From the beginning of its Work in Progress session at Annecy’s Pierre Lamy Theatre, directors Sunao Katabuchi and Chie Uratani’s love of history couldn’t be clearer. The session, based around their upcoming film “The Mourning Children: Nagiko and the Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black,” almost immediately dived into discussing the immense period detail of their work.
Producer and MAPPA CEO Manabu Otsuka called the production “very culturally loaded.” He continued to say that the formation of the studio Contrail to make the film helped with “the need to create a space for this historical research,” allowing them to “dig deep.” Otsuka also highlighted the number of young artists who worked on the film, speaking about a desire to provide the junior staff an environment to learn and experiment in.
The panelists shared first footage from the film, depicting slices of Kyoto (then called “Heian-kyō,” or “peaceful capital”) 1000 years ago. The footage jumped between a struggling local township and its wealthy local lords, both equally besieged by epidemics of disease. Delicately drawn scenes of people carrying fever-ridden children or workers collapsing in the street, and later bodies carried to be burned on a mountain, were interspersed with scenes of pastoral beauty.
The film, produced by MAPPA and the new studio Contrail, formed specifically for its creation, is part of Katabuchi’s interest in how the era is perceived versus how it actually was. It was ravaged by disease, rather than simply serene. The director even showed off a spreadsheet, a logbook he had made of all the deaths by disease at the time, complete with names and categorized by each disease, noting whether a body had been left in the street.
“The Mourning Children” accesses this history via the personal accounts of the writer Sei Shōnagon, author of “The Pillow Book,” which depicted the dealings of the court during Shōnagon’s time as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi. Katabuchi and his assistant (and spouse), Uratani, rifled through footnotes, cross-referenced other writings and more to build character profiles based on these writings.
“When you read her writing, you realize she was very specific about the detail, it was very concrete,” Katabuchi says. They used this to build an immersive atmosphere, even going so far as to use footnotes from “The Pillow Book” and accompanying manuscripts, and comparing them with astronomical records to find the timing of a lunar eclipse depicted in the film.
All of this detail has a point, and it was one that the team illustrated colorfully. At the beginning of the session, co-director Uratani walked across the stage and covered her face with a fan before sitting behind a traditional bamboo screen, a smaller version of the kind used in the imperial court. Shōnagon’s time with imperial court ladies observing this tradition of keeping their faces hidden meant, as noted by the film’s creative team, that the author knew many people without seeing their faces.
“This woman left an enormous footprint in her writing,” says Katabuchi, “but she had to remain hidden from the exterior world. Through writing, they found a vehicle for individuality, that’s how they found self-expression.”
“The Mourning Children,” then, aims to use this writing to bring these obscured characters to life, giving them a visual identity with distinct character traits and costuming. This, of course, was also meticulously researched, as the team shared sketches from Uratani as well as character explorations and sessions of movement studies with recreated Heian period costumes.
Such a deep dive had, suitably, been on Katabuchi’s mind for a long time. Following an audience question, he said the inspiration for the film came from as far back as his 2009 film, “Mai Mai Miracle.” Also based on the work of Shōnagon, Katabuchi had been thinking about his depiction of her in that film as a child, and spoke about how he then wondered what would happen in her adulthood amidst disease and court politics in ancient Kyoto. This led him back to “The Pillow Book” and a realization that characters who appeared in it also popped up elsewhere in other reference texts.
The depth of this research does mean that the process of making “The Mourning Children” has been long, and it is still far enough away that Katabuchi laughed when asked if a release date could be given.
Still, from the footage shown, the film already looks to be as artful as it is detailed in its accounts, all part of Katabuchi and Uratani’s mission to show how “Japanese animation is a form of exploration,” in connecting with women from 1000 years ago and showing, as the two say, that they’re closer to home than one would expect.
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