Japanese Bamboo Animation Project

Back in 2007, the CEO of First Light, Pip Eldridge, visited Japan to attend the D-Cinema Festival in Tokyo. The annual Skip City International D-Cinema festival is designed to discover and reward the next generation of digital filmmakers.
Whilst there she met with Tsuzumi Lisa Takagi, a director in a small TV production company, who together with Junko Kato, Chief Director of an arts organization called Class of Sensibility.

This not for -profit organization, not only explores film, but also music, theatre, arts, science and Japanese culture. Working with young people aged between 6-18 years, the organization aims to explore all of these media using the five senses.

Class of Sensibility worked with a group of children from Nakano Hongo Elementary School, Tokyo now aged 11-12 years old. They developed a project called the Bamboo Animation Project. Bamboo is an important symbol in Japanese culture. The school is lucky enough to have a bamboo forest growing in the play ground which became the focus for exploring film & other arts through the five senses.

Since then, Class of Sensibility has kept First Light up-to-date on the project’s developments. The young people were just 7 and 8 years old when they started the project.

To keep the forest healthy, some of the bamboo needs to be cut down each year so with this discarded bamboo, the class made musical instruments; the Takebora, Balingbing, Super Maui and the Sasara, all traditional instruments from Japan and Asia. This achievement was celebrated by playing them in a concert organised at the school. The class then turned their talents to animation & created 10 short stop-frame animations, illustrating the many uses for bamboo, including the making of fans and the importance of the Japanese tea ceremony. This was edited into one film which you can watch here.

Here are short reviews of the 10 films that make the Bamboo Animation Project:

1. Pleasantly cool bamboo forest – I liked the use of the pretty fans to illustrate the enormous size of the bamboo tree trunks.
2. Bamboo tree living its best – I enjoyed how the bamboo tree grows leaves & thickens its trunk, until flowers bud & sprinkle their pretty petals all about.
3. Bamboo tree that grows up straight sky-high – This film cleverly showed how bamboo becomes a part of the young people it shares the world with, creating fans & umbrellas.
4. Bamboo tree that grows up to the sky – I like the way bamboo is used to create interesting patterns & shapes that compliment the urban environment.
5. Bamboo tree that looks as if it continues forever – I loved that the bamboo seemed to come alive like a giant green snake, disappearing through walls & jumping through windows.
6. Great adventure of bamboo leaves – again this film showed the versatility of bamboo leaves, especially creating little boats for themselves – very intricate.
7. Sound of bamboo forest – I liked the way the young people in the film became a part of the forest, growing up or shooting up as quickly as bamboo.
8. Hard bamboo tree – I know that bamboo is really strong even though it is very light so I loved the funny ending as the large bamboo is broken by a soft sponge – very funny!
9. Welcoming bamboo forest – I really learnt something new in this film. I had never seen a traditional Japanese tea ceremony. I enjoyed learning about the different utensils. The tea-making equipment is very different from an English teapot!
10. A bamboo tree turns into a SENSU – I also learnt something in this last film – fans are made from bamboo!