Yuureisen

Yuurei Sen in Japanese or The Phantom Ship in English is a short animated film from 1956. It’s a film both directed and written by early 20th century, Japanese silhouette animation pioneer Noburo Ofuji. Telling a simple story without dialogue in eleven minutes. It’s the definition of a visual experience with a fantastic direction creating a visually striking piece of animation despite the limitations that came with the experimental storytelling and animation style.

The short film opens with director Noburo Ofuji cutting waves out of colored cellophane. Showing first hand the method he used when creating this film. For this film, he’s inventive by the way ... he uses lighting, shadows, and music for capturing the purest essence of atmosphere. In one scene, on a rugged seascape combined with the low vocalizing of the choir creates a feeling of unease. Within the same scene, the shadow of a phantom ship with brightly colored background shows corpses of what appears to be a grisly aftermath of a battle at sea. The wordless chorus increases in volume and pitch as the boat magically comes back to life. With these series of images Noburo Ofuji opens the short film. From then on, the rest is a perfect culmination of animations, filming, scoring, and editing.

Ofuji usage of color creates images that strike strong in their simplicity. Everything in the foreground from characters to objects they are on or hold are dark while everything in the background is colorful. Together in sync the colorful backgrounds make simple the act of a dark figure being stabbed visceral. When inside of another ship dancers are set against a kaleidoscope a complex design pulled off successfully. In another scene, seeing the present of a white phantom ship uses an experimental technique of overlaying animated swirling lines and other shapes. These techniques make are able to make white, ghostly figures that are also transparent when interacting with the other figures. It’s an incredible scene that epitomizes best usage of silhouette animation using it to its fullest potential.

The soundtrack is composed by Kozoaburo Hirai. His score consists of choirs, strings, and percussion instruments that sound by being struck or scraped by a beater. It is powerful how foreboding of an atmosphere the score creates in a short runtime. Further increasing it gradually grows louder and becomes more menacing strengthening the impact the visuals have. How his score is used when opening the film is masterful. Never does it overtake or overshadows what occurs on screen. It’s treated an equal story tool as much as the animation.

Without a single feeling of doubt I will say Yuurei Sen/The Phantom Ship is a short film worth seeing for all lovers of animation. It’s over fifty years old, but has lost none of powerful imagery and haunting score all those years. Standing proudly over time as a testament of quality. If you have never seen silhouette animation or want to appreciate how far animation has come Yuurei Sen/The Phantom Ship is a great place to start. A masterfully made film from a pioneer of Japanese silhouette animation.

Silhouette Animation has its roots firmly established in the deep history of nightly street plays made using shadows of cutouts and marionettes illuminated under a lamp for children. Using the transformative projective geometry of shadows under the influence of light has been a part of the descriptive artform for centuries, yet compared to the arrival of modern visual motion using film, silhouette animation became limited in what could be visually accomplished as opposed to other technologies rapidly gaining mass market appeal in the medium.

For one, silhouettes are mostly monochrome, a direct consequence of the way the effect is produced. This directly limited the diversity ... of objects and the projection of depth that could be introduced into a storyboard from the outset. At the same time, the shadowy nature of the visuals lent itself brilliantly to the horror genre, since a lot of human fear actually originates from the dark. Weird shapes, when combined with the midnight shadows that could swing in unnatural ways due to the way light projected shadows could create a dramatically ominous aesthetic.

Noburo Oofuji realized this as he pioneered much of the Japanese silhouette animation scene in the late 40s and early 50s. with Kujira, a few years earlier, Oofuji realized that inserting color into the frames when contrasted by the primary characters covered as silhouettes could generate a uniquely terrifying aesthetic that allowed for a dramatic increase in the variety of techniques that could be used.

Yuureisen, or The Phantom Ship, is an experimental masterpiece in this aspect. Oofuji mastered the various delicate mysteries of this haunting art form and brought them to work in this delightfully brilliant horror short. Using black silhouettes to denote the living, white silhouettes to denote death and using bright contrasting colors like red to work the ship, Oofuji manifests a world that is equal parts mysterious and equal parts scary. He uses the bizarre silhouette movements to show hand to hand combat and incorporates color as an integral part of the plot instead of an added layer to the visual.

When it comes to themes, two settings have always been staples of Japanese Animation right from the very first recorded work in 1917. The rugged rural inroads and harsh journeys or ronin and ordinary folk, and the outward expanse of the sea. The second one in particular is a recurrent theme both going into the second world war as well as it's immediate aftermath. Part of this could be credited to how influential the Japanese Imperial Navy was in the development of the Japanese animation industry as a propaganda arm, while another was just the general outlook of the Japanese people at the time who looked at the sea as the hope for their civilizational survival.

Noburo Oofuji's works have often featured the sea, ships and not in a good light. The ocean in his works is almost always a monster waiting to swallow the ship whole. Travelling in the sea is an art of balancing one's chances against death while simultaneously embarking on a difficult mortal trial. Dangers abound everywhere and become the primary antagonists of his work. Whether it is the whale in Kujira, or Pirates in the Phantom Ship. Oofuji derives inspiration from both folklore, yet real Japanese experience of pride and also loss, both of which originated from the sea and waves the tapestry in this wonderful film.