Art, Life and Opinions: Shūsaku Arakawa

Here and There (1961) fuses live-action and animation and was screened at Three-Person Animation 2. Musique concrète and electronic sounds made by modulating everyday noises such as flush toilets are interspersed throughout the work. Contrasts between opposites, as encapsulated by the title – between live-action space and animated space, between mundane sounds of daily life and bizarre noises – and the war between the sexes, a signature theme in Yōji Kuri’s work, are also palpable in the juxtaposition of musique concrète and scat singing. (CJC).

A series of 16 "short stories" created by the creator's group Images Forum.

A night when parasites of various green forms devour humans. A cruel food chain that never ceases, and an eternal repetition of life and death. A grotesque and strange parable drawn by Yoji Kuri. Isao Tomita's synthesizer music echoes quietly and eerily.

Short experimental animation film from 1966 from pioneer Kuri Yoji. A series of shorts pointing out the various ways that people meet their death through their own stupidity. The original monochrome version.

An animated film based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names in animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).

The original black and white version that tells the story of a man and a woman who go by raft to a remote desert island with chickens and a dog. At first, it is a kind of paradise for them. They farm and fish following the same routine every day, feasting on grilled sanma that they roast out in the open. One day, their harmony gets interrupted by a mustachioed scientist on a raft powered by an abused pig. This unwanted visitor constructs a robot which begins the process of industrialization on the island. The couple are disgruntled but decide to put up with the man and his technology.

A series of mini-stories satirising our world in the 20th Century.

A short experimental anime about a woman desperately in love. Made by Yoji Kuri, a well-known Japanese indie animator.

Interesting conceptual film where people of various ages and professions are asked to sit on a chair for 15 minutes with nothing to do. We see how bored and uneasy modern people start to feel when wasting time.

A short film satirizing consumerism.

A montage of scenes that describe how people can be as bad as animals.

A parody of the French erotic film series Emmanuelle, set on an air liner flying through the sky.

In this documentary made by Yoji Kuri, artist Sawako Gōda talks Kuri through the development of her best-known works and the origins of their distinctly Gothic sensibility, including her assemblages of junk and debris picked up in Tokyo and New York, her painted copies of antique foreign photographs, the quickly-produced painted eggs which became her signature, and the sculptures she made from a horse skeleton which she helped to flay herself. Gōda’s commentary on her artistic practice is interwoven with reflections on the practical demands of her life: from the challenges of living abroad and of raising her child as a single mother, to how financial circumstances helped to shape the appearance and form of her objects.

Men gather to tune into the "gossip box."

Short animation by Yoji Kuri