The Book Of The Dead (film)
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The Book Of The Dead (film)
is a 2005 Japanese historical Buddhist stop motion animation feature film directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. It is about the legend of Chūjō-hime who translated some of the significant Pure Land sutras from Chinese to Japanese, and is said to have witnessed weaving of Taima mandala by Amitabha Buddha himself & his attendants from lotus stems. It is his second feature film, the first being the '' Rennyo and His Mother'' (1981) and is based on the novel of the same name by Shinobu Orikuchi. It appeared in a couple of film festivals in 2005 before going into wide release in Japan on 11 February 2006 and has since won several awards at international animation festivals. It was shown in cinemas across the United Kingdom in the spring of 2008 as part of Kawamoto: The Puppet Master, a touring season of the Watershed Media Centre, and was released on DVD-Video in North America on 22 April 2008. Plot ''The Book of the Dead'' is set in the Nara period at around 750 CE, the era when Bud ...
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Kihachirō Kawamoto
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 Shōgai'' 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 ...
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Taima Mandala
The Taima Mandala (當麻曼荼羅,綴織当麻曼荼羅図) is an 8th century mandala in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. It depicts Sukhavati, the western Pure Land, with the Buddha Amitābha (Japanese: Amida) in the center. The original copy was made around 763 AD, and is currently kept at Taima-dera temple in Nara. Many copies have been made since, and the original work has degraded considerably. According to popular legend, Chūjō-hime witnessed the creation of the mandala, crafted from fibers of lotus stems by two nuns who were thought to be Amida and Kannon in disguise. The imagery on the painting is largely based on the '' Sutra of the Contemplation of Amitayus'', and has been the subject of several doctrinal commentaries in Japanese Buddhism. The mandala was designated a national treasure of Japan on April 27, 1961. Description The central image is Sukhavati, the Pure Land of the west. The left, right, and lower borders are lined with images from the Contemplation Sutra ...
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North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean. Because it is on the North American Plate, North American Tectonic Plate, Greenland is included as a part of North America geographically. North America covers an area of about , about 16.5% of Earth's land area and about 4.8% of its total surface. North America is the third-largest continent by area, following Asia and Africa, and the list of continents and continental subregions by population, fourth by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. In 2013, its population was estimated at nearly 579 million people in List of sovereign states and dependent territories in North America, 23 independent states, or about 7.5% of the world's population. In Americas (terminology)#Human ge ...
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DVD-Video
DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD discs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia in the 2000s until it was supplanted by the high-definition Blu-ray Disc. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and an MPEG-2 decoder (e.g., a DVD player, or a computer DVD drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typically, the data rate for DVD movies ranges from 3 to 9.5 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. DVD-Video was first available in Japan on November 1, 1996 (with major releases beginning December 20, 1996), followed by a release on March 24, 1997 in the United States—to line up with the 69th Academy Awards that same day. The DVD-Video specification was created by DVD Forum and can be obtained from DVD For ...
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Watershed Media Centre
Watershed opened in June 1982 as the United Kingdom's first dedicated media centre. Based in former warehouses on the harbourside at Bristol, it hosts three cinemas, a café/bar, events/conferencing spaces, the Pervasive Media Studio, and office spaces for administrative and creative staff. It occupies the former E and W sheds on Canon's Road at Saint Augustine's Reach, and underwent a major refurbishment in 2005. The building also hosts UWE eMedia Business Enterprises, Most of Watershed's facilities are situated on the second floor of two of the transit sheds. The conference spaces and cinemas are used by many public and private sector organisations and charities. Watershed employs the equivalent of over seventy full-time staff and has an annual turnover of approximately £3.8 million. As well as its own commercial income (through Watershed Trading), Watershed Arts Trust is funded by national and regional arts funders. A 2010 report for the International Futures Forum describ ...
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2008 In Film
The year 2008 involved many major film events. ''The Dark Knight'' was the year's highest-grossing film, while ''Slumdog Millionaire'' won the Academy Award for Best Picture (out of eight Academy Awards). Evaluation of the year 2008 has been widely considered to be a very significant year for cinema. The entertainment agency website IGN described 2008 as "one of the biggest years ever for movies." It stated, "2008 was the year when the comic book movie genre not only hits its zenith, but also gained critical respectability thanks to ''The Dark Knight''. Animated films also proved a huge draw for filmgoers, with Pixar's ''WALL-E'' becoming not only the highest grossing toon but also the most lauded. Things got off on the right foot with the monster movie madness of ''Cloverfield''. Marvel got down to business laying the groundwork for their superhero team-up ''The Avengers'' with the blockbuster hit ''Iron Man'' and their respectable attempt at rebooting ''The Incredible Hulk''. ...
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Spring (season)
Spring, also known as springtime, is one of the four temperate seasons, succeeding winter and preceding summer. There are various technical definitions of spring, but local usage of the term varies according to local climate, cultures and customs. When it is spring in the Northern Hemisphere, it is autumn in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa. At the spring (or vernal) equinox, days and nights are approximately twelve hours long, with daytime length increasing and nighttime length decreasing as the season progresses until the Summer Solstice in June (Northern Hemisphere) and December (Southern Hemisphere). Spring and "springtime" refer to the season, and also to ideas of rebirth, rejuvenation, renewal, resurrection and regrowth. Subtropical and tropical areas have climates better described in terms of other seasons, e.g. dry or wet, monsoonal or cyclonic. Cultures may have local names for seasons which have little equivalence to the terms originating in Europe. Meteoro ...
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between the Kingdom of England (which included Wales, annexed in 1542) and the Kingdom of Scotland in 170 ...
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List Of Animation Festivals
This is a list of past and present international animation festivals. These festivals include only animation and accept submissions from around the world. They often show an international program of independent, student, and commercial work. They may or may not be competitive. Some are ''touring festivals'' which are not based in a single city. Notes References External links Animation-Festivals.com websiteZippy Frames website {{Animation International animation festivals Animation Animation Animation is a method by which image, still figures are manipulated to appear as Motion picture, moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent cel, celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited ...
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Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north toward the East China Sea, Philippine Sea, and Taiwan in the south. Japan is a part of the Ring of Fire, and spans Japanese archipelago, an archipelago of List of islands of Japan, 6852 islands covering ; the five main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa Island, Okinawa. Tokyo is the Capital of Japan, nation's capital and largest city, followed by Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Japan is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the List of countries and dependencies by population density, most densely populated and Urbanization by country, urbanized. About three-fourths of Geography of Japan, the c ...
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2005 In Film
2005 in film is an overview of events, including the highest-grossing films, award ceremonies, festivals, a list of country-specific lists of films released, notable deaths and film debuts. Evaluation of the year Renowned American film critic and professor Emanuel Levy stated on his website, "Despite films like “Crash,” which deals with racism in contemporary America, and geopolitical exposes like ''Syriana'' and ''Munich'', the 2005 movie year may go down in film history as the year of sexual diversity." He went on to emphasize, "It's hard to recall a year in which sex, sexuality, and gender have featured so prominently in American films, both mainstream Hollywood and independent cinema. I am deliberately using the concepts of sexual diversity and sexual orientation, rather than gay-themed movies, because the rather new phenomenon goes beyond homosexuality or lesbianism. For decades, American culture has been both puritanical and hypocritical as far as sexual matters are con ...
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Novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the histori ...
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