Beyond Anime – Short animations from Japan at LIAF

Following our report on Oscar Nominated Koji Yamamura attending the London International Animation Festival, we now have a complete list of all the Japanese animations screening at the festival.

Best of the Next: Programme 1 – Tokyo University of the Arts
November 3, 2012 – 6:00 pm – at the Horse Hospital
Legendary Japanese animator Koji Yamamura (‘Mt Head’, ‘Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor’) dramatically and quickly re-energised the Tokyo University of the Arts animation course into a creative powerhouse of the Japanese animation scene and the world is beginning to sit up and take notice of its graduates. This collection looks at some of their more recent graduate works and shows what a unique torrent of animation has been untapped there. 14 shorts will be screened in this series

New Japanese animation: The CALF collective (15)

October 31, 2012 – 7:30 pm
13 shorts from The CALF Collective, a small group of young Japanese indie animators that decided to pool resources and take their work to the world under a single banner. It’s worked extremely well with CALF screenings of one kind or another in a vast array of festivals around the world in the last 18 months. And now it’s our turn to check out this group of Japanese indie animation trendsetters.

Midori-ko (15)
October 27, 2012 – 9:00 pm – at Barbican Centre
In this dark sci-fi tale, 21st century Tokyo is a city at the edge of apocalypse. Little Midori is dreaming of a colourful vegetable world, but instead, as a teenager, she travels to a post-apocalyptic, surrealist, and grotesque future that looks like a Jan Svankmajer nightmare where there is a serious food shortage. Neither hunger nor her bizarre mutant neighbours weaken Midori’s vegan spirit. In the meantime, five scientists work in a lab and manage to develop “dream food”, which is both meat and vegetable. The problem is that Midori-ko – a sort of pumpkin with face and limbs – has no intention of being eaten. When Midori and Midori-ko’s paths cross, they will have to fight to stay safe from neighbours, scientists, and even their own instincts.

Japanese animation artist Keita Kurosaka needed more than a decade’s work and almost 30,000 drawings, completely hand-drawn in coloured pencils, to produce Midori-ko, a dazzling, atmospheric “paranoid fairy tale”, as it has been called. Midori-ko is its own unique kind of animated classic, one that takes today’s present day environmental concerns and puts them into realms of imagination that most of us would never have dreamed possible.

International Programme 4: Recent Japanese Shorts (15)
October 27, 2012 – 7:00 pm – at Barbican Centre
11 of the best of recently released short animated films from Japan – this year’s LIAF country of focus. A programme that opens the window on what’s going on in the young Japanese animation scene.

Tickets (Barbican):
Standard – £10.50 online / £11.50 on the door
Barbican Members – £8.40 online / £9.20 on the door

Concessions £9.50 online / £10.50 on the door

Tickets (Horse Hospital):
Standard – £10.00
Concessions – £8.00