Maya Yonesho’s Top 20 Animated Films

Ever since I got my hands on a copy of the published version of Laputa’s Top 150 Japanese and World Animation (2003) in autumn 2010, I have been writing off and on about individual animators responses to the 2003 survey. There were quite a range of responses, all of which tell us a great deal about the animators themselves. The first generation of postwar "anime" animators - like Yoichi Kotabe, Reiko Okuyama, Eiichi Yamamoto, and Takashi Yanase, were influenced by a wide range of both domestic and foreign animation both popular and artistic. Animators who followed in the footsteps of this first wave of anime like Keiichi Hara, tend to be strongly influenced by domestic anime of the 70s and 80s.

Independent animators (ie. Keiichi Tanaami, Masahiro Katayama, Shigeru Tamura) who practice what some in Japan call "art animation" tend to be influenced by both Japanese artistic traditions and the best of world animation. The stop motion animator Maya Yonesho has one foot firmly planted in Japan and the other in Europe and her lyrically beautiful films explore the idea of animation as a universal language, as you can read in my 2008 profile of her as an artist. In the 2003 survey, Yonesho lists a wide range of animation from around the world whose animation techniques are as varied as their cultural origins. Yonesho's selection could easily make up the course contents of an introduction to world animation. If you haven't seen the films in her list, you have really been missing out on some pretty remarkable art.

Almost all of the animation on Yonesho's list falls under the vague category of independent or alternative animation. The biggest exception is Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940). This is an interesting choice because the most animators tend to choose Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Fantasia (1940) as their nod to the influence of Disney animators Animation fans who only recall seeing Pinocchio as a child should get a hold of a copy and take another look, for it is a fascinating film in terms of its use of animation technique. In a addition to using the novel technique of rotoscoping stop motion animation miniatures (a technique invented by Disney's competition, the Fleischer Brothers), Disney even had Oskar Fischinger contribute to the sparkle effect of the blue fairy's wand. I think Fischinger's influence is quite obvious in the screen-cap I have chosen below. Fischinger, of course, famously worked on the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" animation sequence for Fantasia - which was released nine months after Pinocchio, and had a massive row with Disney over stylistic choices.

You can support Maya Yonesho by ordering a DVD of her Abstract AnimationWorks from Anido today.

Learn more about her by visiting her official website.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

Here is Yonesho's unranked list: