Kawamoto became captivated by the art of dolls and puppetry at an early age. Seeing the work of maestro Czech animator Jiří Trnka him interested in stop motion puppet animation, which led to a partnership with Japan's first puppet animator, the legendary Tadahito Mochinaga, during the 1950’s. In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to produce commercial animations for television, but it was not until 1963, when he travelled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiří Trnka for a year, that he considered his puppets to have truly begun taking on a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw from the rich cultural heritage of his home country, and so Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual, independently-produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968. Heavily influenced by the traditional aesthetics of Nō, Bunraku-style puppetry and kabuki, his haunting puppet animations, such as The Demon (Oni, 1972), Dōjōji Temple (Dōjōji, 1976) and House of Flame (Kataku, 1979), have won numerous international prizes since the 1970’s.
Kawamoto also produced cut-out (kirigami) animations, such as Travel (Tabi, 1973) and A Poet's Life (Shijin no Shogai, 1974). In 1990, he returned to Trnka's studios in Prague to make Briar Rose (also known as The Sleeping Beauty). In Japan, he is best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV series based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sangokushi, 1982–84), and for The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari, 1993–94). In 2003, he was in charge of the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the world's top animators each produced a two-minute segment inspired by the renka couplets of celebrated poet Matsuo Bashō.
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Kihachiro Kawamota Short Animated Films
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