Takashi Ishida’s stock expression is “I am not an animator.”  Without doubt, Ishida’s drawn animation is charged with life and is well beyond standard animation, which relies on narrative development through use of moving images — and in fact, his work extends beyond the conventional boundaries of animation and moreover filmmaking as a whole.  For a man working across disciplines and thereby establishing his own identity, even labelling him a ‘film artist’ is perhaps inadequate. 

Ishida first built his success on the many years of his training as a painter.  Now, starting with animation, he has complete mastery of visual media and furthermore explores his talents in other genres such as music, performance, and poetry.  Highly articulate and extremely well read, he effectively connects and combines his genius with various elements of art and paves ways forward to explore the multifaceted nature of expression.  If one was pressed to label him, perhaps Ishida can best be described as a ‘multimedia artist’.

That said, however, and as Ishida himself points out, he is not a man fluent in cutting-edge technology and media.  In fact, his work is far from ‘state of the art’.  Quite the contrary: his hybrid films are characterised by their classical character and are universal, timeless and almost ‘spiritual’.  To Ishida, ‘media’ is a temporary vehicle that carries his artistic creations towards reaching ‘spirituality’ and to expand and extend beyond conventional borders.

Attempts at comprehensively analysing a virtuoso such as Ishida and his work will only prove to be futile.  In this paper, I would like to limit the scope by focusing primarily on Ishida’s cinematic productions and their development (although this too will be limited to observations of Ishida’s completed works and secondhand accounts, as my relationship with Ishida is still in its infancy).

Ishida painted Tower of Babel in 1986, when he was fourteen.  This would later be traced back as his first conscious attempt at creative expression.  While the ability to command technical aspects is evident, what is more striking is his originality.  It is certainly not a typical theme to be tackled by a young teenager, and Ishida’s acute level of detail towards structural analysis of the image demonstrates his tenacity: the painting reveals elements common throughout his career, even in his most recent productions.  His work has a dynamism that knits together various scenes of strangeness and confusion into a coherent stream that are propelled upward towards a limitless sky in an almost painterly composition, which to me seem to reflect his career pattern and thought process.

The young Ishida, inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s famous Tower of Babel, painted a second tower the next year.  This time, he painted the interior. The unexpected shift from the exterior to the interior space was, according to Ishida, an act that would forever change the direction of his future visual world – and the two different vantage points would be reflected later in his films.  On the one hand he works in an illustrated hand-scroll format to create a two-dimensional world, while on the other he employs a more three-dimensional world where spatial concepts play an integral role. Although the two do not always form a compatible pair, the parallel cinematic worlds nonetheless share many resonances and are interesting.

To give you a brief outline of his life, Ishida was offered a place in his teens at the prestigious Keio High School, but later dropped out.  Although he eventually completed junior college-level training at the Image Forum Film School, he has no other remarkable academic credentials to his name. Ostracised as a drop-out, he moved to Okinawa where he was able to settle in.  The relationships he built during his years there were long lasting: study partners and, eventually, friends and some as mentors, they became his support network. 1

Having returned to Tokyo some years later, Ishida worked as a street artist for a while.  During this time, he increasingly began to use traditional Japanese painting format of the ‘hand-scroll’.  He realised that the method would allow him to capture most effectively a certain moment of time in a visual narrative, much like the way music notation works, with its five lines creating a musical moment on paper. 2

Ishida became increasingly interested in expressing the pure essence of lines and less about figuring in his performances himself.  Such desire led him to explore stop-motion filmmaking.  Emaki (literally ‘illustrated hand scroll’; 1995) depicts organic lines rising upwards on the screen and is one of his earlier attempts at working using stop-motion.  The repeated and expanded use of the scroll format later became one of his two signature productions.  The sequel, Emaki 2 (1996), shows budding elements that would come to full fruition later in his career, such as the shooting of layered, duplicated but slightly altered cels and the use of perspective to introduce three-dimensional space.

The layered cel technique allows for flashbacks and other time-shift devices, giving Ishida’s films the liberty to move freely within chronologically progressing narratives.  He often refers to the scene of a crumbling wall played in reverse in Louis Lumière’s Démolition d’un Mur (Destruction of a Wall), saying that this new media called ‘cinema’ has given him a chance to discover his potential — and his calling, as he began to dig deeper into understanding spatial time.

Ishida’s longest film Art of Fugue (2001) was dedicated to investigating this concept of time-manipulation.  The film made as an original cinematic production for the Aichi Arts Centre and was an ambitious project featuring three of the nineteen movements from Bach’s Die Kunst Der Fuge, transforming the contrapuntal polyphonic sound into moving images.
The idea of ‘musical expression of film’ is not Ishida’s own invention but an abiding occupation of avant-garde filmmakers since the 1920s.  Walter Pater once wrote that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”  It wasn’t long after Pater’s quote that ‘film’, a visual artform that encompasses ‘time’ as part of its formula, emerged.  The new medium was certainly sufficient at visualising music. 

Many have since attempted to take advantage of film, initially Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttman, and in the post-war era by Norman McLaren, the Whitney Brothers and Stan Brakhage.  Ishida’s Art of Fugue surpasses his predecessors’ trials, though, in the persistent and precise way he relates to and analyses the music.  He replaces every section of the music with abstract images that are then layered upon each frame.  Combining drawn images with those that are mechanically duplicated, his obsession with ‘interpreting music in two-dimensionality’ is executed almost in the manner of a music review.  With Art of Fugue, Ishida carved a niche for himself by challenging Bach and his music with his film.

However, Ishida first gained wider recognition not for Art of Fugue but for his earlier film entitled Gestalt made in 1999.  In it he presented a vast abstract world in the corner of a sunlit room in a small dormitory room he rented for a year.  Until then, his films had been purely illustrated worlds created on paper and lacked the concept of ‘location’, but the new film featured a real and existing ‘place’.  Viewers are thrown into this world to observe the chain of events unfolding in the room. 
The film caused a bit of a stir, as it challenged the conventional notion of how spatial concepts were created in films.  Furthermore, beyond the structural makeup of the film, the ways in which it features abstract images constantly overcrowding the ‘space’ are almost suggestive of a spiritual act (and here too Bach’s music is effectively used).  It is as though one is witnessing an act of ‘prayer’ offered to something beyond the window that lets in light in the otherwise dimly lit room.

Chair / Screen (2002) is a further take on three-dimensional imagery.  Shot in a room containing only an inanimate wall and a simple chair, it is the shadows that play the main role.  Strategically lit, the film captures the movement of shadows made by the wall and chair.  The scenes are re-shot and the clips combined to give a sense of movement between what is real and what are imaginary worlds that eventually consume one another.

The film that expanded the topic of using layered space and imagery is Ishida’s Wall of Sea: Creation of a Garden, produced in 2007 by the Yokohama Art Museum.  As part of the Artist in Residence programme, Ishida worked on the theme of ‘water’ for the exhibition entitled Views of Water at Yokohama Art Museum, scheduled to take place the following year.  He brought in 16mm footage of the Okinawan sea taken during his time there.  The film projected on the centre studio wall in the museum shows the entire process in which the ocean appears and eventually engulfs the entire surrounding space.

At a glance, Ishida’s work seems to be based on fixed predetermined plots and meticulous calculations.  But in reality, Ishida says, “The concept for each film is unclear during its making.  It is only afterwards when it is completed and I watch it as a whole that I come to understand it.” 

In his planning stage Ishida does not use storyboards.  For The Wall of Sea every scene was shot over the course of a few days, if not a few weeks.  Once shot, the clips are patched together in an arbitrary way to assume a new direction.  Sometimes drawn and sometimes filmed, he would rework the material repeatedly as though the film was his diary of his stay.

Ishida is a staunch opponent of contemporary art, and in fact he calls it ‘fatigue art’.  In contrast to his disgust towards what he labels a ‘tasteless’ genre, it is ironic that his work enjoys some of the best reviews in the contemporary art circle, which is far more enthusiastic about him than the film world.  Perhaps Ishida’s earnest and timeless approach is a refreshing one in a contemporary art scene which is stifled in part by a lack of innovation and the reliance on cheaply-manufactured art.  At the inaugural Vital Signs exhibition at the Yokosuka Art Museum, held near the same time as the Yokohama Art Museum exhibition, Ishida appeared alongside, and in the same league as the top contemporary artists working in Japan.

The film presented at the Vital Signs exhibition was entitled Unasaka (literally ‘hand scroll of a hill on the sea’), an installation piece and the latest from his emaki series.3  The format used follows his other film, Ema / Emaki, exhibited at the Setagawa Art Museum in 2003 in that the hand-scroll and the film that shows the process by which the hand-scroll was made using time-lapse screening together in the space.  Two concepts of time are presented here: the first is time as memory (as traditional illustrated hand-scrolls are pictorial accounts of events); the second is time as moments preserved on film.  In this way, Ishida compresses images of ‘memory’ and shows them later to an audience to be physically experienced in real-time:  his Yokosuka film crosses over between these ‘times’ to create depth.

Meanwhile, the Yokohama Art Museum film introduces an unprecedented complex approach towards the concept of time.  While both films feature the sea, the format, content and exhibited environment are different and gave Ishida the opportunity to play with a paradoxical relationship between positive and negative.

As a curator responsible for Ishida’s four-months residency at Yokohama Art Museum, I was able to experience first hand how he approached the formidable theme of water (and felt that for an artist who aspires to freely rise above, it was perhaps a topic too deep and restrictive).  He applied various analytical strategies and interpretations to give complex texture and variation.  The 10,000 or more stills he shot containing such wide-ranging issues were condensed into three motion pictures in a forceful manner apt for a man of such self-conviction.  As a result, a colossal triptych installation was presented.

It is now two months since the exhibition closed and he has had hugely positive responses to his work.  And yet, I wonder whether he feels that he clearly articulated his concept with the finished product.  Perhaps he hasn’t yet fully elaborated it.  I wonder whether perhaps another film is on the horizon as a metamorphosis of what he has explored here.

Ishida’s films never exist as a singular work: they share many resonances and feed off of each other to expand and extend.  The view from the tower Ishida will climb is something unfathomable to us all.  But from seeing Ishida and his works, there is a definite upward momentum already set in motion.  For us viewers, we are left only to wait patiently for his next creation.

© Shintaro Matsunaga 2007
Translated by Kazuko Morohashi

This text originally appeared in the festival catalogue.