Authorship in Music and Sound Design / 4: Kōji Yamamura and Satoshi Kon

This chapter examines the animated films of Satoshi Kon and Kōji Yamamura with respect to their remediation of other art forms (cinema in Kon’s works and Japanese traditional theatre in Yamamura’s) and the use of music in their films. Whether they occur in mental delusion, cinematic imagination, or dream, the blurred boundaries and merging of reality and fantasy are recurrent themes in Kon’s feature films such as Perfect Blue (1997), Sennen joyū (2001), and Paprika (2006). While the content and form of Kon’s works allude to the history and technique of cinema, Yamamura evokes the audiovisual effects of Japanese traditional art: the string music and narration used in Atama yama (2002) remind of rakugo, a form of Japanese verbal entertainment; Kafka: inaka isha (2007) is voiced by the actors of the Shigeyama House performing kyōgen, a form of Japanese comic theatre co-developed with nō. These two animators’ works reveal a complex genealogy of Japanese animation influenced by other theatrical and cinematic forms, both indigenous and foreign.