Author/Palomar
Edit/Think Ji
"His legacy continues to nurture and influence the younger generation of animated film directors."
Today is the tenth year that Director Toshi is gone.
The works he left behind are still being discussed today, and the farewell letters and excerpts of his articles have also been turned over.
Toshimoto, which is pronounced "Kon Satoshi", is often pronounced "Kon Bin", "Kon Toshi", "Ima Toshi", etc. by others in places such as hospitals, so I hope you will not misread it. I hope that when I usually write, I must add a half-width or full-width space between the last name and the first name. Writing "Imatoshi" looks unseemly, like a person who only wrote the name part and did not know which country it was. - "My Dream Road"
At this year's Shanghai Film Festival, crazy audiences are hungry to buy not many movie tickets, and among them, the hard currency movie, Jin Min's "Red Hot Chili Peppers" is definitely one.
Movie tickets for "Red Hot Chili Peppers" are almost "empty seconds"
"Red Hot Chili Peppers" movie tickets in the second-hand market, was speculated out of the unit price of 600 yuan...
The Shanghai Film Festival chose to re-screen Imatoshi's film at this time, naturally because August 24 this year marks the tenth anniversary of director Imatoshi's death.
In the decade since his death, There has been no shortage of great works in Japanese animation.
But the cry for the memory of today's life has never stopped.
Douban "Missing Toshi" small station
The unique storyboarding and narrative structure of Imatoshi animation have also become constantly borrowed editing methods, including Nolan and Dylan Elonovsky, who have long been hotly discussed.
Nolan's "Inception" is considered by many to borrow from the setting of "Red Hot Chili Peppers" to represent dreams in mirrors.
Inception versus the mirror design in Red Hot Chili Peppers
Elonofsky's "Black Swan" and "Requiem for Dreams" directly took the character setting and storyboard design of "The House of Unma". Consciously or unconsciously, his absorption of Imatoshi's works is evident in his creations.
"Requiem for Dreams" borrows from "The House of Unma" in the storyboard, and "Black Swan" can also see the shadow of "Unma House" in the design of the main plot.
After the release of Requiem for Dreams, many people pointed out that the film may have copied "The Unma's House", and even Imatoshi expressed displeasure in the interview included in the BD of "The Unma".
To make up for it, Alanowski bought the adaptation rights afterwards.
……
What you may not know, though, is that in the decade since Toshi's death, his legacy has also nurtured and influenced the younger generation of animated film directors.
From "Spider-Man Parallel Universe", which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, to "Happiness Road", which won the Golden Horse Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and even "Busan Trip", which once swept the social networking site, these film directors have said that Imatoshi has given them a profound influence.
On the tenth anniversary of the death of director Toshi Toshi, let's take stock of the new generation of films and animations influenced by his works, and witness the style of Imatoshi who still lives in the works of his successors.
"On the Road to Happiness" X "Millennium Actress"
On the Road to Happiness is a Taiwanese film released in May 2018.
Poster of "On the Road to Happiness"
Lin Shuqi, the protagonist who settled in the United States, learned that her grandmother, who raised her since childhood, had passed away and rushed back from the United States to her hometown of Happiness Road in Taipei.
Lin Shuqi, who returned to her hometown, recalled the bits and pieces of her childhood growth, and also met her childhood friends who ran away from each other, and in the process, she also experienced the true meaning of "happiness".
This animation is a semi-autobiographical film by director Song Xinying, who graduated from Taiwan University and studied in Japan and the United States, and after returning to Taiwan, she originally planned to shoot a live-action movie, and decided to shoot a two-dimensional animation in the style of hand-drawn after the advice of a friend.
Song Xinying
In the realistic narrative, the director adds various memories and fantasies of the protagonist Lin Shuqi, and describes the protagonist's childhood, youth and present experiences with multiple narrative lines.
Many people have seen the shadow of Takahata's "Fairy Tale of the Years" from "On the Road to Happiness", but in an interview, the director said that he was actually more influenced by Imago's films.
"There are a lot of people who think that my films always have some takahata shadow, but I actually learn more from Imatoshi.
Inserting memories in reality and inserting the fantasies of the protagonist Lin Shuqi are all inspirations given to me by director Imatoshi, and his unique editing techniques and ways of dealing with film time have given me great references.
Although it is completely invisible from the visual effects, Imatoshi has helped me a lot in terms of editing and narrative methods. ”
The "editing and narrative method" mentioned by director Song Xinying is Imatoshi's unique "Match cut" approach.
Match cut from On the Road to Happiness
"Match cut" Chinese translated as "matching clip", which completes the scene through similar graphics, colors, or movements.
"Match cut" is not imatoshi's original, the most famous work before this is Kubrick's "2001 Space Odyssey", the opening apes throw bones into the air, and when the bones land again, human civilization has developed to the beginning of interstellar travel.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Among Imatoshi's works, the most impressive matching edit is "Millennium Actress", where Fujiwara Chiyoko constantly switches roles, and the background is constantly changing, but it is Chiyoko herself who does not change.
Millennium Actress
Many shots of "On the Road to Happiness" can see the shadow of "Millennium Actress", the protagonist Lin Shuqi shuttles through various era scenes, sometimes returns to elementary school, and sometimes flashes back to the present, but like Chiyoko, she is still Lin Shuqi and still telling her own story.
"On the Road to Happiness"
After the release of "Happiness Road", it won the Golden Horse Award for Best Animated Feature Film, the Tokyo Animation Award for Animated Feature Jury Award, and the Best Animated Feature Award at the Stuttgart International Animation Film Festival.
"With a moving and delicate script, the protagonist Lin Shuqi can be described as the most contradictory and ordinary protagonist in the history of Taiwanese animation, and her confusion and confusion about life show the epitome of Taiwan's past decades." Kaohsiung Film Festival judge Zheng Binghong commented on the film.
And this, obviously, is also what Chiyoko experienced in "Millennium Actress".
Spider-Man Parallel Universe X Unhemp's House
Spider-Man Parallel Universe is already a movie that doesn't need to be introduced any more.
Spider-Man: Parallel Universe
Written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and directed by Bob Pestchitti, Peter Ramsay and Rodney Rothman, the animated film was a box office hit and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2019, breaking disney's six-year monopoly on the award.
Spider-Man Parallel Universe takes a very clever approach to the narrative, where the protagonist Miles Moras, who was originally an ordinary middle school student, was accidentally bitten by a radioactive spider and thus gained spider-Man abilities.
The protagonist, Miles Moras
The story has developed to the present, which seems to be a clichéd Spider-Man plot, but the collision plane and the parallel time and space that are torn apart in the immediate future make the story develop in a very different direction from traditional superhero movies.
The villain tries to use the collider to find his wife and children in other parallel universes, but accidentally brings Spider-Man from other universes to the place, including a female Spider-Man, a Japanese Spider-Man who manipulates the mech, and a "Spider-Man" from the 1930s black and white Spider-Man and animal universe.
Other Spider-Man in parallel universes
The unique parallel universe setting makes the film depart from the previous single-protagonist single-art setting mode, and the whole movie has gained an unprecedented freshness through the editing of different protagonists' respective art styles and the attempt to insert the style of the comic storyboard into the movie.
In the performance of Japanese Spider-Man, the film uses Japanese animation-style art design
This unique editing aesthetic is naturally borrowed from Japanese animation, not only the "two-dimensional girl" has become a member of the parallel Spider-Man, but the main creative team said in an interview: "The creative methods of Japanese animation producers led by Imatoshi are still world-leading, and we are still on the road to catch up." The artistic realizations we rely on to refer to are still almost entirely from Japan. ”
The main creative team told the Japanese media about the influence of Jinmin on them
In the today's films, the cross-dimensional editing technique used in Spider-Man Parallel Universe is obviously more sophisticated, and the coordination with the plot is more organic.
In Red Hot Chili Peppers, when Officer Fanchuan tells Red Hot Chili About what the "axis" (the line between the camera and the object being filmed) and the "pan focal length" (using the choice of aperture and focus points to control the depth of field) are used to illustrate the audience and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a character.
This is known in the theory of narratology as "narrative cross-layer", in addition to "Red Hot Chili Peppers", a film that can better reflect Imatoshi's cross-layer editing technique, of course, belongs to "The Unma's House".
If the cross-layer editing of "Spider-Man Parallel Universe" is only about increasing the characters and interspersing the background design, then the cross-layer editing of "Unma's House" blurs the identity of Unma, divides Unma into countless personalities, and also makes the audience fall into a situation where they don't know what is true.
Busan Trip X Red Hot Chili Peppers
It seems strange that "Busan Trip" appears on Imatoshi's list of learners.
Busan Trip poster
This first zombie movie in Korean history has continued to set new box office records since its release, and Rotten Tomatoes has also given a 76% freshness rating.
Even among professional film critics, the film has been mixed and controversial, but it is undeniable that "Busan Trip" has still gained a certain degree of public popularity and recognition.
Such a blockbuster zombie commercial film seems to be incompatible with Imatoshi's style.
However, the director once said in an interview that he was influenced by Tetsuya Nakajima and Imatoshi, and was greatly inspired by Japanese anime and manga in the film.
This inspiration is reflected in the action scenes of zombies: countless unconscious infected people blindly running in one direction, which is quite similar to the parade after losing consciousness in "Red Hot Chili Peppers".
Both of these losses of control are based on the loss of consciousness of the crowd.
If the infected in "Busan Trip" loses their way of thinking as a real person, then the out-of-control person in "Red Hot Chili Peppers" loses the ability to control his dreams.
Blind group parades are a form of expression that Imatoshi often uses, and in addition to "Red Hot Chili Peppers", his earlier TV version of the animation "Delusional Agent" often made a fuss about this scene, showing a scene of collective unconscious rampage.
《Delusional Agent》
This expression of Imatoshi has also been borrowed into contemporary art.
At this year's Yokohama Triennial, artist Tokuhei Kim used white latex paint to cover the heads of various anime characters we know, as if it were a kind of parasite parasitizing the heads of the characters, and he interpreted this series of works as the delusions, fears, distress and uneasiness generated by the human heart, which manifested as the delusion of white viscous objects, which undoubtedly reminded people of the nightmares that spilled into the real world in "Red Hot Chili Peppers".
Kim's White Discharge
Imatoshi X post-Imatoshi era
The evaluation dimension of "Im-mystitsu" has gradually been used by more and more people in the evaluation of works, and we can also appreciate it from this point, and the influence of Imatoshi is so great.
In addition, the Canadian Fantasy Film Festival, held annually in Montreal, named the highest award in the animation competition unit "Imatoshi Award" in recognition of Imatoshi's achievements in the art of animation.
The China Independent Animation Film Forum has also set up the "Imatoshi Award", which is composed of a jury composed of Japanese industry veterans to recognize participating authors with special award significance.
Toshimi Prize-winning work "The Murder of Cannon"
In the year of director Toshi's death, Time named him one of the top ten deceased people of the year, and his influence apparently did not stop in 2010, and even after ten years of death, the word "Imatoshi" is still often mentioned and is evaluated as one of the greatest directors in the history of animated cinema.
After the death of director Toshitoshi, his thousands of words of suicide note were also published, and even if there was not much time left, he could say it humorously:
"But I want you to understand a little. Because Imatoshi is 'such a person', he has the ability to make animations that condense many different components from other people. This may be very arrogant, but please forgive me for looking at the face of cancer. ”
At the moment of his ten-year death, we may be able to understand a little bit of the meaning that Imatoshi's works that are different from others bring to us and the world.
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