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Takeshi Yashiro’s Gon, The Little Fox is a beautiful short animated film made with painstakingly lovely stop-motion. The film is based on the famous Japanese children’s story written by Nankichi Niimi about a playful orphaned fox who tries to comfort a little boy and make amends for his own earlier mischief by secretly bringing small gifts every day.
By Nefeli Soteriou
See the animated short film Gon, The Little Fox on September 25 @ 12PM and September 27 @3PM at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street) as part of New York City’s 10th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!
The original story appears in most of the textbooks for fourth grade from half a century ago; the tale is widely known in Japan by children and adults.
Takeshi Yashiro is an experienced commercial director who specializes in animation and is one of the top stop-motion specialists. Throughout his long-standing career in advertising, Yashiro learned the things he likes in the business of media but that he is simply not good at. He also found what he likes and dislikes in directing films. He loves creating hand-made, story-telling pieces.
The film took two years and a half to complete and the pre-production process took about six months. The filmmaker modified the original story to a screenplay and developed the storyboards.
Takeshi Yashiro prefers to have full creative control by crafting everything to the last detail by himself. For Gon, The Little Fox, he had envisioned shooting the film in stop-motion. Stop-motion is an animation technique in which the camera photographs puppet action in a chronological order. This way inanimate objects gain the illusion of movement when played at speed. Stop-motion is a tedious process, as each second of movement takes 24 frames to be created, or else 24 photographs.
As the filmmaker explains, “It is because I can express more things with real objects like with wooden puppets and by designing the setting in this case, rather than using computer-generated or digital design. The setting, the filmmaker refers to is what is put into a scene. To put it more simply, setting what is shown into a filmed frame, what you exactly see in your viewing screen, from actors or puppets, nature, the sky, props like a table, a bed, a chair, and so on.
To the filmmaker, stop-motion animation is a work of art: “I think the beauty of a stop-motion animation lies in its artistry; it is necessary even today! People enjoy the story told with puppets as the props and the setting are combined together. Demonstrate crafted objects proudly as they are art pieces. I think that is the requirement for today’s stop-motion animation.”
To reduce production time and to make the post-production process simpler, the team combined traditional stop-motion with advanced digital technology. For creating the background of the scenes during filming, they used a video projector. The machine screened a background for scenes, while each frame was photographed with a video camera. To balance the lighting, an artful technical task on its own, the filmmaker took into primary consideration the measurement of the light volume from the projection screen. In other words, he exposed for the images screened from the projector. The reason behind that decision is that the projected imagery has a specific brightness that is unchangeable.
As for the puppets, Takeshi made the first few puppets himself. Later on, he work with his crew to build more – he wanted to make every detail with his own hands to reflect his vision throughout the film.
The largest setting was about 8m wide x 6m long. The puppets were about 30cm, made on a scale of 1/5 to 1/6. The biggest object was the old Japanese traditional house. As Takeshi Yashiro pointed out during our interview, “We built two houses, one for the interior, and the other for the exterior. The size of the interior house was about 3m wide x 2m deep (long) x 50cm tall. The exterior was about 1.5m wide x 1m deep (long) x 1.2m tall. The smallest objects were insects and they were about 1~3 cm.”
During the production process, Yashiro worked with ten crew members who were mainly in charge of the production design, the animation and for filming. Just one Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera was used to film Gon, The Little Fox. For the photography, the director used interchangeable lenses, a normal, macro, a wide lens, and zoom lenses. To shoot in more detail and tiny things, they used a macro lens. No corrective filters were necessary for shooting this film.
Autodesk Flame was the post-production tool for the composition and editing. It took about eight months for the editing process because of the workflow. The editor/compositor started to work from the scenes as Yashiro finished shooting. Davinci Resolve was the software used for color grading. This final process, of color correction, took about two weeks.
Gon, The Little Fox has been selected and screened at many film festivals such as the Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival and New York International Children’s Film Festival.
Takeshi Yashiro is currently working on a new stop-motion animation that he is shooting in actual natural landscapes so he can add the beauty of nature and landscape which humans just can’t create.
Nefeli Soteriou
Nefeli Soteriou’s background is in Film and Media Arts, Creativity Coaching with Coaching Psychology, Behavioral Coaching for Mental Health, and Education. With significant, real-world experience as a Life Coach and Filmmaker, she specializes in helping filmmakers with every aspect of the filmmaking life, from completing unfinished films to handling the stresses and pressures that they face.
About Winter Film Awards
New York City’s 10th Annual Winter Film Awards International Film Festival runs September 23-October 2 2021. Check out a jam-packed lineup of 91 fantastic films in all genres from 28 countries, including shorts, features, Animation, Drama, Comedy, Thriller, Horror, Documentary and Music Video. Hollywood might ignore women and people of color, but Winter Film Awards celebrates everyone!
Winter Film Awards is an all volunteer, minority- and women-owned registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 2011 in New York City by a group of filmmakers and enthusiasts. The program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the NY State Council on the Arts.
