I make animation, at the root I think about transforming triangles into squares. I think that the fun of animation and movement comes from trying to figure out how to show what happens in between. So, first I had everyone create an animation of a circle turning into a triangle. The point is to think about how you get people to find the transformation in between the two shapes to be interesting.
Nobuaki Doi
Kapie, can you tell us about your workshop in Sapporo?
Kapie Eipak
I will share with you a bit more about the workshop we did in Sapporo: Animation Travelers!. For Tan Wei Keong (he is not here today), animation is a medium for him to capture his feelings so feeling is very important. And for me animation is a very powerful tool to tell the stories hence I pay more attention on the storytelling. We came up with the idea for the participants to create their own story, a very short story by combining the two elements, unexpected elements.
So we give them two boxes, one with the items, like normal objects and the other one with open adjectives. For example, they can get one item from the first box which is like t-shirt, and the second item – the second questions from the second box would be like crazy, so they will have a combination of crazy t-shirt, and they have to come up with a story related to the theme about the traveling but have the items that we were talking about.
And because of the various other spontaneity of the exercise, we actually found a lot of interesting stories from other students, and after that we developed like the story into the actual animation by using the loops because we don’t have a lot of time to do a long animation so we do a short one and then we loop it.
I think I was very surprised by the result, I was shocked, and especially where the students, most of them, they do not have like any animation background, and the result turned out to be really very amazing. And I realized a lot of them have a very great sense of humor and I just keep on replaying the animation. Yeah, I really loved it.
Nobuaki Doi
Please tell us about your artist-in-residence experience in Nagano.
Kapie Eipak
I was very lucky to have a chance to visit Nagano for a short residency of 2 weeks. So we were supposed to create arts work there, that is preferably about the place and about the people in Nagano, so when I was there, I was very impressed by the statue of Binzuru-sama. He was in a temple, and a lot of people liked to touch his face and they touched his body because they believed that whichever part they touched, that part in their body would be cured, so that’s the reason why they keep touching the statue, and the face was actually almost gone, and we can’t really see the original face of the statue.
So, my idea was to ask the people in Nagano to re-imagine the original face of the statue, and then they redraw the portrait on a paper, and then I create it. So I did a painting of him and then I did a short animation, the transformation of face to face, and the face is actually drawn by the people from Nagano, and then I projected it on the painting, as a final installation.
So, when the people draw the portrait of the Binzuru, I was also drawing that portrait, that’s a gift in return to them, and I realized that most of them, they actually draw their own self-portrait, and it is part of my other research of the connection of the links between the physical appearance, and the metaphysical appearance of the human beings.
Nobuaki Doi
What are your impressions about the exchanges with Japanese artists in Singapore?
Kapie Eipak
When I met them in Singapore, and after I watched their films, I realized that actually Japanese animation is actually getting very mature as compared to Singapore, and each of the animator, they really care a lot about their own identity, and they really go into very deep to exploring their identity, and that’s why they have a very diverse and interesting mix, in general.
Nobuaki Doi
I think this exchange was a journey of discoveries that included finding out about each country’s diversity and diverse ethnicities, and also finding out about your own personal ethnicity. Actually, an artist named Ishu Patel teaches at Nanyang Technological University and he stopped by just as the workshop was being held. There’s a passage in a book about how Koji Yamamura participated in Ishu Patel’s workshop in 1986 in Japan and “learned about the existence of animation artists.” In other words, Patel is the person who taught Japan about the existence of the “animation artist.” I think it was somehow an extremely symbolic scene when he coincidentally stopped by in the midst of this effort to share the concept of the “animation artist” in Singapore.
