Come to our Yale screening by car, boat, train, hot air balloon, turtle, tanuki, horse, motorcycle, skis, rocket or just run! As always, Duo Yumeno (Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cello) provide live musical accompaniment.

Details: film.yale.edu/events/2025-...

Hello from the Pordenone Silent Film Festival! We loved seeing Japanese paper films projected onto the Teatro Verdi theatre to promote our screening. Props to Phoebe for b-roll of Yoko, Hikaru, & Eric capturing the moment! A big THANK YOU to the Yanai Initiative for supporting our screening here.

I love paper films' materiality, especially in an age where digital streams have largely replaced physical media. When color grading, I always look at the beginning of the filmstrip and darken it to reveal the ridges and spirals of fingerprints from those who handled the films 90+ years ago.

Land ho! Tonkichi's Adventure is a charming anime where nothing is as it seems.

Sharing from Instagram: we're beyond thrilled to play the Pordenone Silent Film Festival next month in Italy. A truly magical venue and event. #japan, #anime, #silentcinema

Philly, New Jersey, and NYC friends: new program premiering next week at Lafayette's Williams Center for the Arts on Sept. 12 at 7pm. Ticket's here:

williamscenter.lafayette.edu/event/japane...

As usual, Duo Yumeno joins us for live musical accompaniment!

Beware of speedy turtles! Suihō Tagawa's Norakuro was a popular manga character in the 1930s who also appears in several paper films. We scanned an incomplete version of this film in 2024 but collector Natsuki Matsumoto found a complete version which we scanned this summer in Japan.

Like so many paper films, this one begs for more research. This film - along with several others - targets (in an admittedly stereotyped way) 1930s Japanese girls & young women. Other films (like the Sutakora Sacchan films), however, upend gender norms. A book chapter/journal article awaits!

Back to work on new films. We scanned Prof. Yo Sato's collection this summer including the Japanese folktale "Battle of Monkey & Crab." Like most Japanese folktales ... it's complicated: there's onigiri, persimmons, a crustacean tragedy, & vengeance with bees, chestnuts, and a quasi-human mortar.

We always travel with musicians Yoko Reikano Kimura & Hikaru Tamaki but our Japan tour also had benshi Ichiro Kataoka & Kumiko Omori. Benshi were star Japanese film narrators popular in the 1920s & 1930s. Some paper film soundtracks include benshi so it was an honor to have live benshi on the tour.

One of the film's screened during our summer tour was Seven Little Lambs. Here's a G-rated part of the film but things turn dark quickly when the wolf eats the lambs and then the mother sheep seeks revenge. 1930s fairy tales don't pull any punches!

Our 2025 Japan summer tour (details coming soon!) needs high resolution images of paper film strips for the theatrical posters. So we shot some tests using a 100 megapixel camera. The paper film frame is just 27mm but the 100MP image reveals individual paper fibers!

Most days working on Japanese paper films is staring at three monitors painstakingly working on films frame by frame to bring them back to life. But for one week a year, if I rotate my chair to the right, I get my own Pennsylvania version of sakura season.

A clip from Ponsuke's Shapeshifting Training from our LA rehearsal at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theatre. Thank you to everyone who came to the show and to the UCLA Film/TV Archive. As always, Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cell were amazing.

Great show in Santa Barbara yesterday. Thank you to everyone who came out and thank you to the Carsey-Wolf Center for hosting us. Here's a short clip of the amazing Hikaru Tamaki (cello) and Yoko Reikano Kimura (koto).

Tonight: Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theatre. Join us!