Kihachirō Kawamoto

He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another independent filmmaker. They collaborated in booking private halls in which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in the 1970s. Kawamoto completed the film. The film was based on Kenji Miyazawa's short story "The Restaurant of Many Orders."

Kihachirō Kawamoto studied at Yokohama National University. Training under Tadahito Mochinaga and Jiří Trnka is recorded. The recorded working language is Japanese and English. The field of work recorded is animated film. Noh and kabuki are recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with Toho. Distinctions recorded are Order of the Rising Sun, 4th class, Annie Award and Winsor McCay Award.

Born in 1925, from an early age Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiří Trnka, he first became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the 1950s began working alongside Japan's first puppet animator, the legendary Tadahito Mochinaga. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiří Trnka for a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly begun to take on a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own country's rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual, independently produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968. Heavily influenced by the traditional aesthetics of Nō, bunraku-style puppetry and kabuki, since the '70s his haunting puppet animations such as The Demon (Oni, 1972), Dōjōji Temple (Dōjōji, 1976) and House of Flame (Kataku, 1979) have won numerous prizes internationally. He has also produced cut-out (kirigami) animations such as Travel (Tabi, 1973) and A Poet's Life (Shijin no Shogai, 1974). In 1990 he returned to Trnka's studios in Prague to make Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty. In Japan, he is best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV series Puppet theater, the Three Kingdoms, which was based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sangokushi, 1982–84), and later for The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari, 1993–94). In 2003, he was responsible for overseeing the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the world's top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by the renka couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo Bashō. The project received the Grand Prize in the Animation Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2003. The Book of the Dead (Shisha no Sho) is Kawamoto's only feature length animation, 1981's Rennyo and His Mother (Rennyo to Sono Haha) being a live-action puppet film. It had its world premiere as a part of a Special Retrospective Tribute at the 40th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (July 1–9, 2005, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic). Kawamoto died of pneumonia on August 23, 2010, at the age of 85.

See Winter Days.

Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (花折り, Hana-Ori; March 1, 1968, 14 min.) [1] Anthropo-Cynical Farce (Farce anthropo-cynique, January 1, 1970, 8 min., from a story by Riichi Yokomitsu) The Demon (鬼, Oni; September 2, 1972, 8 min.) [2] Travel (旅, Tabi; January 1, 1973, 12 min.) [3] [4] A Poet's Life (詩人の生涯, Shijin no Shōgai; January 1, 1974, 19 min., from a story by Kōbō Abe) [5] Dōjōji (道成寺; June 19, 1976, 19 min., from the Nō play of the same name) [6] House of Flame (火宅, Kataku; December 10, 1979, 19 min., from the Nō play Motomezuka) [7] Self-Portrait (セルフポートレート, Serufu-Pōtorēto; January 1, 1988, 1 min., part of a multi-artist ASIFA project of animated self-portraits by animators) [8] To Shoot without Shooting (不射之射, Fusha no Sha; January 10, 1988, 25 min., from a story by Atsushi Nakajima; coproduction with People's Republic of China made at Shanghai Animation Film Studio) [9] Briar-Rose or The Sleeping Beauty (いばら姫またはねむり姫, Ibara-Hime matawa Nemuri-Hime; January 1, 1990, 22 min., from a concept by Kyōko Kishida; coproduction with Czechoslovakia made at Jiří Trnka Studio) Amefutakami, in the Sky (ひさかたの天二上, Hisakata no Amefutakami; 2006, 14 min.)

Rennyo and His Mother (蓮如とその母, Rennyo to Sono Haha; October 7, 1981, 93 min., live-action puppet film) Winter Days (冬の日, Fuyu no Hi; November 27, 2003, 40 min.) The Book of the Dead (死者の書, Shisha no Sho; October 21, 2006, 70 min., from a novel by Shinobu Orikuchi)