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The Book of the Dead by 川本 喜八郎
At the age of eighty, Kihachiro Kawamoto 川本 喜八郎 is considered a living treasure in Japan, with over thirty years spent creating some of the world’s most atmospheric stop motion animated works. Kawamoto first became interested in animation after seeing the works of maestro animator Jiri Trnka. He started making commercial animations for TV in 1958, but it was not until 1963 that his puppets began to take on a life of their own.
Making all the figures that appear in his works himself, Kawamoto draws heavily on his country’s rich cultural heritage. His haunting films The Demon, Dojoji Temple and House of Flame are influenced by the traditional aesthetics of Noh, Bunraku doll theatre and Kabuki.
See it at the Raindance Film Festival. (27 Sept to 8 Oct 2006, yes I missed it!)
The Book of the Dead - Story The Nara period (奈良時代, Nara-jidai) in Japan, set around 750 AD: Buddhism has recently been imported from China and is all the rage amongst the nobility. Iratsume, a young woman from a noble house, becomes obsessed with the religion and spends much of her time hand-copying the sutras. One evening, after copying a thousand pages of sutras, she sees a radiant figure floating above a distant mountain. She leaves her residence as if possessed, and walks until she reaches the mountain arriving at a temple that women are forbidden to enter. In the temple she encounters the figure she had glimpsed. It is not the Buddha after all, but the spirit of Prince Otsu, who was executed many years before in a court intrigue. Prince Otsu's ghost was drawn out by her fervent devotions and has mistaken Iratsume for one of her ancestors, Mimimo no Toji. His ghost cannot rest while her face haunts him.
Kawamoto Kihachiro "Shisha no Sho" Web Site (Japanese)
There’s also The Egyptian Book of the Dead from 1240 BC. Totally unrelated!
posted by Message from Japan on Saturday, March 17, 2007
