Puppet Master and Experimental Animator Kihachiro Kawamoto Passes Away at 85

Kihachiro Kawamoto (1925 - 2010)

I first came across Kihachiro Kawamoto’s animation in 2002 when doing research for an essay on the folktale Dojoji, a story in which a woman spurned by a monk transforms into a white serpent and chases after him in a heated rage. The tale originated in China as early as 981 A.D. and reappeared throughout Japan’s history again and again in various forms; from religious parable to Noh and Kabuki plays, literary supernatural tale in Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), to film and finally animation. Kawamoto’s Dojoji (1976) is where this tale finds the true form it had been pursuing all those years.

Kawamoto began working in the medium in the 1950s and honed his skills at the Kratky Studios in Prague under the mentorship of celebrated Czech animator Jiri Trnka. Kawamoto applied these techniques to animated retellings of ancient folktales, contemporary short stories, Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku plays. His world of puppets without strings describes the permeable divide between the real and supernatural. It is this restraint, to balance the intent of complete realism and uncontrolled fantasy that creates, as Chikamastu Monzaemon the famous Bunraku playwright says, “a certain something in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.”