Whale Love Animation

Koji Yamamura's Lyrical Short Film Campaigns for Greenpeace

Aug 2, 2007 Dominic von Riedemann

Koji Yamamura has produced a haunting short film, "Man and Whale," as part of Greenpeace's campaign to save the whales

It's not surprising that, as animation fans get older, their attention is drawn (no pun intended) to the work being done in Japan. There, animation (or anime) is not just for kids: it's recognized as a legitimate art form, and many animated films contain adult themes and images, and I don't mean that just in the pornographic sense.

Even the anime meant for the under-12 set has a depth and lyricism most North American cartoons just cannot match, with the exception of the National Film Board of Canada, DIsney and Pixar's best work.

This brings me to Whale-Love.org. From the title alone, it's very easy to assume that this is some kind of porno site, or even a humour site like Horny-Manatee.com. However, it's put together by Greenpeace as part of their efforts to control (or even stop) whale hunting.

According to the site, Japan is the only country in the world that continues to conduct whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. It's a protected area of 50 million square kilometers, surrounding the continent of Antarctica, where the International Whaling Commission has banned all types of commercial whaling.

Japan refuses to respect the IWC's ruling, and is even attempting to cultivate a taste for whale meat among Japanese children by serving it in schools. In 2005, Japanese whaling vessels caught 856 minke whales and 10 endangered Fin whales inside the sanctuary.

Award-winning animator Koji Yamamura (Tracing Jake, Mt. Head) produced a short film "Man & Whale" for Whale-Love.

It's told from the point of view of a beloved school principal. When he looks at an old drawing of a whale, he remembers the post-World War II shortages and how Japan hunted whale meat in order to survive. His memories of being hungry clash with his guilt over slaughtering such beautiful animals for food. When the principal sees a whale stranded on a beach, he gathers his students together to help save the ocean mammal.

"There was a time in Japan during the food shortage hardships of the postwar period when whale meat was taken as a valuable source of protein," says a blurb on the site. "We are alive today thanks in a very real sense to this gift, so should we not reach out in gratitude to whales now and seek a path of peaceful coexistence?"

In an interview with Greenpeace, Yamamura detailed his reasons for doing the project.

"I was in the finishing process of producing another movie when I got the offer," he says about "Man & Whale," which took him 5 months to produce. "I was quite busy and wondered if I could take on another production at first. But I got interested in making an animation film about whales as I like the animal, and finally decided to accept . . . It was actually quite tough to make this film along with another movie, but was really worth doing."

Yamamura continues: "What I wanted to achieve with this film was to get children, who are our future, interested in whales, protection of whales and other environmental issues."

He also wanted to show the idea "that your thoughts, feelings, ideas, what you have in mind will be gotten through and handed down over generations. Even when you get older, what you thought and felt in your childhood still remain inside of you and will pass on to your children, in some way."

"I came up with the idea of the last scene where some children try to help a whale together with grown-ups. You need a grown-up to help the kids doing so in a realistic storyline. So I wanted an adult person as a main character . . . I chose a school principal as the main character. The trusting relationship between the school principal and the kids made it easy for me to create a natural and realistic last scene where they unite to rescue a whale."

Yamamura says the most difficult part of the short "was creating scenes of the sea. In animation, it’s fun to express something in flux shape, but it was really tough to make scenes of the sea because you need multiple cells to show the reflection of lights, waves, bubbles, shadows and so on."

Check out "Man and Whale" over here. It's a beautiful short for a worthy cause. You can also read the complete interview, along with another interview with soundtrack composer Hitomi Shimizu, over here.

(This story was found via Cartoon Brew)

The copyright of the article Whale Love Animation in Animated Films is owned by Dominic von Riedemann. Permission to republish Whale Love Animation in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Koji Yamamura