Ichikawa, Kon 1915-2008 (Christie)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 20, 1915, in Uji-yamada (now Ise), Japan; died of pneumonia, February 13, 2008, in Tokyo, Japan. Film director, animator, and screenwriter. Ichikawa began his filmmaking career in the animation department of J.O. Studios during the 1930s. He maintained his collaboration with the successor studio, Toho Company, off and on for the rest of his career. Ichikawa's earliest work as a director and screenwriter was an outgrowth of his work as an animator which, due in part to a labor shortage of production artists during and after World War II, had to be produced with live actors. His early films tended toward melodrama, but as he grew more comfortable with his work and more popular with Japanese audiences, he expanded into many genres: art films, thrillers, documentaries, and films that could be classified as comedies, albeit dark ones. Ichikawa also began to produce the profound, often psychological films that won him international respect. One of his earliest directorial triumphs was The Burmese Harp, a powerful depiction of the horrors of war that won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1959. A,pmg the films he directed and coauthored, one of his earliest U.S. releases was Odd Obsession (1961), a look at family life that revealed the filmmaker's somewhat off-center sense of humor; the film won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Another film familiar to U.S. audiences in the same decade was the prizewinning documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1966). Some critics have designated the 1960s as the decade at the apex of his career, at least on the international scene, though he continued to work well into old age. Overall, Ichikawa made at least forty films as director and screenwriter (some under the sobriquet Christie) and dozens more as director. He once told CA that he made films because he was interested in people, and his theme seems to have been a humanist one. Ichikawa had a talent for depicting the good side of people, even under trying circumstances: in the face of war or during the fiercest moments of athletic competition. He won praise for the emotional complexity revealed by a young man on a solo sea voyage from Japan to San Francisco in his film Alone on the Pacific (1963). He did not, however, hesitate to portray the other side of the human condition, if only for purposes of comparison. One of Ichikawa's goals was to inject the most creative elements of the filmmaker's art into all of his work, even the most prosaic film assignments. He has been called one of the most flexible and versatile Japanese filmmakers of all time. Ichikawa won a lifetime achievement award from the Montreal International Film Festival in 2001. Among his last feature films, made at age ninety, was The Inugami Family, a 2006 remake of a film that Ichikawa had originally written and directed thirty years earlier.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2008, p. B11.

New York Times, February 14, 2008, p. C12.

Times (London, England), March 11, 2008, p. 72.