[Week 0] Yamada, KyoAni, Music Teens

For the film club I do with friends, I'm picking a series of works by Japanese animator Naoko Yamada, whose new film The Colors Within releases in the US this week. I've previously done a series on Mobile Suit Gundam, and because my friends are not well versed in the cultural context around Japanese animation, I preceded each selection with a short essay introducing the work and explaining some relevant cultural context. I'm doing that again with Yamada's works, and like with the Gundam series, I figured I could adapt these for my blog as well.

Week 0 | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5

Hi friends! Let's do a five week series on Naoko Yamada.

Yamada is a Japanese animator and director, best known for her work on young adult slice-of-life comedies and dramas. She's acclaimed for using subtle details in body language and camera framing to create a rich sense of interiority for her characters. She's one of the best known anime directors working today, and arguably the single best-known female director in the male-dominated Japanese animation industry. She's also notable for how young she was when she became a major player in the anime world, having directed a massive hit show at 25.

We have something of a secondary theme here too: Kyoto Animation. That's the studio where Yamada worked from 2004 to about 2020.

And there's sort of a tertiary theme in play here too: teenage musicians, a recurring subject in Yamada's work. GKIDS, the distributor of her latest film, just posted a great video where they took Yamada record shopping, which I think provides some interesting context for the role music plays in her work:

As with the Gundam series, I'll write some introductions to help contextualize the work (or go off on dubiously related tangents, we'll see). To start things off here is some general background.

Kyoto Animation

Kyoto Animation ("KyoAni") was founded in the 1980s by Yoko and Hideaki Hatta, a married couple who still run the studio now. KyoAni began as an informal group of Kyoto housewives that Yoko trained in animation cel painting. This allowed Yoko to continue her animation career, even after leaving Tokyo to live with Hideaki.

Until the early 2000s, KyoAni was primarily a subcontractor providing animation support services for projects led by larger studios. In that capacity they’ve worked on a few films we watched for this movie club a while ago, like Akira and Porco Rosso, as well as some Gundam projects (although not the ones we watched as far as I know). In 2003, KyoAni led its first in-house production, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, a romantic comedy spin-off from the action mecha anime Full Metal Panic!

KyoAni's corporate culture is unusual among Japanese animation studios, which famously run their workers ragged. Stories of grueling work quotas, industry burnout, and hospitalization from overwork are extremely common. KyoAni avoids some of these problems by limiting its slate of projects to just a few per year, employing its staff full time rather than on a freelance basis, and focusing on quality over quotas. It also operates a highly regarded animation school, with programs offered to the public as well as internally, making it an important incubator for industry talent. True to its origin as an informal housewife collective, KyoAni still has a majority female staff, and it received the Women In Animation Diversity Award in 2020 for its commitment to hiring, training, and promoting female artists.

Even if you're not an anime fan, you may remember hearing news about Kyoto Animation in 2019, when a tragic arson attack at one of its studios killed 36 people and injured 34 more, one of the deadliest massacres in the history of postwar Japan. We'll touch on this later in the series.

A Weird Subculture Girl

Yamada joined KyoAni in 2004 at age 20, as an in-between animator on one of KyoAni's subcontracted projects: Inuyasha, a popular fantasy adventure series from Sunrise (the studio behind Gundam). Soon after, she worked on some of KyoAni's early in-house productions: Air (2005), Kanon (2006), and Clannad (2007), three adaptations of romantic drama video games. The director of these productions, Tatsuya Ishihara, would go on to become Yamada's mentor and close collaborator. When asked to reflect on his impression of Yamada during their early collaborations, Ishihara once said "I thought she was a weird subculture girl who went to an arts university."

After honing her skills on the aforementioned shows and several others, Yamada was the series director for K-On! (2009), adapting a slice of life comic strip about teen girls who join their high school music club to keep it from being disbanded. K-On! was a massive success, the first of several hits Yamada would helm while working at KyoAni.

In 2020, Yamada left Kyoto Animation, and has since worked on projects with Science SARU, a Tokyo-based studio known for stylistic experimentation and global collaboration. We'll circle back to Science SARU later in the series.

Our Itinerary

For this series, we'll start by watching a selection of Yamada's TV work. Details to follow.

For weeks two and three, we'll watch two of her major films with KyoAni.

For weeks four and five, we'll check in on what she's up to with Science SARU, including her latest film, The Colors Within.