Sori’s idea was to treat Ping Pong like a science fiction project or a fantasy movie – to get all the mundane stuff in the camera, and then treat it afterwards to add the special magic, which in this case, was the ball. By his estimation, 90% of the balls in the table-tennis scenes were animated effects, storyboarded by Sori’s long-time collaborator Shinji Aramaki, with whom he would later make Appleseed (2004).
“Actually,” he noted, “a quarter of the entire film, or about 300 shots, were processed with CG.”
In order to ensure that the actors were physically matched with the way real table tennis players would move, Sori drafted Yoshihiro Hiraoka, the coach for the Meiji University table tennis club, to give the cast a crash-course. Players from the real-life club can be glimpsed among the background players, while Hiraoka himself was cast as the coach from Kaio Academy.
“The actors were completely choreographed, or rather, they were practicing their swings. But in the end, they trained for about two months,” said Sori. “After that, they were all young, so they got really good, and they could really hit the ball. But in this production, the setting was super-players, so we added the CG ball later. In the end, that was just an added bonus; the power and beauty of the swings were everything.”
The concentration on interaction with an invisible object proved to be an exciting discipline for the actors, returning them to a stripped-down form of theatre, like stage performers swaying with the motion of an imaginary boat, or mimes negotiating an invisible obstacle.
“We were filming without the ball in sight,” said Sori, “but at that point, the image was almost close to the finished product. I’m not exaggerating; the actors themselves said, ‘When I’m practising, I can see the ball.’ ‘I can tell the ball is there.’ And the cameraman was also following the ball, which he couldn’t see, so it’s amazing.”
For viewers in the United States, I am on the History Channel on Friday in The UnXplained with William Shatner, 8pm Central time / 9pm Eastern, discussing Japan’s Imperial Sacred Treasure, the sword Kusanagi, as well as the ancient Kingdom of Wu and its reputation for swordsmithing.
“The backers were all expecting Totoro to be a flop. I mean, who cares about a movie where nothing happens in the countryside, right? Suzuki came up with the idea of shoring up Miyazaki’s mad pastoral project by running it on a double bill with something that the schools would have to block-book as ‘educational.'”
Over at Animation World Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about my book Japan’s Anime Revolution.
“For my teenage self, living by the Thames Estuary a world away from the exotic East, Rayns’ accounts in Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight & Sound of Beijing night clubs and Hong Kong Film Festivals were like dispatches from another planet. He was present at many critical moments in movie history, including the premiere of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), which started an hour late because the projectionist refused to begin before the last two reels had arrived from the developing lab. Such experiences made Tony a pivotal presence in the exhibition and distribution sectors, sometimes as the programmer who discovered them, sometimes as the subtitler who made them comprehensible.”
Over at MediaOCD, I write an obituary for Tony Rayns.
“Japan’s Anime Revolution is a greatly enjoyable, informative read, even on films you thought you knew back to front. Hey, Pokémon fans! Did you know Mewtwo’s Japanese voice actor, Masachika Ichimura, was picked for that role because he’d played the masked hero in the stage musical of The Phantom of the Opera?”
Over at Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond posts a long and gritty review of my book, Japan’s Anime Revolution.
“Fujisawa drifted into industrial journalism, working for a while as a reporter for that scandal-ridden gossip rag, the Japan Food Processing Newspaper. His area of specialty was ham and sausages, and even as editor-in-chief, he wrote a column called ‘Sweet & Spicy’, which frequently called out declining food safety standards.
“Widowed at 36, he moved back in with his ailing mother, and cared for her while trying to raise his daughter. Eight years later, he married his second wife, who took over the household chores and bought him vital time to write fiction. He began winning literary prizes in 1971, and in 1974 quit the turbid world of food processing newsletters to become a full-time novelist.
“‘When I reread my novels from that time,’ he wrote, ‘many of them are so dark that I feel a little pain. Love between men and women ends in separation, and stories end with the death of samurai. I couldn’t write happy endings.'”
Over at Media OCD, I commence my new column by relating samurai to sausages.
“Made with the cooperation of the Finnish tourist board, the film is literally swimming with careful moments of product placement and what the Japanese call ‘holy land’ locations inviting a real-life visit, such as the Yrjönkatu Swimming Baths, the first and oldest public swimming pool in Helsinki, built in 1928. At the time they were filming Yoko’s solo dips, the pool had only recently allowed swimmers to wear clothes at all – until 2001, it had been nudist by decree.
“On the subject of clothes, Masako loses her luggage on arrival in Helsinki, and is obliged to dress with whatever she finds in the Helsinki shops until it is recovered. Surprise, surprise, all she seems to be able to rustle up are eye-stingingly expensive clothes from Marimekko, the world-famous Finnish brand. But the company has a strong connection to Japan, unknown even to many Finns, since one of its leading textile designers, designing 400 fabric prints from 1974 to 2006, was a Japanese man, Fujiwo Ishimoto. Today, he is back in his native Japan, where his own fashion brand, Mustakivi, derives its name from the Finnish for ‘black rock’.”
In a rare conjunction of my interests, I am asked to provide a video essay for the forthcoming limited edition Australian release of Naoko Ogigami’s Kamome Shokudo (2006), a film about a Japanese woman who opens a cafe in Helsinki.
“Now the monks working for Kashinkoji are specifically described as Negoro monks, who were a real-life group operating out of the Negoro temple in Kii province, who were famously and obviously much more military than they were monk-y. They were legendarily accomplished not only with muskets, but with gunsmithing, and archery, and would be a major playing pieces in the samurai battles of the 1570s and 1580s.
“After their temple was destroyed in 1585, some of them ended up fighting for other clients, most notably forming some of the best musketeer platoons in the army of Tokugawa Ieyasu. And this film is set, as best as I can tell, somewhere in the late 1560s, shortly before the historical death of Matsunaga, so possibly the temple has yet to be destroyed.
“So the opponent here is a monk called Suijubo, the Fluid Spitting Monk, played by Gajiro Sato, who was a familiar face to mainstream Japanese audiences. He played another monk, although not one who vomited viscous gunge, in almost every installment of the Tora-san movies, for decades. He only missed one, due to a car accident, but he was still credited on the poster!
“That punch perm you see really marks him out as an unusual character in a period drama, but it was a part of his general look, and was a feature of many of his onscreen appearances throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”
From my commentary track to Arrow’s forthcoming UK/US release of Ninja Wars.
It’s Midsummer Eve, and the youth of a Finnish village have gathered for a big party. Eetu Mikkola (Aku Käykö), heir to the wealthiest estate in the region, asks the pretty Leena Kosken (Helena Koskinen) to dance, to which she agrees with great reluctance. Seeing that Eetu’s advances are growing increasingly unwelcome, logger Erkki (Urho Somersalmi) diplomatically calls for a dance in the round. Eetu bristles with irritation at the interference of the logger gang, and starts trying to whip up the local folk against them over the course of several evenings.
Eventually Erkki bodily lifts Eetu off the ground and hangs him from a bridge support, and when that fails to shut him up, he throws him in the river. The stand-off continues, between gangs of rich boys and blue-collar folk, while Erkki and his fellow loggers gather beneath Leena’s window to sing a serenade.
Called away to see his sick mother, Erkki asks Leena to wait for him, and gives her a ring made of birch bark. While he is away, the mansion where Leena lives is put up for sale, becoming the subject of a fierce bidding war between Eetu and a wealthy investor, who turns out to be Erkki’s father. Erkki the presumed penniless logger rolls back into town in an open top car for the traditional Finnish homily that money doesn’t matter, but it really helps, and the young couple race off to the altar.
The origins of this Finnish film blog lay in the release of a DVD box set of all the films of the Suomen Filmiteollisuus company a few years ago. What this means, is that although it aims to be complete, I have yet to go back before that company’s foundation in 1934 to watch the decade of movies that came before it. This Midsummer’s Eve, I caught Tukkipojan morsian on television, and decided to throw it in out of order.
Billed as the tenth anniversary production for the studio Suomi-Filmi, and Finland’s “first 100% talkie”, The Woodcutter’s Bride is a fascinating study in film technology. A few scenes are indeed recorded in studios with microphones, but much of the film is shot wild outdoors, overdubbed with sleight of hand, as characters retreat into the distance or turn their backs to avoid lip sync issues, narrate scenes in post-production, or take a back seat for long, space-filling song and dance numbers.
Large chunks of the drama are portrayed in mime, which writer-director Erkki Karu cunningly renders part of the story, by setting so much of the action at raucous barn dances, where nobody can make themselves heard.
Writing for the Helsingin Sanomat, reviewer Erkki Kivijärvi totally got it, praising the film for its depiction of “summer idylls, Midsummer bonfires, girls in national costume carrying milk churns, bridge dances, fights… rafting and other picturesque phenomena of our rural life – both everyday and sacred.”
The anonymous reviewer in Svenska Pressen gushed about the film’s “novelties in the choice of characters, camera settings and editing,” which only serves to remind us that even hoary old clichés were young once. Here, we see the roots of uncountable later productions like Rich Girl (1939) and Scorned (1939) – the good-hearted salt of the earth, the girl pressured into an unwanted marriage, the Finnish stand-off between good-hearted boys who work with their hands, and an entitled class of monied dastards. Since the title also constitutes a synopsis, the conniving Eetu is little more than a plot device, but theatre actor Aku Käykö brings a bewitching presence to the screen. For some reason, his eyes glint and flash in the camera, giving him a feline, replicant aura that I have failed to catch in my screengrabs.
In the role of the young male lead, the forty-something Urho Somersalmi is pushing his luck. He was destined to be superseded by a new generation of male leads in the next few years, and indeed, we are witnessing them, in turn, aging out of the spotlight in the 1940s in the main strand of this Finnish film watchathon. Then again, this would not be the last Finnish film to feature middle-aged men duelling over the affections of a barely-legal girl. See, for example, The Bachelor Patron (1938).
Love interest Helena Koskinen is bright and feisty, holding her own for as long as she can against Eetu’s effortlessly wielded privilege. Her film career fizzled out in the wake of The 45,000 (1933), an earnest film about the spread of tuberculosis, but not because of any lack of talent. She was one of the casualties of director Karu’s cataclysmic falling-out with the board of his own company, after which he stomped off to start a new studio, Suomen Filmiteollissus. Which is where we came in, with Our Boys in the Air (1934).
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
“…lives up to its title as a thoughtful discussion of how twenty select, enduring, and iconic anime transformed cinema worldwide… Jonathan Clements provides his unique insights into the evolution of an artistic medium. Thoroughly detailed yet accessible to all backgrounds, and replete with fascinating, little-known vignettes about historic anime and the people who created them, Japan’s Anime Revolution! is a ‘must-read’ for anime connoisseurs and highly recommended for both personal and public library theatre/cinema studies shelves.” — Midwest Book Review
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