Kihachirō Kawamoto

Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a production design assistant under So Matsuyama^[6] in the art department of Toho in 1946,^[1] 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 have been republished in English editions by such American publishers as Grosset & Dunlap and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint,^[6] and trained in the art of stop motion filmmaking under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, Jiří Trnka.

He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another independent filmmaker. They collaborated in booking private halls in which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in the 1970s. Okamoto's last film, The Restaurant of Many Orders (注文の多い料理店, Chūmon no Ōi Ryōriten, 1991), had been left incomplete following his death during its production. Kawamoto completed the film. The film was based on Kenji Miyazawa'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 Tadahito Mochinaga.

In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiří Trnka for a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly began 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 to make a series of highly individual, independently produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968.

Heavily influence by the traditional aesthetics of Nō, Bunraku-style puppetry and kabuki, 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.