When I said in my discussion of Wada Makoto that I enjoy the talent the Sannin no Kai inspired in the 1960's more than I enjoy the output of the Sannin no Kai itself, I may as well be talking specifically about Furukawa Taku. With thirty-odd works to his name as compared to Wada's three, it's easier to talk about Furukawa developing a personal style over the years, starting close to Kuri Youji's rounded sketchs and block colors to sketches with smaller figures and more space, with bold, darker color schemes that fill the whole frame. His scale also grows grander; if Kuri became known for his almost comically small scale, Furukawa moves into the realm of rewriting humanity's history thrice over, and writing humanity's future many more times. Even the ones that focus on a more personal scale, like a coffee break or a trip to New York, end up filling the screen with wonder and new sights, even capturing it through sketchwork.
Of course from Furukawa's perspective it would probably be sacrilege to compare his oeurve favorably to Kuri and Wada, two of his main inspirations in his post-college years. Things converged well for Furukawa to end up pursuing independent animation; considering his interests in Spanish and guitar one would guess he was always a free spirit, but he also managed to encounter the Sannin no Kai as well as manga from artists like Tezuka Osamu and Saul Steinberg right around the same time as he did some more backbreaking establishment work on Gigantor. Seeing his rough relaxed drawings and playful stories it seems like the former was a much more appealing route, and it wasn't long after cutting ties with late-night TV anime that he also managed to shed the styles coming from those other anti-establishment artists who paved his way. Sometime around then he also adopted a trademark signature that would be a watermark at the start and end of his films, maybe indicating his comfort with having his name and personality boldly stamped onto art that he could call his own.
Like many other experimental animators, Furukawa has a career in illustration alongside his animation, but in Furukawa's case the dual career is particularly pronounced in how his use of color changes over time. After his black and white focus in his time at Kuri Jikken Manga Kobo, works like Head Spoon and Nice to See You are a clear venture into contrast, and in particular color palates that accentuate black. The most compelling example to me, while also one of his thematically weaker films, was Comics, one of his early abstract takes on the world. After 1980 we see him flit back and forth between these darker, fully colored works, and the sketches with either no color or a lighter pastel palate. They seem to be fundamentally different ways that Furukawa explores the world, with more experimentation in style and even medium happening with his darker colored films and more playful stories in the fittingly lighter tones. Just as interesting is that neither is weaker than the other; two of the works I remember the most are Tarzan in the former camp and Speed in the latter, and apparently the animation circles agree since both won major awards, the Hiroshima Prize and the Oofuji Prize, in their respective years.
Tarzan wouldn't be the last time he would parody a classic film, with Tokyo Story being envisioned as Tyo Story nine years later. Reducing the epic story of Tarzan to six minutes of tiny sketched characters shifting locations every minute or so was fun by itself, and a perfect target for the way that Furukawa flows from scene to scene effortlessly, but making the giraffes and buildings so small on the screen combined with his darker color palate applied to sunsets and nightscapes to give a sense of scale no less grand then the original film. Another shock to me came in the ending credits, where I found out that it was an early role for music director Oshima Michiru, who would later compose masterpieces in Sound of the Sky and The Tatami Galaxy. I'm glad that Oshima, who excels in creating whimsical carefree soundtracks of everyday life, could come into contact with an animator with a penchant for capturing those moments.
Perhaps the best representation of that attitude of Furukawa's is Coffee Break, a simple moment in time as a writer takes a quick sip of coffee and experiences all the psychadelic wonders of the universe without ever leaving his desk. It was remade over three decades later by his students Tomoyoshi Joko and Hiroco Ichinose on his 70th birthday, and the differences say something about both Furukawa and the animation landscape of the 21st century. The updated Coffee Tadaiku has the man jump between different views, each covering a different arrangement of colors, shapes, and movements. By contrast Furukawa's Coffee Break is content with just one view, the most weightless and bright of them all, stretched out to roughly the same amount of time. Tomoyoshi and Hiroco had the innovation and creativity to find more views in keeping with Furukawa's original, but in keeping one image Furukawa best captures the feeling of the coffee break, a single effortless exit from time and space at a sip of coffee, an uncomplicated snapshot in time.
As a final counterpoint, Furukawa won the ultimate award for independent animation, the Oofuji Prize, with his sketched Speed. Having a clear plot and progression, it may be one of his most accessible works, but it's also the work I could identify with him the most. We start in prehistory with the first people as they develop civilization and reach the current era only to wipe each other out, flashing back to the moment the first ones began to progress. The second time through they focus on art, the third time technology, and the fourth time philosophy. All fail in spectacular and varied fashion. Why he chose the name Speed is only speculation for me, but the 1980's certainly went at a breakneck pace for Japan, and Furukawa wouldn't be the last animator to try and remind the world that progress for progress' sake is a pretty good path to ruin, no matter which field we choose to do it in. It also takes a special touch to condense four world lines into six minutes, and to convey the development of art and philosophy without any dialogue, but his idiotic people pull it off, and they pull it off while being so small that to us even the grand birth of the modern era seems comically insignificant.
In some ways, things have come full circle for Furukawa, who now presides over the Japanese Animation Association (JAA), founded in part by Kuri and first chaired by Tezuka. As opposed to the more well-known Association of Japanese Animation (AJA), comprised of the major studios in the modern anime business, the JAA's members are animators and directors rather than businesses, including old masters like Takahata Isao, newer yet established creators like Yamamura Kouji and Katou Kunio, and the graduates coming from powerhouse schools like Geidai and Kyoto Seika. The organization is a testament to the progress of both individual styles of animation as well as shifts in the medium itself over the decades, and so someone like Furukawa, an eternal outsider who can both change with the times and yet remain identifiable at any distance, is a great leader to lead the JAA in the modern era.