was a Japanese puppet designer,

independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in Pennsylvania, United States * Independentes (English: Independents), a Portuguese artist ...

film director A film director or filmmaker is a person who controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfillment of that Goal, vision. The director has a key role ...

screenwriter A screenwriter (also called scriptwriter, scribe, or scenarist) is a person who practices the craft of writing for visual mass media, known as screenwriting. These can include short films, feature-length films, television programs, television ...

animator An animator is an artist who creates images, known as frames, which give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, and video games. Animat ...

and the second

president President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) * President (education), a leader of a college or university *President (government title) President may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Film and television *'' Præsident ...

of the Japan Animation Association, succeeding founder

Osamu Tezuka Osamu Tezuka (, born , ''Tezuka Osamu'', – 9 February 1989) was a Japanese manga artist, cartoonist and animator. Considered to be among the greatest and most influential cartoonists of all time, his prolific output, pioneering techniques an ...

in 1989 and serving until his own death. He is best-remembered in Japan as designer of the puppets for the long-running

NHK , also known by its Romanization of Japanese, romanized initialism NHK, is a Japanese public broadcasting, public broadcaster. It is a statutory corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television licence, television license fee. NHK ope ...

live action Live action is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live action with animation to create a live-action animated feature film. Live action is used to define film, video games o ...

television series A television show, TV program (), or simply a TV show, is the general reference to any content produced for viewing on a television set that is broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, and cable, or distributed digitally on streaming plat ...

of the ''

Romance of the Three Kingdoms ''Romance of the Three Kingdoms'' () is a 14th-century historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong. It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, starting in 184 AD and ...

'' in the early 1980s and '' The Tale of the Heike'' in the 1990s but better-known internationally for his own animated

short film A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film o ...

s, the majority of which are

model animation A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided int ...

but which also include the

cutout animation Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The props would be cut out and used as puppets for stop motion. The world's ...

''Tabi'' and ''Shijin no Shōgai'' and

mixed media In visual art, mixed media describes work of art, artwork in which more than one Art medium, medium or material has been employed. Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different List of art media, media. M ...

French-language French ( or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in ...

''Farce anthropo-cynique''. Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a

production design In film industry, film and television, a production designer is the individual responsible for the overall aesthetic of the story. The production design gives the viewers a sense of the time period, the plot location, and character actions and ...

assistant under So Matsuyama in the art department of

Toho is a Japanese entertainment company that primarily engages in producing and distributing films and exhibiting stage plays. It is headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and is one of the core companies of the Osaka-based Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group. ...

in 1946, he met Tadasu Iizawa and left the film studio in 1950 to collaborate with him on illustrating

children's literature Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. In addition to conventional literary genres, modern children's literature is classified by the intended age of the reade ...

with

photograph A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. Th ...

s of

doll A doll is a physical model, model typically of a human or humanoid character, often used as a toy for children. Dolls have also been used in traditional religious rituals throughout the world. Traditional dolls made of materials such as clay and ...

s in

diorama A diorama is a replica of a scene, typically a three-dimensional model either full-sized or miniature. Sometimes dioramas are enclosed in a glass showcase at a museum. Dioramas are often built by hobbyists as part of related hobbies like mili ...

s, many of which have been republished in English editions by such American publishers as

Grosset & Dunlap Grosset & Dunlap is a New York City-based publishing house founded in 1898. The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of Penguin Random House through its subsidiary Penguin Group. In recent years, through the P ...

and

Western Publishing Western Publishing, also known as Western Printing and Lithographing Company, was an American company founded in 1907 in Racine, Wisconsin, best known for publishing the Little Golden Books. Its Golden Books Family Entertainment division also ...

's Golden Books imprint, and trained in the art of stop motion filmmaking under

Tadahito Mochinaga was a pioneer Japanese stop-motion animator. Having done many stop motion films in Japan, he is best known as the animator for Rankin/Bass' " Animagic" productions at his MOM Production Studio in Tokyo throughout the 1960s. He did this work in a ...

and, later, Jiří Trnka. He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another independent filmmaker. They collaborated in booking private

hall In architecture, a hall is a relatively large space enclosed by a roof and walls. In the Iron Age and the Early Middle Ages in northern Europe, a mead hall was where a lord and his retainers ate and also slept. Later in the Middle Ages, the gre ...

s in which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in the 1970s. Okamoto's last film, , was left incomplete following his death during its production. Kawamoto completed the film. The film was based on

Kenji Miyazawa was a Japanese novelist, poet, and children's literature writer from Hanamaki, Iwate, in the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He was also known as an agricultural science teacher, vegetarian, cellist, devout Buddhist, and utopian social ...

's short story '' The Restaurant of Many Orders''.

Biography

Born in 1925, from an early age Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiří Trnka, he first became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the 1950s began working alongside Japan's first puppet animator, the legendary

. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when he traveled to

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

to study puppet animation under Jiří Trnka for a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly begun to take on a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own country's rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned from

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

to make a series of highly individual, independently produced artistic short works, beginning with ''Breaking of Branches is Forbidden'' (''Hana-Ori'') in 1968. Heavily influenced by the traditional

aesthetics Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste (sociology), taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Ph ...

of Nō,

Bunraku is a form of traditional Japanese puppet theatre, founded in Osaka in the beginning of the 17th century, which is still performed in the modern day. Three kinds of performers take part in a performance: the or (puppeteers), the (chanters) ...

-style

puppetry Puppetry is a form of theatre or performance that involves the manipulation of puppets – wikt:inanimate, inanimate objects, often resembling some type of human or animal figure, that are animated or manipulated by a human called a puppeteer. S ...

and

kabuki is a classical form of Theatre of Japan, Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with Japanese traditional dance, traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes ...

, since the '70s his haunting puppet animations such as ''The Demon'' (''Oni'', 1972), ''Dōjōji Temple'' (''Dōjōji'', 1976) and ''House of Flame'' (''Kataku'', 1979) have won numerous prizes internationally. He has also produced cut-out (''kirigami'') animations such as ''Travel'' (''Tabi'', 1973) and ''A Poet's Life'' (''Shijin no Shogai'', 1974). In 1990 he returned to Trnka's studios in Prague to make ''Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty''. In Japan, he is best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV series based on the Chinese literary classic ''Romance of the Three Kingdoms'' (''Sangokushi'', 1982–84), and later for '' The Tale of the Heike'' (''Heike Monogatari'', 1993–94). In 2003, he was responsible for overseeing the '' Winter Days'' (''Fuyu no Hi'') project, in which 35 of the world's top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by the ''renka'' couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo Bashō. '' The Book of the Dead'' (''Shisha no Sho'') is Kawamoto's only feature length animation, 1981's ''Rennyo and His Mother'' (''Rennyo to Sono Haha'') being a

live-action Live action is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live action with animation to create a live-action animated feature film. Live action is used to define film, video games or ...

puppet film. It had its world premiere as a part of a Special Retrospective Tribute at the 40th

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (, KVIFF) is an annual film festival held in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. The Karlovy Vary Festival is one of the oldest in the world and has become Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Eur ...

(July 1–9, 2005,

Karlovy Vary Karlovy Vary (; , formerly also spelled ''Carlsbad'' in English) is a spa town, spa city in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 49,000 inhabitants. It is located at the confluence of the Ohře and Teplá (river), Teplá ri ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

Filmography

Short films

*

*
Anthropo-Cynical Farce
' (''Farce anthropo-cynique'', January 1, 1970, 8 min., from a story by Riichi Yokomitsu) *

*

*

*

*

*
* Opening titles of the film in question.
* *

Feature films

* * *

DVD releases

Short films

''Winter Days''

See '' Winter Days''.

''The Book of the Dead''

References

External links

Interview
with Kihachirō Kawamoto at Web site ''Midnight Eye''

at ''Nishikata Film Review''
Kawamoto: The Puppet Master
a season centred on Kawamoto's films which toured the United Kingdom in 2008
Iida City Kawamoto Kihachirō Puppet Museum
official Web site
Japan Animation Association
official Web site * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kawamoto, Kihachiro 1925 births 2010 deaths Anime directors Anime screenwriters Annie Award winners Japanese animators Japanese film directors Puppet designers Puppetry in Japan Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun, 4th class Stop motion animators Anime people from Tokyo Japanese Buddhists Japanese fantasy film directors