originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/760444...
Hey everyone, it’s that time of the week again!
First up, the Animation Night archive has been updated with Animation Night 182-186! The entries of late have been rather sparse, but they are in one place at least!
Tonight, we will continue to explore the Annecy DVDs, this time with the 2023 festival (of which you may recall some liveblogs). There are some absolute bangers this time - like the darkly hilarious Drijf, or the gorgeously absorbing La Saison Pourpre - but before that, there’s a new release which we cannot wait to screen.
Which is… not the latest film by Naoko Yamada, The Colours Within (Kimi no Iro), since that film isn’t available yet outside of film festivals (we gave her two standing ovations for it at Annecy tho, it’s good). It’s the film before the latest film by Naoko Yamada: The Garden of Remembrance. Here’s a quick trailer for ya:
Like every animation fan, I think Naoko Yamada - of K-On, A Silent Voice/Koe no Katachi and Liz and the Blue Bird - is the absolute bees knees and also the cats pajamas. And as you may know (perhaps from when we covered Heike Monogatari), in the wake of the horrific arson at Kyōto Animation, Yamada left her old home studio and went to work at Science Saru - neatly filling the slot of ‘star auteur director’ recently vacated by Masaaki Yuasa and no doubt making Eunyoung Choi very happy. Her work there, like Heike Monogatari, has definitely maintained many of her specific sensibilities as a director, even without KyoAni’s unique production system to back it up.
So back in 2022, Yamada directed an adaptation of the Heike Monogatari to pair with Yuasa’s Inu-Oh - seriously beautiful and moving, especially in its final arc, but the historical source material and huge cast makes it take a bit of effort to get into. Garden of Remembrance was her next project, a short film.
This 18-minute wordless film covers a subject that any Yamada-head will know well: girls playing music. It brings in a list of key animators that will make any sakubuta drool, with names among them like Shingo Yamashita and Weilin Zhang. Not to mention the bold and gorgeous colours. Word on the sakugabooru server is “it’s peak”.
So tonight we’ll be watching that!
After that, we’ll dive into the Annecy DVD. Plus a few more short films from around the web. But I don’t have time to write more right now, but I’ll try and find a chance to write about them after! (Also move the Annecy coverage to my website, and write up the last couple of days of that and worldcon, and and…)
Hope to see you there~! Should be a special one (but then, they’re all special…)
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