review an Auteur

kihachiro kawamoto


Born in Tokyo, Kawamoto became entranced by puppets as a youngster after being shown how to make them by his grandmother. He made figurines of popular stars of the day and staged them in dramatic tableaux. Despite being an avid movie fan, he originally had no plans to make a career out of his hobby. in 1944 Kawamoto graduated from Yokohama national university but remained stationed in japan for the remainder of the second world war.

Historian Brian Sibley sees the work of kihachiro kawamoto as uniting "the European approach to puppet filmmaking with the ling tradition of puppetry in japan, which dates back to bunraku puppet plays first presented in the seventeenth centry." This is partly because kawamoto trained in eastern Europe he went to Prague to study with jiri trnka after seeing the great Czech animator's Cisaruv Slavik (the emperor's nightingale, 1949), and spent some years working in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia. He returned to japan in 1965, where he produced animated films using puppets and other techniques. in his films, puppet figures take on the mannerisms of live performers.

His short films include Oni (the demon, 1972), Shijin no shogai (a poet’s life, 1974), Kataku (house of flame, 1979) and the book of the dead. (a link to more of kawamoto animations http://www.watershed.co.uk/kawamoto/film_clips.html )

Creating a puppet for these films took about 10 days. Particular care was taken with it most detailed features such as heads, hands, eyebrows and even teeth. Most all of his puppets he used were made from plaster mold. For just ten minutes of animation, one year of preparation was required.


The reason I chose this auteur is his style of stop-motion animation. Kawamoto animation are very detailed to give them a realistic view and have the characteristics of real life actors, making the animation seem more real. His style of story-telling is very colourful giving the background ad characters a light and bright colours, but also having a dark story telling of ghost and monsters putting fantasy and in a darker scene.


Information providid by: 'The Animation bible', Wiki, YouTube, The Guardian