Yoji Kuri, at the Annecy animated film festival, in 1987. DESPATIN & GOBELI / OPALE.PHOTO In the history of Japanese animation, Yoji Kuri played a unique, essential role, revealing to the world, from the 1960s, the existence, in Japan, of a form of cartoon other than that offered by this emerging industry. Published by his family in mid-December, the announcement of his death, Sunday November 24, marks the end of a creative ideal made of minimalist self-production, iconoclastic derision and solar eroticism. Born in 1928, in the department of Fukui, Kuri found his vocation in the drawings of the satirist Taizo Yokoyama (1917-2007), whom he worked with from 1950. From 1954 to 1956, he studied art at the Bunka Gakuin academy in Tokyo, before starting a career as a press cartoonist, paid at miserable rates for drawing. In 1958, he founded the Atelier Kuri of experimental manga. A rare initiative at the time, the self-publishing of a collection of his drawings earned him the same year the BD Prize from Bungeishunju Editions, which revealed him to the general public. Dazzled by the films of Norman McLaren (1914-1987), he began working on animated films in 8mm format as an autodidact. In 1959, he was one of the young talents brought together by the filmmaker Susumu Hani for a series of television programs in the form of carte blanche: he showed his first films there and met the illustrator Hiroshi Manabe (1932-2000) and the graphic designer Ryohei Yanagihara, with whom he founded the “Animation Trio” the following year, named after jazz artists performing collectively. Fierce sense of the absurd At the Sogetsu Art Center, which hosted them in 1960, 1962 and 1963 (before the program opened up to other creators, to become an ephemeral festival), Kuri and his friends brandished the banner English term animation to assert itself as an avant-garde movement – at the antipodes of the logic then reigning over animated production – and to explore various crossroads. Thus Kuri is based on texts by the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (1931-2024), on the voices of the actress Kyoko Kishida (1930-2006) or Yoko Ono, on musique concrete or jazz – Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), Hikaru Hayashi (1931-2012)… His films stand out among the productions of his contemporaries by their caricatured minimalism, their assumed ribaldness and their existential despair balanced by a sharp humor and a fierce sense of the absurd. The first Japanese director to win an award at the Annecy Festival, with a special mention received in 1963 for his short film Zoo humaine (1962), he was a member of the jury at the following edition, in 1965, and at many other festivals foreigners. Indeed, revealed in the West by a shower of distinctions (in Venice, Oberhausen, Vancouver, San Francisco, Krakow, Locarno, Mamaia, Chicago, Montreal, Tours, Barcelona, New York…), influential and revered by his peers for his radicalism of his films, Kuri soon sits on the board of directors of the International Animated Film Association (Asifa). He thus becomes the first Japanese artist to represent his country within this community. A thousand films produced Among his most notable films: Fashion (1960), Two grilled fish (1960 and 1968), Love (1963), The Chair (1964), AOS (1964), Au fou! (1965 and 1967), The Midnight Parasites (1972), Manga (1977), but also the animated transposition of 35 songs, from 1960 to 1975, for the emblematic musical program “Our songs to all” of the NHK… After having put aside animation to devote himself to painting, he returned to it in the 2000s, notably with Gramophone (2008)… If the 3,000 films he was able to claim form an exaggerated total, he achieved the feat of having produced almost a thousand (including some 800 segments broadcast weekly for eighteen years in a nightly TV show , “11PM”). The Annecy Festival awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 1993, and that of Zagreb in 2012. A truculent and joyfully transgressive figure, Yoji Kuri almost single-handedly embodied a major turning point for animated films. in his country: the affirmation of the short film as a form in itself and of the fundamental freedom available to every creator. Yoji Kuri in a few dates April 9, 1928 Born in Tokyo 1963 Special mention at the Annecy festival for his short film Human Zoo 1993 The Annecy festival awards him a prize for his entire career November 24, 2024 Death in Tokyo Ilan Nguyên Reuse this content
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