Dojoji Temple

Japan

1975

19 Min

Color

Japanese

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

DIR Kihachiro Kawamoto

Synopsis

An elderly monk and his young eager acolyte travel along a road crowded with pilgrims toward a famous temple. As evening approaches they find lodging at a young widow’s; she falls passionately in love with the young man. He can only resist her charms by lying, saying that he will return after completing the pilgrimage. The widow, however, sees through his words, and during a frenzied chase she turns into a giant serpent, the symbol of jealousy, capable of trampling any obstacle. To escape the fury, the monks at the temple decide to hide him underneath a bell. But there’s no refuge from her burning passion…. A masterful and aesthetically sophisticated work from 1976. —Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Director

Kihachiro Kawamoto

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