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Read the full review of Kurayukaba.

It is always a delight to converse with the talented filmmakers I have come to expect at Fantasia, but it is especially gratifying to be the first on the North American continent to interview a new star on the scene. Through the interpretational skills of Michio Hirai, director Shigeyoshi Tsukahara (and producer Shinnosuke Yoshida) talk with 366 about his new feature-length debut, Kurayukaba, going in depth about his development as an animator and a storyteller.

366: Thank you very kindly for agreeing to talk with me today. My name is Giles Edwards, 366 Weird Movies. We hunt down strange cinema, non-mainstream kinds of things. I am seated now with Shigeyoshi Tsukahara, and off over to the side is producer Shinnosuke Yoshida, and yesterday was the international premiere of Kurayukaba. I want to open up with: what drew you to storytelling through animation?

Shigeyoshi Tsukahara: That is a difficult question! First, when I was a student, I was making various animes myself, so expressing myself through animation was already something I was used to. There wasn’t a specific moment, or time in my life when I thought, “I’m going to express myself through anime!” No, it was already something that was when I just noticed it.

I really liked to play around with PCs, and fiddling and made some drawings on PCs, and then I started making them move, and there you go: animation!

366: Yes, images moving—animation indeed!

ST: [laughs]

366: The style you have is dissimilar to much of what I’ve seen. There are watercolor elements, there’s a “papery layering” to the image, and I was curious to how you developed that singular style, and what inspired that artistic choice.

ST: Another difficult question! I’m not really sure how and where I went to that. It did evolve into that, but I’m not sure. I was trying to find the animation style that made me feel good, and I ended up where it is now.

366: As reasonable an answer as I could hope to ask for.

There is one dominant visual theme in the three animations we saw, the two shorts and the feature film, all heavily involving trains and—how to phrase this? There’s a “mechanization”, not electrical per-se, but how the interest developed in that [kind of technology], because there’s a focus on that in nearly every frame: trains, cities of a certain period, and even the clockwork vignettes within the animations surrounding them.

ST: Another interesting question… One of the things that inspired Continue reading TSUKAHARA-SAN DIVES DEEPLY INTO “KURAYUKABA” →