On the 16th of February 2014 the animation community lost another brilliant legend with the passing of 80 year old Teruaki “Jimmy” Murakami. Jimmy leaves such a vast and varied legacy of films and such a complex personal history that it is impossible to sum up his achievements in a few sentences.
Born on 5 June, 1933 in San Jose, California in the United States, Jimmy was a Japanese-American, and at the age of 9 he and his family were interred in a WW II concentration camp along with tens of thousands of other Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. This tragic event left lifelong deep scars and changed his life forever, which was often reflected in his films.
He has said “I was very, very bitter to be an American citizen to be treated this way. My older sister died in the camp and the rest of us came out pretty bad.” Jimmy Murakami – Non-Alien, a documentary about this period of Jimmy’s life by Irish film maker Se Merry Doyle premiered at the 2010 Stranger Than Fiction Film Festival in Dublin.
After leaving the camp, the family considered moving to Japan until they found out that the family home there had been bombed to the ground. They moved to Los Angeles instead, where Jimmy enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute in the 1950’s. His teachers included Don Graham and Disney Animator Marc Davis. Chuck Jones was in his night drawing class.
His first professional animation work came when he was hired by UPA Studio to work on The Gerald Boing Boing Show television series and with Fred Crippen on the Ham and Hattie theatrical series. Jimmy went on to design the big-nosed islanders in the Jamaican Daddy sequence of the Oscar nominated Trees and Jamaican Daddy.
Jimmy’s move to New York City in 1958 was the first stop off of what would become an international career. In New York City he worked with his former UPA colleague Ernie Pintoff at Pintoff Productions. Ernie and Jimmy designed the 1959 Oscar nominated short The Violinist.
The next stop on his odyssey was Tokyo to work at Toei Animation. In an interview Jimmy said “I wanted to find my roots as a Japanese. . . I worked at Toei Animation for a time as a consultant and all they did was give me grief because they wanted me to do everything their way, including using paper-clips for registration instead of pegs, so the picture would be jittery”. While in Tokyo he also began his other life long career as an artist, selling his first watercolours even if it was, as he said “for negligible money”. His later watercolours were represented in renowned galleries and exhibitions and painting remained a great pleasure for him.
The next move was to London where Jimmy worked at George Dunning’s TVC studio, directing the 1961 BAFTA winning short Insects. He returned to Los Angeles in 1965 to launch Murakami-Wolf Productions. The studio focused primarily on commercial work but Jimmy did find time to make his own personal films such as the Oscar nominated Magic Pear Tree and Annecy Grand Prix winning Breath.
In 1971 he settled in Ireland which was to become his lifelong home. His first project there was as second unit aerial director on Roger Corman’s The Red Baron. He went on to direct Battle Beyond the Stars and Humanoids From The Deep for Corman before setting up his own commercial studio, Quateru Films in Dublin.
The studio worked on freelance projects such as the opening sequences of Heavy Metal. Jimmy’s ultimate desire, though, was to follow his fiercely independent streak and make films the way he wanted to make them. Murakami’s philosophy is summed up by Irish animation designer and director Paul Bolger, “When I first met Jimmy in 1989 I asked him how best to apply all I had learned about making animation at Don Bluth Studios and he told me “most (people) use film to make animation when it’s better to use animation to make films”.
Jimmy is best remembered for his role as supervising director on the 1982 The Snowman. The film, based on the children’s book by Raymond Briggs, premiered on BBC on December 26th and has become a beloved British classic. The Snowman was nominated for an Oscar.
Briggs and Murakami next collaborated in 1986 on When the Wind Blows based on Briggs’ graphic novel of the same name. The hand drawn stop-motion film depicting an impending nuclear attack through the eyes of an elderly British couple has become an international classic. The film also reflects Jimmy’s desire for world peace which was present in so much of his personal work.
After the closing of Quateru Films, Jimmy opened Murakami Films in Dublin. The studio worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Christmas Carol: The Movie as well as the television series Storykeepers.
Jimmy is regarded as the Founding Father of Irish animation and he will be long remembered not only for his impressive body of work but especially by the younger Irish animators as someone who was always happy to help them. Paul Young, Irish producer of the Oscar nominated The Secret of Kells remembers “the highlight for Tomm Moore and myself during the various festival events we were lucky enough to attend with The Secret of Kells was a festival in Morocco where we had Jimmy all to ourselves for nearly a week. We both remember one night under the stars listening to Jimmy – rapt. He was a spellbinding storyteller, his life made is laugh and cry. I’ll never forget that night and how warm he was to us”.
He was indeed a great storyteller who will be missed by so many of us who had the privilege to spend time with him. I can’t believe that I will never share another drink with Jimmy while he entertains me with his stories.
At the time of his passing at his home he was preparing his new feature about Hiroshima. My sympathy goes out to his wife Ethna and their two daughters Dee and Claire on their sudden, unexpected loss.
