The EyeOdyssey Lounge

Here in this video you can see me excitedly mumble about a compact disc with some sheets of paper. I bought said compact disc and sheets of paper hoping to support Hiroshi Harada as he continues production of his latest films, The Karakuri and Horizon Blue. As established in prior videos, I'm a diehard fan of the films of Japanese underground animator Hiroshi Harada. I've been practically obsessed with his style and body of work since I first saw Midori partly on accident while trying to find info on The Day The Clown Cried. It was pretty intense and creepy for me that first time I saw it, but since then it quickly grew on me, and now I see it as one of my personal influences as an artist and filmmaker.

And yes, that is a pillow stitched to look like a dead rat. I found it at that one Swedish supermarket everyone gets their shelves from. No clue if they're still selling those pillows. They sold dead flattened cat shaped pillows too.

Originally written on the 6th of December, 2018.


While digging around for some content to put on my art film focused Tumblr side blog, I found that the Japanese homepage for Hiroshi Harada’s Kiryukan production company underwent a real overhaul as of late. They apparently went through a whole domain switch sometime in the 2010s, and with that comes a lot of previously unreleased info regarding Harada’s film productions (both completed and still in production). With this, we’ve got some new screencaps of his 2-hour collaborative work Horizon Blue (originally known as H). When looking through though, I found an interesting bit of info regarding Midori. The original text was a bit butchered in the way that you would expect Google Translate to absolutely slaughter Japanese to English text, so I decided to fix things up a bit for this iteration.

“A 16MM negative of “Shôjo tsubaki: Chika gentô gekiga” was uncovered in an IMAGICA Productions warehouse, a new print was produced in contribution with the Kanazawa Film Festival.”

While the Kanazawa Film Festival was in 2013, I’m remaining optimistic in that this may eventually give the opportunity for a future restoration and rerelease of Midori. The quality of a 16MM reprint would be much more accurate to Harada’s original art over the telecine version that the Cinemalta DVD was transferred from. With the rising market in cult film and cinematic obscurity, I’m hoping that we’ll one day see a proper DVD anthology of Harada’s work with all new restorations (I’m looking at you Criterion Collection / Arrow Films). If we could see films like Belladonna Of Sadness and Hausu become cult sensations overnight from home video restorations, I feel that this film will be no exception. Oh, and Ken Russell’s The Devils too. Warner Brothers, get off your asses and have it where all of us don’t have to buy a region-free player to watch the ye olde censored BFI DVD.