The head monk orders a young acolyte to guard a beautiful cherry tree in the monastery garden while he goes out. But the older man underestimates his colleague’s fondness for sake. As it so happens, a samurai warrior and his servant decide to have a picnic feast in the same garden under the blossoming tree. The acolyte refuses to let them in, but when he smells their sake, his determination is put to the test…. Made in 1968, director Kawamoto’s first puppet film is a moral tale about a disciple who was justly punished for a momentary lapse. —Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Born in 1925, from an early age Kihachiro Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiri Trnka, he first became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the 50s began working alongside Japan’s first stop motion animator, the legendary Tadahito Mochinaga. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiri Trnka for a year, that his puppets truly began to take on a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own country’s rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual, independently-produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968. Heavily influenced by the traditional aesthetics of Noh, Bunraku doll theatre and Kabuki, since the 70s his haunting… read more
