It came as no surprise to me to learn that Tamura Shigeru is most known for being a picture book author. When I say that I don't mean that his work is overly simplistic, free from philosophically laden dialogue, or anything else I associate with picture books aimed solely at children. Firstly, his style looks like a picture book. Hallmarks of his works are simple color blocks separated only by lines, with little gradients or shading. Second, his style feels like a picture book. Even with dialogue and other background noise his worlds are profoundly quiet. And the background noise isn't even the classic Japanese style of indicating a silence, the しーん sound effect often found in manga; his backgrounds have the sound of projectors clicking as they pass each frame, a factory expelling gas slowly, or the dull but clearly audible murmur of a crowd waiting for a spectacle. His style of coloring removes almost all depth from the shots and gives very little sense of space, even though all of his settings are out in wide areas. Yet despite all this, everything is calm, the calm of a world moving exactly as much as it needs to, with the unfilled air hanging homogeneously like space itself. It's the sort of feeling that the cover of Le Petit Prince evokes, or what one would imagine a Miyazawa Kenji work would feel like if he illustrated his stories. In short, Tamura's stories are animated picture books, along every axis I can imagine.
There's something wonderful about this type of animation, and even with that overly long explanation of his visually simple style and a fair amount of experience describing my feelings towards anime I can't quite capture what I find so compelling. To be sure, it's at least somewhat content-dependent. Out of his three works I can point to one I liked less than the other two, Ginga no Uo Ursa Minor Blue, for the reason that I couldn't find quite as much of a story or a world to enjoy. I suppose then it would be unfair to take my love of his other works, A Piece of Phantasmagoria and Glassy Ocean, and put them solely in his style. Then again, neither would work half as well without his sense of sound, of space and flatness, and of coloring. And even with Ursa Minor Blue, there's no way it could have worked without Tamura at the helm.
To focus on Phantasmagoria and Glassy Ocean, they each reveal something else about Tamura as a creator. Phantasmagoria is split into fifteen segments, which are each five minutes exploring a different piece of the closed world of Phantasmagoria. All of the climates of the world are reflected, from the deserts to the polar caps, but more intriguing are how all the climates of human civilization are compartmentalized as well, from the factories to liminal spaces like the cafe and the movie theater. Moreover, all these human environments are told with a focus on workers and operators. Originally working as a package designer, Tamura seems to have an affinity for the people who make things work, rather than the people who reap the benefits. The first Phantasmagoria segment tells of a movie theater which projects the Northern Lights, and of the man who changes the reels. To me this first experience of Phantasmagoria, and of Tamura's anime work, is canonized in my mind, the image of a flat night sky, a massive analog movie projector clicking in the darkness, and the little man beside it who steps away for a coffee.
Glassy Ocean tells a similarly fantastic story, the story of a whale jumping from the glass ocean before a crowd of onlookers, but Tamura uses the fifteen extra minutes to literally freeze time in order for his characters to sit and wax. Without this dialogue on life the film would fit perfectly as a Phantasmagoria segment, but it's in this dialogue that we get a glimpse not into just the planet, but also the everyday thoughts of someone living on it. They are adults, who draw and read newspapers, and in particular come from far away to see the whale jump. They talk as the live band plays after the whale disappears below the pale green glass, and as we fade out into night. Contrast appears not just between the atmospheric background sounds and the everyday dialogue, but also between the 3D-rendered glass ocean and the completely hand-drawn elements around it. I feel that Tamura is someone who looks for ways to create this contrast in both art and sound, the same contrast that gives rise to silence in an active world and space in a flattened frame. Part of it must be his experience having to create depth and developed worlds with only the pictures in a book, but to me none of his stories would work without a mind that can conceive of a whole world like Phantasmagoria.
Tamura Shigeru was one of the first directors I found when I first started watching OVAs from the 90's and early 2000's, spurred by the idea that I could find some more fantastical worlds just off the beaten trail. I had just finished the early works of Yoshiura Yasuhiro, well-known for his Time of Eve and now also for the feature length Patema Inverted, but what struck me in his filmography were his earlier works, set in worlds that were not just different but unimaginably different, technologically developed and populated with humans but completely unrecognizable. Looking to capture the same flavor, I learned about Tamura's A Piece of Phantasmagoria and gave it a try. Now having seen all four of his anime works I'm incredibly saddened that we don't have more; his take on a picturebook style is rare even for experimental works, but his worlds are exactly what I most enjoy in experimental anime.