AMI DANG, MIDORI HIRANO, 食品まつり a.k.a FOODMAN, SABIWA, MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ
鬼 / The Demon (2021)
Ami Dang
Midori Hirano
食品まつり a.k.a foodman
Sabiwa
Maher Shalal Hash Baz
Phantom Limb continues its soundtrack series Imaginal Soundtracking, in which contemporary musicians are invited to re-score existing film pieces, with five new scores to a 1972 stop-motion work by Japanese master puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto.
Designed to reframe overlooked or forgotten works of cinema and to offer a new artistic challenge to the contributing musicians, Imaginal Soundtracking acts as a dialogue between the creative minds at play. The second release in the series sees a quintet of highly inventive, wildly varying takes on Japanese stop-motion animation 鬼 [eng: The Demon], created in 1972 by Kihachiro Kawamoto. The film is based on ancient Japanese mythology, telling the story of a demon-possessed mother hiding her true identity from her sons.
Created from traditional bunraku puppetry, painstakingly shot with manual stop-motion, Kawamoto's film is beautifully expressive. It conjures sorrow, superstition, horror and honour, all uniquely materialised within a delicate and ornate miniature world. Two brothers - hunters - go out into the woods to trap deer, but find a terrifying, demonic presence haunting the darkness. With a macabre sense of humour, the piece ends with a retelling of the legend on scrolling title cards - when people grow old they turn into demons who will devour their own children: "how horrible."