Quotes of the Day
If you want to annoy Satoshi Kon, ask him why he makes cartoons. Suggest that instead of toiling away in his smoky studio drawing mundane Tokyo street scenes, he might be better off investing in a movie camera and just filming the city in all its quotidian banality. Kon's response will start before you finish your sentence. His eyes will narrow, his lips will curl into a sneer, and with a quiet menace he'll recite the line that has become his mantra through countless interviews and film-festival question-and-answer sessions: "I'm an animé director. I don't do anything else. People can take it or leave it."
For anyone who has had the chance to see his movies, the choice is easy. In recent years Kon has been expanding the boundaries of his medium, tackling themes traditionally untouched by animé: criminal insanity, exploitation of women in popular culture and the fine line separating reality and illusion. In the process, he has created some of the most original—and grownup—animation ever released. Kon's third and latest feature, Tokyo Godfathers, recently opened in Japan to packed cinemas and looks certain to expand his fan base beyond the connoisseurs who have formed his core audience so far. "It's not only his best movie, it's also his most accessible," says Atsushi Ohara, an animé critic for the daily Asahi Shimbun. "It's going to appeal to people beyond the usual animation fans."
With his signature black turtleneck, neat goatee and long hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail, the 40-year-old Kon takes pains to set himself apart from the stereotypical otaku animator who's too immersed in his cartoon world to ever change out of slippers and pajamas. But Kon's distance from the animé mainstream is more than sartorial; he is one of the rare animators whose creative point of reference isn't other animation or manga. Instead, he takes his inspiration from reality: "My ideas for movies come from the world that I live in. When I walk down the street I see homeless people. I started to wonder why they didn't show up in movies. It seemed like an obvious topic."
It was Kon's refusal to accept the conventional boundaries of his field that encouraged Masao Maruyama, founder and president of Mad House animation studio, to choose him to direct Perfect Blue, a paranoid psycho-thriller about a teen idol dragged through the sleazier realms of Japanese pop culture. The film turned out to be Kon's breakthrough. Until then, he had been making slow but steady progress through the industry, working his way up from being an assistant manga artist to drawing his own manga to directing occasional episodes of animated TV shows. One of these episodes caught Maruyama's eye. "I needed someone who had the flexibility to make an animated film in a live-action genre," he says. Kon proved more than equal to the task. "He brought out an incredible humanity that I didn't even know was there," says Maruyama. "Perfect Blue was the first animated film that could honestly be called a full-fledged movie." Critics agreed; Perfect Blue garnered a handful of international awards, including the prize for Best Asian Film at Montreal's Fant-Asia Film Festival. And Kon's follow-up, Millennium Actress, a lyrical life story of a fictional movie star, so impressed U.S.-based DreamWorks that it bought the North American distribution rights and released it in theaters this fall. Says Ann Daly, head of DreamWorks' feature animation division: "When we showed Millennium Actress to our animation team, they were enthralled. They saw it as the work of a visionary."
Kon's growing virtuosity inevitably raises his second least favorite question: Can he become the next Hayao Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away was a global hit last year and which picked up an Oscar for Best Animated Film? Dream-Works' Daly believes he can; so does Maruyama. But ask Kon if he wants to follow in the footsteps of the reigning emperor of animé, and after a moment of offended silence he starts to wave his hand violently in front of him as if warding off a curse. "I've never even thought about it," he insists, a little unconvincingly. "It's the last thing on my mind." As far as he's concerned, the two of them couldn't be more different. "It bugs me how in his movies everyone has to love each other, how the moral is always so clear," says Kon. Miyazaki assembles fairy tales from a grab bag of myth and sorcery; Kon's creativity is grounded in the concrete of urban Japan.
But the two also have much in common, starting with a passion for storytelling. Despite an occasional scene with a point to make—for example, a homeless tent pitched in the shadow of Tokyo's glittering city hall—Kon's penchant for realistic settings and characters doesn't make him a social crusader. "I like drawing pictures and telling stories," he says. "I'm not trying to save Japan; I just want to show people how things look to me." For all his impatience with Miyazaki's morals and happy endings, it's hard to avoid the impression that Kon took some cues from his rival when making Tokyo Godfathers. In Kon's first two movies he abandoned his characters to harsh fates. The heroes of Tokyo Godfathers, in contrast, seem to be watched over by a benevolent deity. Chance encounters repeatedly save the day, and the film's chase-sequence finale is brought to a safe conclusion by a meteorological miracle. Kon seems to have synthesized his hard-boiled instincts with an almost Disney-like sense of providence, arriving at a kind of magical realism.
It is this juxtaposition of the miraculous and the ordinary—appropriate enough considering the Christmas setting—that gives Tokyo Godfathers its unique character. That even the grittiest scenes possess a careful beauty is the result of meticulous work by Kon's team of artists, considered by many to be the best in the business. Chief among them is Kon's longtime art director Nobutaka Ike. To prepare for the task of rending Tokyo into animé, Ike spent months prowling the city with a digital camera. In the process he discovered the beauty of Tokyo's grungy, cluttered back alleys—normally passed over by filmmakers in favor of the city's sleek, sterile thoroughfares. "I took pictures of garbage bags, air-conditioner boxes, cases of empty beer bottles," says Ike. "I came to think of the city as a character in the movie." Tokyo Godfathers' portrayal of the metropolis is so fresh and stark that it's hard to view the city in the same slick way again. Tokyo's bright-eyed homeless men, the occasional sashaying transvestite, and the teenage girls languishing in the shadows like lost children shift into the foreground, while the usual symbols of the capital suddenly seem irrelevant.
Kon's next project is a TV series that is due to air early next year. It promises to be a kind of Twin Peaks for Japanese animation, bringing Kon's work to a wider audience and raising the standards of prime-time TV in the process. "We're going to let him keep doing what he wants, and I think the audiences will eventually come to him," says Mad House president Maruyama. That may finally be about to happen. Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers made the release-date cutoff for this season's Oscars, and industry insiders are whispering that both films might be top contenders. That would bring Kon much deserved recognition and show that his brand of animation has a destiny beyond entertaining children. And Kon would never again have to explain why he makes cartoons.
- Ilya Garger | Tokyo
- Satoshi Kon's groundbreaking realism takes animé to a new level