Mitsuo Kimura’s “Onslaught,” part of the Pop Japan exhibition Reimagining: Narratives of tension and wonder, at the TIFF Lightbox Theatre in Toronto. (Courtesy of TIFF)
To walk into the atrium of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Bell Lightbox Theatre right now is to be hit with a wave of wild and often fantastical imagery. A whale emerges from the sea, its innards visible, x-ray style. A goblin walks down a city street. The neon-lit skyline of Tokyo at night takes over a wall.
TIFF’s new slate of programming, Pop Japan, is a broad look at the last century of Japanese cinema, split up into three series: a look at the work of Japanese New Wave auteur Seijun Suzuki, a retrospective of anime classics, and an examination of animator Hayao Miyazaki, founder of Studio Ghibli.
The film series will be accompanied by an art show — called Reimagining: Narratives of tension and wonder — featuring works by two Canadian-based Japanese artists, Mitsuo Kimura and Toko Hosoya, as well as a mural by Japanese-Canadian artist Tim Fukakusa. Elyse Leonard, TIFF’s manager of community and public spaces, says that the TIFF curatorial team selected these artists because their work invoked similar themes and feelings as the featured films.
Leonard explains that they were looking for artists that evoked “Suzuki’s experiments in form and storytelling [and] bold use of colour, the wondrous and mythical worlds of Miyazaki, and this theme of transformation that unifies all the world of anime films.”
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“After we had that sort of curatorial frame established, we approached programming partners and artists and invited them to co-create a showcase of their work with us that would bring their own practices and experiences into dialogue with these elements.”
Kimura grew up in Japan, and came to Canada in 2009 to study at the Ontario College of Art and Design. His work combines the dark lines and natural themes of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking with elements of fantasy and to create work that is riveting, unique and, in his own words, occasionally “grotesque.”
He says that he was surprised to be selected for this show — he’s not actually a huge movie guy.
“To be honest, I only know very major movie directors,” he says. “I am not so into watching Japanese animation.”
Still, he does see some commonalities between his work and the films being shown. “Visually, maybe [the curators] found similarities [between the directors’] depiction of fantasy and mine,” he says.
He adds that, at the risk of generalizing, he thinks that many Japanese artists share an ability to bring what he calls “imaginary expression” into their depictions of day-to-day life.
Toko Hosoya’s “Goblin Passing,” part of the Pop Japan exhibition Reimagining: Narratives of tension and wonder, at the TIFF Lightbox Theatre in Toronto. (Courtesy of TIFF)
Fukakusa, a.k.a. Ekwal, started doing graffiti as a teenager in the early ’00s. As an adult, he says, his work has become a way to connect with his Japanese heritage, including working on various projects for the National Association of Japanese Canadians. That said, he says that usually when he’s asked to do Japanese-themed murals, the request is to do something traditional.
“It’s usually, ‘Paint a waterfall or a tiger or a stork,'” he says. “A lot of Japanese iconography and ukiyo-e.”
For Pop Japan, though, he was able to tap into the modern Japanese culture that has fascinated him since he was a kid. His piece “Neon Otaku” is influenced by both anime and Japanese noir cinema.
“When [TIFF] told me the theme of this, it was right up my alley,” he says. “It was a no-brainer.”
“[The title] has to do with neon lights, that classic kind of anime [visual] of Tokyo at night. An Otaku is a person who’s obsessed with a certain character or a particular anime or something like that. And earlier in my life I would define myself as that. There’s certain anime that I was obsessed about. I had a huge action figure collection from it. I still have it, actually — it’s just not displayed.”
Muralist Tim Fukakusa works on his piece “Neon Otaku,” part of Pop Japan at the TIFF Lightbox Theatre. (Kenneth Collins/TIFF)
Fukakusa says that he’s also happy to be included in the show because Japanese film has always been important to him. Growing up in a family that he describes as “whitewashed” — something that was a long-tail result of his grandparents undergoing internment during the Second World War — film was one of the ways he was able to access Japanese culture as a kid.
“My aunts and uncles and my father, they don’t speak Japanese,” he says. “My grandmother spoke Japanese. A lot of these movies, these old Japanese movies, I used to watch with my grandmother.”
He adds that, overall, he sees Pop Japan as a celebration of how Japanese popular culture has entered the North American mainstream, and he’s glad to be a part of it.
“When I was growing up, I was almost embarrassed to tell people how much I was into anime,” he says. “And now it’s so mainstream. Everybody loves Ghibli, and this is just celebrating the fact that it’s not such a niche anymore.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
