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| Foxing: Kitsuné-Tsuki Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Alongside the features programme which gets most of the attention at the Fantasia International Film Festival is a collection of shorts always guaranteed to include some interesting stuff. One of the more intriguing choices in this year’s line-up is Foxing: Kitsuné=Tsuki, an animated film about the process of animation directed by relative newcomer Takeru Shinozuka and produced by Toei Animation’s Yoshihide Moriyama. It focuses on a struggling artist, Shinano, who finds it hard to narrow her focus and concentrate on the task at hand, whilst showing symtoms of kitsuné possession. With the aid of a translator, both men spoke with me about the film.
“The project itself was started under the supervision of Toei Animation, which is, as you know, the studio which was behind One Piece and Dragon Ball Z and other very well known works of art,” says Yoshihide Moriyama. “Now, this project in particular was in the context of an initiative to have more original creators with their original works being produced, and it is our intention to make more and more of them from now going forward. It is something, I should say, fairly new to us. We have not really done this in the past. What we would like to see now is more young creators bring their own fresh visions forward, and our intention is to make sure that they grow from there and that they are trained so that they can grow as creators and make original works like this one, and eventually feature films.”
It feels very personal as a film. Was it based on someone's own story?
“I would say about 30 to 40 percent is based on my own personal story,” says Takeru Shinozuka, “but of course that's not enough on its own to make a whole world, so I used a lot of folklore to add to the story in order to make this one.”
We discuss the way that the symptoms of being possessed by a kitsuné are portrayed, from her frequent chewing on a pen to the way that light and shadow move across her when she’s in her car.
“I wanted really to do something different with this one,” he says. “For this I focused more on the drawing itself, because I felt like just the characters would not suffice to really convey the story and make it understandable. So, for example, to make the shadows, instead of using merely hard lines, I decided that I would use more gradation, by experimenting with different materials and processes. I really appreciate you noticing those details.”
I observe that Shinano and the people she works with look very different from the characters she draws and imagines coming to life, and the characters that come to life in her imagination.
“You're right,” he says. “The human characters were based on something more realistic. But for the characters that are part of her imagination, since they are the product of her own drawing, I put a lot of care into making them easily distinguishable and completely different. I wanted to really highlight the fact that they belong to her inner imaginative world, and I put a lot of effort into doing this.”
A lot of the figures she draws come from folklore; it emerges that there#s a practical reason for this.
“This is actually my directorial debut, so I figured that if I did something immediately based out of something that is from overseas, I would maybe not be able to do more after that. So I decided to really focus on something more distinctly Japanese, something that is more unique to Japan.”
I mention that something that I like in the film is that the camera is very active even when we're just looking at the ordinary scenes. It could be boring to watch somebody just sitting in an office, drawing. But the camera, even in the first scene, circles around when we are watching her work at her laptop. Was that just to keep the audience interested or was it about showing the anxious side of her character?
“I would say it's for both of these reasons. For example, when the camera spins around, it's, well, also a representation of what is going on in her head: the fact that her thoughts are spiralling. That is something that is extremely difficult to do in animation. It takes so much time. I found it extremely difficult, to be honest, but I figured that it would be noticeable that I put a lot of effort into it, and that it would stand out.”
Did he have freedom to animate the way he wanted to all the way through, or were there tight financial constraints?
“I have to follow a certain schedule and there is obviously a limit to what I can do,” he says. “So I can't say that I had all of the freedom, really, but I can say for sure that I was involved in every aspect of the production from beginning to end.and that I put everything that I could into it.”
He’s very happy to be at Fantasia.
“I'm super grateful to be here, and especially because my artwork was selected in the programming amongst other various works of art. It's also well known that there is a very passionate audience that comes here, so I'm having a lot of fun already. And if I might add, I'm a big film fan myself, especially when it comes to unusual and unconventional films, so it's especially interesting for me to see my own work projected alongside those others.
