The Quiet King of Japanese Stop Motion
Plus: animated fabric, newsbits.
Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one is a little bit different.
For today’s lead story, we asked the outside journalist Andrew Osmond to go on location in Tokyo for us. Specifically, he traveled to Japan’s best stop-motion studio of the moment. We’re excited to share what he learned about the philosophy, style and creative ecosystem that power the team.
With that, here’s our slate:
1) Andrew Osmond goes inside dwarf studios.
2) A new film from Estonia.
3) Animation newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1 – A special warmth
This September, I visited an animation studio in a Tokyo suburb, a studio far removed from conventional notions of “anime.” It’s dwarf studios — the name is lower case, befitting a company that treads quietly. Founded in 2003, it’s known for soft, gentle, kindhearted films that are exquisite pieces of stop-motion art. Viewers outside Japan are likeliest to recognize it for series like Rilakkuma and Kaoru and Pokémon Concierge.
Dwarf is about an hour’s journey from Tokyo’s central Yamanote Line, and not far from the Sayama Hills — popularized by their connection to My Neighbor Totoro. The building’s in a quiet business area, grassier than Tokyo’s center, with offices and restaurants and a little canal running through it. The only peril is cyclists on the pavements.
It’s easier for a foreigner to find a studio in Tokyo than it used to be. One of my most shameful memories as a journalist is of being late for an important magazine interview at an anime studio, back in 2001. I was baffled by which train on the relevant Japan Rail line stopped at the station I needed. A quarter-century later, smartphones have made it all a thousand times simpler.
The dwarf studios building is among the larger ones in its area. Much of its exterior is corrugated metal, and it has the overall impression of a cavernous warehouse, though made friendlier by the dwarf name in lower-case letters over the door. I was there for an appointment to speak with Shuhei Harada, an animator who oversees the studio’s puppet and art production, and producer Yuriko Okada.
This wasn’t a tour, so I can’t report on what dwarf’s stop-motion characters were up to during my visit. From the evidence of dwarf’s films, though, I’d guess they were striking some extremely cute poses.1
Andrew Osmond: What would you say is the ethos of dwarf’s animation? What makes a piece of animation good by the standards of the studio, and what qualities do you think puppets need in order to be good puppet designs?
Shuhei Harada (animator): I would say that the studio’s standard for what constitutes a good piece of animation is related to the characters.2
Well, the most important is the story — but it’s the characters who embody it. So, it’s about how well they match; how the designs and movement best convey what the story is about. What’s most fundamental in animation is to have something to convey through storytelling.
Moreover, at dwarf, we’ve all grown up in Japan, surrounded by the country’s culture of kyara (cute characters).
Anime is really popular worldwide nowadays, but, in Japan, there have always been things like Doraemon, Hello Kitty, Sanrio mascots and Pokémon. Which is to say that the Japanese grow up with such simple characters. At dwarf, we try to follow that lineage in stop-motion animation. So, we pay a lot of attention to the cuteness of our characters. We want them to have something charming and lovable, whatever the situation.
Also, there’s the tradition of bunraku puppet theater in Japan. It’s not really about showing delicate expressions: the puppets express feelings through dramatic poses. We inherit that as well. Rather than focusing on changing facial expressions, we try to show emotions through the posture of the characters, the camera angles and so on. Perhaps if we’re able to create a variety of emotions in such a way, we’ve already created good animation.
Andrew: The points you made about bunraku remind me of some stop-motion animators outside Japan, such as Jiří Trnka in the Czech Republic. In your experience, are there foreign stop-motion animators who are popular with people at dwarf?
Harada: I would say Czech [and Eastern European] animation, such as [Yuri] Norstein or Trnka. They have many fans, including people who started in stop motion thanks to their work. But, rather than something specific to dwarf, I’d say that’s something shared by former art students in Japan.
Aside from that, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson and del Toro are very popular in Japan. Such names are more recent and tend to have influenced the younger staff. So, even within dwarf, the kind of influence really depends on the generation and the type of education people have received.
Finally, we all know about the big names in Japanese stop motion: Tadahito Mochinaga, Kihachiro Kawamoto… they’re absolute legends for us. Actually, Kawamoto was my teacher’s teacher [laughs].
Andrew: Does dwarf studios see itself as part of that stop-motion history in Japan, following in the line started by Mr. Mochinaga and the amazing work of Mr. Kawamoto?
Harada: Of course; it’s part of the context we evolve in. It’s also visible in teacher-student relationships. Some of our staff were trained by people who were themselves trained by Mochinaga or Kawamoto, or in their studios. [Hirokazu] Minegishi, who was one of Kawamoto’s direct disciples, used to work at dwarf and was closely involved with its creation. He’s a legendary animator in Japan.
People like Kawamoto developed new styles and techniques within their studios, and such development has kept going on since. We’re situated within that lineage.
Andrew: In 2021, dwarf released a beautiful short film, Warm Hands. It seems to exemplify the good-natured warmth that a great many of the studio’s animations share. What draws dwarf to create work in this warm spirit?
Harada: I’m actually surprised that you know about this film!
The director of that film was dwarf’s founder, Tsuneo Goda, someone who’s worked very hard to heighten the quality of Japanese stop motion, and put a lot of passion into the creation of characters. His works are difficult to describe precisely, but they all have this kind of warmth to them. It’s something very specific to him.
The studio is turning 23 years old this year. Among all the people who’ve joined over the years, most of them of course love stop motion. But an increasing number of people at the studio connect with its past productions and characters. I’d say that plays a part: people working on the studio’s new projects love the studio’s old projects.
Warm Hands wasn’t actually fully produced at dwarf, but I’m very glad to hear that, even so, you can still feel dwarf’s essence in it.
Yuriko Okada (producer): Many of us gathered, really, because we like the way Goda has expressed his characters and films. Although we’re trying to do different things as well, we feel our core state is the way of depicting messages or characters that Goda started. On projects like Rilakkuma or Pokémon Concierge, Goda is not involved at all, but we hear from people who feel they’re very similar to our essence.
Andrew: Leading on from that question, I wanted to ask about a couple of recent studio projects. Dwarf worked on the first-season opening titles for Beastars, which are a bit more sinister and scary, and Hidari. They seemed a little different from the sweet and cute animation that the studio has done before. Is dwarf starting to widen out its style?
Harada: Certainly, making cute things is our specialty. However, we’re also putting a lot of energy into creating in new styles.
Cuteness is something we’re used to as Japanese people, but we’re also confident that it can reach across the entire world. On the other hand, we feel it’s necessary to expand what we can do with stop-motion animation, which is why we’ve created action works such as Hidari, for instance.
I actually think that our ability to pursue different possibilities in stop-motion animation is one of the things that makes dwarf so interesting as an animation studio.
Andrew: On the website, it mentions that dwarf handles all aspects of film production. But I wondered if the studio ever works with subcontractors, and if there’s any kind of production ecosystem for stop motion in Japan.
Okada: Well, dwarf studios is a very small studio, as you can see [laughs]. Our employee staff is probably around 30. So, we often work with freelancers around us, and we can work with outside studios — like with Warm Hands.
About the ecosystem of stop motion, the size of the business in Japan is very small. We are kind of struggling to find a system [laughs]. When we have larger projects coming in, it’s always a new challenge to create a production format that will be suitable. It’s still [at] a challenging stage, I think.
Andrew: Are there any foreign studios that you have an especially close relationship with? Or any cases where either the dwarf staff go to visit stop-motion studios in other countries, or people from a studio abroad come to visit you?
Okada: That’s a good question [laughs]. We’re really hoping and trying to communicate as much as possible with studios in outside countries. Because it feels like there’s always at least one studio, in all countries, that’s dedicated to stop motion.
We learn with them, and people come visit us. For a specific name, we’ve worked with Mackinnon & Saunders [in England] as a workshop — they made Kaoru from the Rilakkuma and Kauru series, and other human puppets. We had an exchange with them for a few weeks to learn, because we weren’t really active in human puppets back then. We worked more in the fluffy type of puppets, but we were trying to introduce [human puppets]. So, we learned a lot from them.
Andrew: Japan is known for its 2D animation, and what people call the anime industry. Does dwarf studios consider itself part of the anime industry, or in opposition to the anime industry — or is the relationship more complicated than that?
Okada: I’ll give you my personal opinion, and maybe Shuhei will say something different [laughs]. But I feel we’re not exactly part of the massive 2D anime industry, but we’re not really in opposition to it, either. It’s kind of a different industry. We’re closer to live-action shooting, and the viewership also, I feel, is different. Because stop motion and anime fans are a little bit different, although they can overlap.
Sometimes, it’s interesting how 2D or 3DCG creators really love stop motion [laughs]. It’s fun interacting with them, and we feel there’s a possibility of combining [techniques] — a hybrid, or an interesting way to collaborate with them.
Andrew: You mentioned the audience for the studio’s work. Are you thinking of parents watching with children, for example? Is there anything you’d say about the people who watch your work?
Harada: That’s a tough one… there are actually a lot of adults!
Okada: We don’t know if it’s really families — it’s more like grown-up individual fans who like craftsmanship, miniatures, art films.
But we’re trying to make it a little more general than [full-blown] art films [laughs]. Netflix, for example, is helping us, because there are broader opportunities to find us than going to a small theater or a film festival.
Also, for example, the Komaneko character that Goda created has gone to the next generation. As you said, there are, like, mothers bringing in teenage daughters — even after 20 years. We had a new Komaneko film for our 20th anniversary two years ago, and in theaters we showed the first film from 20 years ago in a row with the very recent one. I don’t think anybody felt that it was so different. It flew across the generation. So, in that sense, I think it goes beyond a small audience.
Andrew: I also wanted to ask about dwarf’s relationship with Netflix, because obviously Netflix distributes some of your projects. Are you able to say anything about it?
Okada: We feel we were really fortunate to work with Netflix. The first series we did [together] was Rilakkuma and Kaoru. And we contacted them at the very early stage, when Netflix launched their business here [around a decade ago].
Stop-motion animation is too high budget to fund within the country [laughs]. We don’t have government funding here, and it’s not like the TV stations will pay a lot of our costs [to make up the difference]. Netflix was willing to invest a big budget into something really new. We worked with them on three series and all of them were great experiences — they respected the creative and also local needs. So, they didn’t really try to push anything on us.
Andrew: I believe the Hidari short film had a very successful crowdfunding campaign. Do you think it’s a good way for dwarf to fund further projects in the future?
Okada: Honestly speaking, it’s not likely that we can cover a whole production’s cost [with crowdfunding]. But it was a great match for Hidari, because [we were making] a pilot film that shows what we want to create. So, it was a very short [production].
Also, while doing the crowdfunding, we were able to get attention, especially from the industry. So many people wanted to be part of the project, and they got excited when the film was done. And we have a fanbase that’s waiting for it to become a longform [film], which we’re trying to achieve.
It’s not like we would use [crowdfunding] as a replacement for funding a whole project, but we do feel there’s good potential when we’re developing a project like this.
Andrew: One more question. Watching dwarf’s work again, even more than most stop motion, you feel it’s tactile. The viewer feels like, “I want to touch these characters. I want to feel how soft they are.” Does dwarf, for example, hold exhibitions where people are actually able to touch the puppets?
Harada: We would like to hold some! But the problem is that puppets are really delicate [laughs].
Okada: Maybe we need to create some that are touchable [laughs].
The thing you said, I think it’s one of our strengths — that we create puppets you want to touch. We use the word “huggable.” Even if there’s an existing character, like in Pokémon, when dwarf creates the puppet, it becomes very huggable. We add that element to the existing charm, and make it a little bit of a dwarf type of character. That’s one of the things we always try to [do].
Andrew Osmond is a British-based author and journalist, specializing in fantasy media, animation and anime. His books include “100 Animated Feature Films,” “BFI Film Classics: Spirited Away” and “Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist.” He has written thousands of articles and reviews for websites and print magazines over more than twenty years. If you’d like him to write for you, please drop him a line at andrew_osmond53@hotmail.co.uk
2 – Animation news worldwide
2.1 – A diaspora on the Oscar longlist
Almost four years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine and started the war that continues now. The details are tragic, as you know from the regular news. What receives a bit less mainstream coverage is the war’s huge impact on animation. Artists in Ukraine have told their stories in films like I Died in Irpin, a project longlisted for an Oscar this year.
There was another impact, too. When the war began, artists fled Russia — a creative exodus of a scale rarely seen since the 20th century. We’ve covered the diaspora a little: Invisible Friends and Sasha Svirsky, for example. But there are many more cases.
Take Natalia Mirzoyan, an Armenian who was living in Saint Petersburg when the invasion happened. Immediately, she and her family escaped to Estonia. The film she made about that time, Winter in March, is likewise on the Oscar longlist right now.3
“In 2022, all my thoughts and emotions were directed towards the full-scale war that Russia started against Ukraine, and actually the story is partially based on my own experience, in terms of feelings,” Mirzoyan tells us by email. She created Winter in March while studying stop motion in Estonia. Although she was “very depressed,” school pushed her to work, and to tell this story.
It’s an animated doc about two of her friends — artists who made the harrowing journey out. Like her, they’d been the type to protest and to support Russia’s opposition figures before the war. Mirzoyan interviewed them for hours. The film’s title, Winter in March, comes from the cold March of 2022 in Georgia, where Mirzoyan’s friends traveled. “The Georgians joked that the Russians had brought the winter [with them],” says the film’s narrator, Daria.
Mirzoyan built her project up from a single image: “soldiers standing on the [train] platform with their helmets covered with snow.” Her mixed-media animation puts it across in a haunting way. Much of Winter in March is fabric, and loose cotton spills everywhere. This cotton is the cold and snow — but it ties into the insult vatnik, or quilted jacket, used for hardcore supporters of the Russian government.4
In Mirzoyan’s words:
… I chose maybe the most time-consuming technique, probably unconsciously, because all this sewing and embroidery works like antidepressants. So it took me two-and-a-half years to make it, even though I had one animator besides myself and several intern students who helped with set building and embroidery. I have a small kid, so I took him early in the morning to the kindergarten and then started my work until 5 p.m.
Usually I am very focused on work, so I work quite fast, but with puppet animation everything takes double time from what you have planned. I tried to make a storyboard and animatic first, but the final film is still quite far from it. Sometimes I took embroidery to the lectures — because I made the film during my master studies and still needed to take some classes. But I was really waiting for the filming each day.
Mirzoyan made something impressive here — Winter in March is beautifully done. It’s been traveling since she completed it in April. “I received many letters: people are talking about how much it touched them, and interestingly it is not only people from Russia,” she writes. See a clip of the film from Cannes below:
2.2 – Newsbits
We lost Joseph Gilland, a legend of effects animation at Don Bluth’s studio and at Disney.
Speaking of Oscar longlists, the one for animated features is out. Weirdly absent is Nezha 2 from China, the biggest movie of the year. The reason, reportedly, is that the companies behind the film didn’t even submit it for consideration.
One of the year’s most encouraging stories has been the success of I Am Frankelda in Mexico. Its fourth week carried it above 800,000 attendees, and it’s now joined the country’s 100 highest-earning local films. Revenues are at $2.67 million.
The Dutch foundation that manages Blender released a big update to the software, including new linework settings and motion blur for Grease Pencil art.
In America, Cartoon Brew has a great piece on the early history of CG animation, with fun video examples.
LIAF starts in Britain later this month. Only a few large animation festivals still offer virtual, international tickets, and this is one of them. We caught it last year and hope to catch it again.
The Car That Came Back from the Sea is a worthwhile film from Switzerland — and it’s finally on YouTube. One we saw (and enjoyed) at a festival in 2024.
Russia’s government revealed plans to “completely replace YouTube” with local services. It’s part of a larger strategy that some are calling a digital Iron Curtain.
In France, Arco’s release in theaters has attracted 300,000 attendees and earned almost $2.8 million.
Last of all: we explored the story of Taro the Dragon Boy (1979), a classic by Toei Doga.
Until next time!
The interview has been edited for length, clarity and flow.
Harada spoke to Andrew through an interpreter. However, his answers were picked up on the interview recording, and we’ve printed longer and more direct translations here. Huge thanks to writer Matteo Watzky for translating Harada’s sections today.
Some of these details come from Mirzoyan’s interview with Zippy Frames, where she also made the point about protests and opposition.
The point about cotton is explained in this London Cult feature.
Jiri Trnka and dwarf studio in the same week. Thanks so much for the great articles!
作为中国的动画爱好者，说实话更希望Olivia y las nubes拿下奥斯卡最佳长片，不过arco马上在中国要上映了，看完后可能会改变想法。罗小黑固然优秀但氛围把控还是差了点（题外话：漫画里清凝终于回归啦！！）