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.
Meeting Ushiyama
It began when Mr. Ono, the sound director of Wonderful World Travel, introduced me to Ushiyama. When we first met, Ushiyama told me that the show’s creative origin lay in the imagery of Albert Lamorisse’s films The Red Balloon and White Mane.
I replied without thinking:
“But if you turn that sort of thing into animation, it ends up looking fake.”
At another meeting, Ushiyama said:
“Tsukioka, why are the cuts in your animation always so short?”
“Because it takes a lot of work,” I answered honestly, though I struggled for a response.
He didn’t press further, but the question stayed with me. I went back and examined the storyboards of Wolf Boy Ken and Mushi Production’s W3, checking the length of each cut. Just as I’d expected, the average cut in a 30-minute show was about four seconds. It wasn’t unusual for some directors to use 500 cuts in a single episode.
The World of Documentary
But Wonderful World Travel was a documentary program under the network’s news division. It was an entirely different world.
At the time, television coverage without video was shot on 16mm film, and crews used a compact camera called the “Filmo” for its mobility. It was small enough for a large man to hold in one hand, but a single roll of film gave you only about two minutes and forty seconds of footage.
On documentary sets, there was a saying that went like a proverb: “When the moment comes, pull the start button. Don’t let go. Keep pulling.” In other words, it was a world where a single cut could run over two minutes.
Around 1965, when I was still in high school, one of Ushiyama’s programs escalated into a political controversy. The issue was whether the footage depicted reality. A critic weighed in:
“Film can be edited. Therefore, any lie can be fabricated.”
That remark helped calm the uproar. However, it was later revealed that the footage had not been edited at all — it was a single, unbroken cut. In other words, it was the truth.
When I heard this story, I understood: the lifeblood of documentary lies in the duration of the cut.
As a side note, Ushiyama left Nippon Television because of this incident. Having covered the Vietnam War and earned recognition for his outstanding records, I believe he yearned for the poetic worlds of a Lamorisse precisely because of what he had witnessed.
Whether an Image Can Hold
Ushiyama’s question — “Why are your cuts so short?” — never left my mind.
While working on simulation pieces for another series, I attempted a cut exceeding 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is an extraordinary length in television animation.
Long cuts in animation invariably cause problems, both in creating materials and in filming. A 30-second shot could take ten hours in a single day. If even one mistake occurred along the way, the nature of 16mm film meant starting over from the beginning. Long cuts were notorious for being a cameraman’s nightmare.
But length alone is not enough. The real question is whether the image can hold — in the same sense that a phone battery either holds its charge or doesn’t.
Here, I want to say “image” rather than “cut.” Think of viewing paintings at an exhibition. Before a masterpiece, we will stand for minutes, even tens of minutes. But a dull painting? We walk right past.
For an image to hold, it must have power. Appeal, movement, performance, ideas, technique — these are the forces of expression.
In documentary and photography, it is the instinct for the decisive moment. The same applies to commercials. Truly powerful ones are rare. When an image cannot hold, cuts are made short, and short cuts are easy to produce. As a result, films, animation, and commercials alike drift toward codification.
And codification is precisely what AI excels at today.
The Man Who Made Me Think About Cuts
The person who made me conscious of the cut as a unit, who made me think — that was Junichi Ushiyama.
Shortly after “Computopia” aired, the critic Tadao Sato wrote a favorable half-page review in Weekly Bunshun. I was relieved. But almost immediately after, I was summoned by department head Ushiyama.
“Why did you make something like that?”
Another thunderbolt. I said, “It’s what the staff always talk about — ‘approaching truth through fact.’” Ushiyama fired back:
“You fool. There are as many truths as you like. And where the hell is there any fact in animation?”
“In my head…”
The lecture ended with a pronouncement of seppuku. The sales department, apparently, had been in an uproar. I thought as much and slunk out of the room.
The Challenge of the Single Cut
Yet with time, understanding comes. What Ushiyama taught me turned my approach to work 180 degrees.
From then on, many of my commercials became single-cut pieces, and for NHK’s Minna no Uta, I created a work that was 2 minutes and 15 seconds in a single cut — something no one had ever done before.
The Kind of Person Ushiyama Was
On Ushiyama’s desk, there was always a large bottle of sake sitting on the left side. He would occasionally pour some into a teacup as a substitute for tea — though whether the contents were actually tea or sake was a truth no one knew.
People called him eccentric, but he was more bold-spirited than anything — not much of a company man. I don’t drink, but for some reason, I never disliked that type of person.
In any case, he was someone who taught me — on an entirely different plane from computers — how to get at the essence of creative work.
“There are as many truths as you like.”
And —
An image must have power.
I am still grateful for those two lessons.
Thank you, Mr. Ushiyama.
(Junichi Ushiyama, died 1997)
The proofreading of this manuscript was done with the assistance of ChatGPT.
Sadao Tsukioka