Project Summary

The objectives of this project are to develop local talent by dispatching experts in the fields of cinema and animation, areas in which Japan excels, to notably developing ASEAN countries and holding practical workshops for local young people to strengthen Japan’s presence in terms of cultural transmission and promote international cultural exchange.

While society as a whole is rapidly and increasingly becoming dependent on technology, it is culture that provides the soil from which well-nourished minds grow, and only human beings can cultivate the fertile sources of culture. Although it has become easier to exchange cultural “knowledge” through the Internet, the “experience” of being at the same place and feeling what is in the air together with other people, all acknowledging one another’s physical presence eye to eye and sharing an intense experience at a more profound level, is irreplaceable. We aimed to facilitate cultural experiences at this profound level, which we hope will help build a solid foundation in the lives of young people who participated in this project.

To meet these goals, we came up with a program for “cultural understanding through the experience of creating together.” Even though Japanese pop culture is widely accepted in the ASEAN countries, few have genuinely “experiential” knowledge about how this pop culture is created, and by whom it is created. At the same time, the “experience of creating together” helps to build relationships of mutual respect where participants listen to what others want to accomplish, and teach each other how to accomplish their objectives. Participants have eye-opening experiences of collaborative processes, which enable outcomes that exceed what individuals can achieve on their own.

With these ideas in mind, we executed cultural exchange programs in the fields of cinema and animation with a focus on practical production experience. Specifically, we dispatched top-notch film

and animation creators with many years of experience to Malaysia and Thailand and held hands-on workshops. Through these workshops, we aimed to cultivate human resources in each country’s corresponding fields, as well as to share with local young people the advanced skill levels of Japan’s top film and animation creators and the profundity of their underlying philosophies.

We held this year’s workshops in Malaysia and Thailand, the same as last year.

The government has been actively promoting the motion picture industry in Malaysia, where we held a workshop covering all areas of film technique, namely lighting/cinematography, production design, editing and sound, with cooperation from Multimedia University and OLM Asia SDN BHD, the local Malaysian entity of a Japanese film and animation production company. The instructors are leaders in Japan in the fields of cinematography, production design, editing and sound. Students from six ASEAN countries participated in last year’s Cinema workshop, which drew upon the network of the International Association of Film and Television Schools (CILECT). This year’s workshop further expanded the breadth of participants with applicants from ten countries, namely Malaysia along with Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam to create an internationally vibrant workshop with 24 participants in total.

In Thailand, the program consisted of Animation Boot Camp 2018 ASEAN, which is an international version of the workshop executed as an Agency for Cultural Affairs project from 2012 by directors Koji Takeuchi and Taruto Fuyama. The program teaches the fundamentals of expression through animation with top class animators from Japan’s animation industry serving as instructors.

The workshop was held at Silpakorn University’s Sanam Chandra Palace Campus, which is located in Nakhon Pathom Province to the west of Bangkok. This year marks the fourth year of holding the workshop, and the continuity has yielded positive outcomes including the participation of 15 workshop alumni. As part of a new effort, the workshop included

four students from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta (Institut Seni Indonesia Yogyakarta, ISI Yogyakarta) in addition to the Thai students. Like the previous two years, six students dispatched from Tokyo University of the Arts also participated to create a distinctively international workshop with students from Thailand, Indonesia and Japan.