The Airtight Garage or: Kurosawa's Shelved Animated Co-Production
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30 July 2010
30 July 2010
An interesting link!
I remember the rumours, but I think the project got cancelled in the mid-90s or something? Now that I did a quick search, I realised that Jeremy also mentioned this at one point in connection with AK100. Maybe there were plans to revive it?
1 August 2010
As a fan of both Giraud and Kurosawa, I found this very fascinating. But it’s very unclear how directly involved Kurosawa was in this. I wonder if this was just his production company, or whether or not he himself was more involved?
The author also mentioned that Kurosawa was an animation buff as if this were common knowledge, but I’ve never heard this before. Granted my knowledge is somewhat limited, but can anyone answer if he really was strongly interested in animation?
Ultimately, though, I’m not too sad that this project fell through. Airtight Garage is a series of improvised visual pieces and as a whole story it makes very little sense (but is wonderfully enjoyable nonetheless). I think the beauty of Giraud is in his brilliant artwork not in his story telling, and this would be thoroughly lost if animated exclusively with computer graphics (especially 1990s computer graphics).
(By the way, the article failed to mentioned Rene Laloux’s wonderful film Les maĆ®tres du temps (Time Masters) which is not Giraud’s story but is absolutely the most thorough adaptation of Giraud’s artistic style ever put on film.)
1 August 2010
The author also mentioned that Kurosawa was an animation buff as if this were common knowledge, but I’ve never heard this before. Granted my knowledge is somewhat limited, but can anyone answer if he really was strongly interested in animation?
My abilities to find you a solid reference fail me at the moment, but Kurosawa did express an interest towards animation from the late 80s onwards. Reportedly, he loved Grave of the Fireflies and most other Studio Ghibli films, and considered himself a fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s works. I don’t know how involved he was going to be with the Giraud film, though.
You probably already know this, but Kurosawa’s script The Mask of Black Death, based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story and written in the late 1970s, is currently being turned into an animated film. It should have a release date sometime this year, although very little new information has been made available.
1 August 2010
I believe he named “Kiki’s Delivery Service” as one of his top 100 favorite films.
6 August 2010
Blah:
You are correct. “Kiki” appears as #97 on the list, with the following comment:
“It’s an animation, but I was deeply moved. I really liked that ‘cat bus’, for no one else would think up such a thing! His “Majo no takkyuubin” [the original Japanese title] actually made me weep. Indeed, many talents nowadays whom I would have loved to kept [sic] for movies have gone to the animation industry… We, the movie industry, must not be lazy – we must make pictures that stimulate young talents’ interest in movies.”
See the link here (about a quarter of the way down the page).
There’s a kind of odd ambiguity here. He appreciates the art of the animator, but he can’t help wishing that talents like Miyazaki’s would instead have been attracted by live-action cinema, which is where AK’s heart really lies.
6 August 2010
Blah:
Correction to the previous post. It was Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro that was chosen as favorite film #97, but he alludes to Kiki’s Delivery Service in his comments. Clearly he is a fan of Miyazaki’s work, not just of one film by the animator.
6 August 2010
I have often wondered about that list. Unless I’m mistaken, it was actually compiled by Kazuko after her father’s death, based on the films that she remembers her father to have talked about?
So I was searching for something on Google when I happened upon this curious article. Apparently, Kurosawa was going to be involved in producing an animated film based on Moebius’s “Airtight Garage,” to be animated by Katsuhiro Otomo, director of Akira. Moebius’s involvement in AK100 seems to make more sense now…
Has anyone heard of this before?