Kihachirō Kawamoto

Who was Kihachirō Kawamoto?

Kihachirō Kawamoto was a Japanese puppet designer and maker, independent film director, screenwriter and animator and president of the Japan Animation Association from 1989, succeeding founder Osamu Tezuka, until his own death. He is best-remembered in Japan as designer of the puppets for the long-running NHK live action television series of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the early 1980s and The Tale of the Heike in the 1990s but better-known internationally for his own animated short films, the majority of which are model animation but which also include the cutout animation Tabi and Shijin no Shōgai and mixed media, French-language Farce anthropo-cynique.

Since beginning his career in his early twenties as a production design assistant under So Matsuyama in the art department of Toho in 1946, he met Tadasu Iizawa and left the film studio in 1950 to collaborate with him on illustrating children's literature with Photographs of dolls in dioramas, many of which have been republished in English editions by such American publishers as Grosset & Dunlap and Western Publishing's Golden Books imprint, and trained in the art of stop motion filmmaking under Tadahito Mochinaga and, later, Jiří Trnka. He is also closely associated with Tadanari Okamoto, another independent with whom he collaborated in booking private halls in which to show their films to the public as the "Puppet Animashow" in the 1970s and whose last film, The Restaurant of Many Orders was completed under Kawamoto following Okamoto's death during its production.