Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- My favorite documentary of 2006-2007 was a film called White Light/Black Rain. It offered an in-depth look at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 literally ending the war in Japan. I’ve seen this film at least a half dozen times, and I’m moved each and every time. It’s like watching a flame – completely captivating.

There are extensive interviews with many survivors of the bombing. All of course were children when it happened, and all of their lives have been dominantly affected, if not completely ruined, by the bombing. Familes lost, mashed and mauled bodies, peeling bodies and blood, fire, heat and a desperate need for water remain vivid in their memories.

There’s a beauty in these people in the film and a poetry in their language, and I wondered if it were all Japanese that had this about them; I assume it was generational. All of these people spoke with a quiet dignity and unusally articulate turns of phrase to describe everything they saw or felt.

We met the crew of the Enola Gay, the plane that carried the bomb and dropped it on Hiroshima. They discuss their mission and the feelings they had them on completing it.

The film, interestingly, started with a camera crew asking school children in Hiroshima if they knew what had happened on August 6, 1945. It was a sorta Leno’s “Jay Walking” for Japanese children. Expectedly, none of the kids knew what that date represented even though there was a dance-performance piece, remembering the bombing, which was happening right alongside them.

I saw this show again this past Thursday. It often runs on HBO. This viewing the opening stayed with me, I wondered about young kids who seem to know so little, and I worry a bit about it.

This was brought to mind, again, when I’d read Amid Amidi’s piece on Cartoon Brew about Tex Avery and his last animated product for Hanna-Barbera, Kwicky Koala. Amid ends his piece with these lines:

So has animation learned from its past? Is our industry diverse enough today to support and utilize the wide range of talents working within it? Twenty years from now, will we be looking at the credits of Bee Movie, Open Season, and Chicken Little with a similarly sad lament? And more importantly, does anybody even know who Tex Avery is in 2008?

We certainly know the answer or the question wouldn’t have been asked.
When school children in a mall in Hiroshima, watching a dance piece about the bombing, are unable to remember that the tragedy had happened in their home town, the conscious memory of the newer generations are unable and probably uninterested in remembering an animation past.

We live in the present.

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