Posts

What Is the Bank System? Long ago, Osamu Tezuka — creator of Astro Boy, the pioneering television anime — devised a method called the Bank System to produce 30-minute episodes every week. “Bank” means to store. Unlike today, animation at that time was drawn on paper, traced onto cels, and painted by hand. Normally, cels were discarded after a production was completed. But Tezuka decided to keep and organize certain cels rather than throwing them away — bust shots, waist shots, close-ups, walking shots, flying shots, crying, laughing, lip-sync shots, and other footage likely to be reused. This was the Bank System. ...

There is a work called The Congress (2013, directed by Ari Folman) that blends live-action film with animation. It is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem (born in Ukraine, raised in Poland), the author famous for Solaris. A producer approaches an actress whose prime is passing and asks her to sell her current likeness — her image rights. Struggling with a difficult illness and crushing medical bills, she agonizes but ultimately accepts the offer. She is then recorded from head to toe by a full-body 3D scanner — and so the story continues. ...

There is one more thing I want to put down in writing. I considered three people my mentors. The first, needless to say, was Osamu Tezuka. The second was Junichi Ushiyama. The third was Shinobu Hashimoto. I wrote about Hashimoto in the second post on this blog, and I mentioned producer Ushiyama briefly in my first post about “Computopia.” Here, I want to write about what Ushiyama taught me about filmmaking — and one more important thing. ...

Lately, my memory for people’s names, dates, and numbers has been growing terribly hazy. Having eaten mainly fish since my youth, I wonder if acetylene-based microplastics have accumulated around my hippocampus and damaged the cells there. Reports say that the brains of severe dementia patients contain about two teaspoons of microplastics. It may already be too late, but I want to leave some notes as a personal record before things get any worse. ...

About “Minmin & Bunbun” After more than half a century of creating animation, my latest challenge is “Minmin & Bunbun” — a “hybrid picture book” that fuses the best of manga, anime, and picture book storytelling. It is currently serialized on Kindle. Meet the Characters Bunbun (文々) — The Boy A curious and slightly mischievous panda boy. His trademark is his little bow tie. ...