Catherine Munroe Hottes : Tomoyasu Murata and Company

From Midnight Eye (17.05.2008) :

Murata's stop motion work, paintings and pastels tend to have a rather melancholic theme. The My Road series - Scarlet Road (2002), White Road (2003), Indigo Road (2006), and the most recent instalment Lemon Road (2008) - can be read as meditations on loss and mourning. These poetic films tell their story through motif, character expression, music and montage and require repeated viewing for one to absorb the subtly evoked layers of meaning. Perhaps the only flaw with the use of music in these claymation films is that over-sentimentality occasionally rears its head.

Murata's other animation ranges from lyrical mixed media work like Winter Rainbows (2005) and Nuance (2006) to comical cel animation like the Sakadachi-kun films, which feature a small boy running about on his hands. Sakadachi-kun reminds me of the fourth section of Donald Richie's experimental film Five Filosophical Fables (1967) in which a man wanders through Tokyo walking on his hands. This sense of humour is also apparent in Murata's manga work, installations and mixed media art. For example, he has a series of photographs of people in which their heads have been obscured by blobs, and some of his installations also include large white blobs.