Realised in collaboration with A.S.C.I.G. - Association for Cultural Exchanges between Italy and Japan, Ottobre Giapponese (Japanese October) is Ravenna Nightmare's section that every year explores one of the film industry that most contributes to the enhancement of genre cinema, through the screening of retrospective and contemporary films.
One of the events of the 2020 edition (online from 31 October to 8 November on MYmovies.it) will be dedicated to Kōji Yamamura, one of the most famous and appreciated independent animators of his generation. Among his best-known films, Mt. Head (Atamayama) - nominated for an Oscar as Best Animated Short Film in 2003 - and the three shorts The old crocodile (2005), Satie's Parade (2016) and Dreams into drawing (2019) are the films proposed by Japanese October in the focus dedicated to this contemporary master.
In spite of the great commercialization of Japanese animation started in the sixties, whose boom also led many of the independent animators to choose the path of the great studios, it is singular that a young animator, a rookie in the eighties, chose the path of independence and, through this, to carry out an expressive work that in a short time would have given him fame both at home and abroad. Yamamura Kōji (1964), a Japanese animation prodigy boy, made his debut at the age of thirteen. In a short time, through his own independent studio, he exported his name and his art to the main stages of quality animation, from Hiroshima and Annecy, to Chicago and Berlin. His works, in addition to the ways and methods of classical animation, cel-animation, also rest on the solid foundations of computer animation. Yamamura's is an "unusual" use of the electronic medium, where the interaction between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality gives the characters a poeticity rare for CG productions. The artist has become an idol among the younger Japanese.
