Transcultural Musical Encounters / 3: Kōji Morimoto, Yōko Kanno, and the Zagreb School of Animation’s Legacy

This chapter is an intercultural comparison. Animator and director Kōji Morimoto collaborated with composer Yōko Kanno in the concert scenes of the Macross Plus series, in the animated short Onkyō seimeitai Noiseman, and in Kanojo no omoide, a segment of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s film Memories. Some aspects of these films, like putting music, sound, or noise at the centre of the story, or eclecticism and “strangeness” of the musical score, draw the attention on the similarities of the visual and sonic world of the Zagreb school of animation. In the aforementioned films, Morimoto’s styles considerably changed, which also happened to the styles of the leader and founder of the Zagreb school of animation, Dušan Vukotić, during his last years of filmmaking. Vukotić’s last animated short,  Dobro došli na planet Zemlja, was not well accepted by critics and scholars; moreover, the public was not even aware that the film existed. Nevertheless, the way it was made reminds of Onkyō seimeitai Noiseman. The sf genre was, and still is, rare in Croatia (former part of Yugoslavia), but it was introduced by Vukotić, who often crossed borders between musical genres to express strangeness and otherworldlyness. The same thing, but in different ways, was done by Kanno in Morimoto’s films. This comparison is, possibly, ambitious and even odd; but it provides a different, alternative perspective, which, as argued in the chapter, brings depth to the research on Japanese (and European) authorship in music, animation, and direction.