TORONTO JAPANESE SHORT FILM FESTIVAL Rating: NNNN
The seventh annual Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival takes over Innis Town Hall for four days with an assortment of comic, dramatic and absurdist visions.
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Program One, Momo (tonight, Thursday, at 7 pm, repeats Saturday at 10:30 pm), celebrates the work of director Masaya Kakehi. The four shorts include Love Story Of Fingers, a charming romance played out entirely by human hands against a black felt background, and Canned Beauties, a weird little tale of short-term attraction.
Program Two, Ichigo (Friday at 7 pm, repeats Sunday at 5:15 pm), features two wonderful examples of stop-motion innovation. Takeuchi Taijin’s A Wolf Loves Pork enacts a delightfully complex chase through a series of photographs, while Takena Nagao’s Bloody Date offers a claymation send-up of slasher movies. Less successful is Shoh Kataoka’s Mr. Bubblegum, an overly precious piece about an odd little girl who helps a depressed man sort out his suicide.
Program Four, Ringo (Friday at 8:45 pm, repeats Saturday at 7 pm), features Kunio Kato’s haunting, Oscar-winning La Maison En Petits Cubes and Toshihisa Yokoshima’s melancholy Amanatsu, which traces the relationship of a young girl and her faithful robot.
Program Five, Budou (Friday at 10:30 pm, repeats Sunday at 7 pm), collects eight of the shorts produced for Riichiro Mashima’s 2008 Tokyo Onlypic anthology, using various animation styles (and the occasional live-action insert) to parody the Olympic Games with a series of unusual sports like the Mother Toss and Giant Sumo competitions. I suspect this is one of those cultural things that just doesn’t travel.
Tonight (Thursday, March 15) through Sunday (March 21) at Innis Town Hall. For complete schedule see listings and tjsff.ca.
