[Week 4] The Heike Story and Garden of Remembrance

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 released in the US recently. 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.

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For our penultimate selection, we'll watch a couple episodes of The Heike Story (2021), an ONA ("Original Net Animation", or what English speakers might call a "streaming" "series"). We'll also watch Garden of Remembrance (2022), a short film Yamada directed with Science SARU.

A Monkey Business

Science SARU was founded in 2013 by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa and South Korean animator Eunyoung Choi, who had collaborated on projects like Kemonozume (2006), The Tatami Galaxy (2010), and Kick-Heart (2013). These works were lauded for their eccentric, surreal, experimental styles, as well as their use of innovative methods to blend hand-drawn and digital animation. That ethos set the agenda for Science SARU, with similar quirks of style and process becoming central to its identity as a studio.

The studio's name is intended to reflect those priorities. "Saru", the Japanese word for monkey, evokes an instinctive playfulness, juxtaposed with the intelligence and innovation suggested by "science". The cross-linguistic name also underscores their global ambitions, also reflected in their collaborations with western franchises. For the studio's first project, Choi and Yuasa co-directed "Food Chain", a 2014 episode of the American animated series Adventure Time. In 2021 the studio produced two shorts for Disney's Star Wars: Visions series, one directed by Choi and one directed by Spanish animator Abel Góngora. In 2023 Góngora worked in close collaboration with Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley, directing the Netflix series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, a hybrid adaptation/sequel to O'Malley's comic. Meanwhile, Science SARU has continued producing works geared toward Japanese television audiences, including the TV series Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (2020) and the recent hit show Dandadan (2024).

The Blue Bird Flies Away

The Heike Story marks Yamada's first major work outside of Kyoto Animation. The shift from KyoAni's approach (meticulous, polished, traditional) to Science SARU's (fast-moving, experimental, cutting-edge) may seem a sharp contrast, but it also feels like a natural progression for Yamada. While her works at KyoAni were undoubtedly in that studio's spirit, each one seemed more interested than the last in pushing the boundaries of anime convention. Science SARU seems a great place to push them even further.

Still, I get wistful about Yamada's departure from the renowned close-knit supportive environment at KyoAni. I wonder whether Science SARU is a "home" for her in quite the same way. In contrast to KyoAni, whose animators and directors are all full-timers, Science SARU works extensively with freelancers, and I believe she falls in that camp. But I'm not just fretting about her employment status, It's also a bit of a bummer that Science SARU, while progressive compared to many Japanese animation studios, doesn't quite share KyoAni's reputation for manageable workloads, work/life balance, and supportive professional development.

For more insight into the contrasting studio cultures and labor dynamics, check out the analysis in this excellent piece from SakugaBlog, posted the same week Yamada's departure from KyoAni became public knowledge (via Science SARU's announcement that she was leading The Heike Story). For additional perspective, check out AnimeNewsNetwork's interview with animator Joan Chung discussing industry-wide problems as well as specific "horror stories" from her time at Science SARU. Chung's stories correspond with the period when she was doing key animation for the first episode of The Heike Story, a fact unmentioned in the article because it was published before that project was publicly announced.

Sound! Biwa Lute

The Heike Story (or Heike Monogatari as it's known in Japanese), adapts the 14th-century literary epic of the same name. Actually the title of that work is usually translated in English as "The Tale of the Heike", in case you were not satisfied with two titles and needed a third.

To be more specific, Yamada's work adapts a 2016 "translation" of the classic work into modern Japanese by acclaimed novelist Hideo Furukawa, although I could find virtually no information about Furukawa's work in English aside from passing references in discussions about Yamada's work.

The Heike Story chronicles the downfall of the Heike, also known as the Taira, a warrior clan that dominated Japanese politics in the late twelfth century. Although Japan was nominally ruled by an emperor, real power was hotly contested during this era, with rival families and even retired emperors vying to assert influence in the imperial court. As the series begins around 1170, the Heike have risen to prominence and filled many key government positions. The early episodes chronicle their consolidation of power, which culminates in 1180 when the clan's leader secures the throne for his two-year-old grandson, Emperor Antoku.

Power shifts in the latter part of the series, as the retired emperor seeks to reassert power and root out Heike influence. To that end they ally with the Heike's old rivals, the Genji warrior clan, sparking the Genpei War (1180-1185), which proved disastrous for the Heike. In the latter days of the war, the Genji installed a rival child emperor, Go-Toba, forcing the beleaguered Heike to take Emperor Antoku on the run. According to legend, during the war's climactic naval battle, Antoku drowned when he and his grandmother leapt into the sea with the imperial relics to prevent their transfer to Go-Toba. If this truly happened, then it was probably not Antoku's idea, because he was seven.

With the Heike defeated, the imperial family did not regain influence as it had hoped. Within a few years the Genji leader pressured Emperor Go-Toba into naming him shogun, Japan's first military dictator. Historians mark this as the end of Japan's classical Heian period and the beginning of the Kamakura period, an age of feudal governance and samurai rule.

The classic work is a Monogatari, is a Japanese literary genre of long form prose analogous to epic poetry Norse sagas. Like those works, Heike Monogatari is a mix of historical account, fictional entertainment, nationalist propaganda, and religious instruction. In this last regard, Heike Monogatari casts the decline of the Heike as a lesson in the Buddhist theme of impermanence and transience, exemplified by the work's opening lines: "The sound of the Gion Monastery bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sāla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind."

Like many works of epic literature, Heike Monogatari is thought not to have a sole author. Early written accounts were expanded over time by traveling "lute priests" who memorized the written accounts and added their own embellishments, which appeared in subsequent written versions. Yamada puts these lute priests at the center of her adaptation. The protagonist is an original character, Biwa, the young daughter of a lute priest and later a lute priest herself. Biwa is named after the biwa lute, the type of lute she carries and plays. An anime about a kid musician! Who'd have thunk it?

The Mysterious Garden

I know nothing about Yamada's short film Garden of Remembrance (2022), apart from the fact that it exists. But let's give it a shot.

This Week

The Heike Story (2021) is dubbed or subbed on Crunchyroll (or at the link below). Each episode is 22 minutes. Let's watch at least the first two episodes. I personally might try and fit in a third if I have time.

Garden of Remembrance (2022) is 18 minutes. Sadly it's not streaming anywhere.

Garden of Remembrance resonated more strongly with movie club than The Heike Story did. It's a really interesting silent short. The story seemed kind of ambiguous and difficult to piece together, but this only made more fodder for discussion. The general impression of The Heike Story was that it was stylistically interesting but a little difficult to follow with its fast pace and huge cast of characters. After we watched the first three episodes, over the following weeks I finished the show and by the end of it I'd become a huge fan, I think it might actually be my favorite of Yamada's works. But I'm not sure how widely I'd recommend it. It's difficult to follow the story unless you're familiar with the history, or willing to pause frequently and remind yourself who is who and how they're all related to one another. The research I did for this write up gave me enough background familiarity to get a handhold, and I think the juice was worth the squeeze for me, but it feels like a recommendation that comes with a lot of homework. Still, it might be worth watching just for the vibes and the great animation.