Youji Kuri

久里洋二

Yōji Kuri was born in 1928 in Sabae, Fukui, Japan. He has been active in numerous fields including animation, manga, painting, illustration, sculpture, and fiction. He founded the animation studio Kuri Jikken Manga Kōbō (Kuri Experimental Animation Studio) in 1960 and began producing works. The same year, Kuri, Ryōhei Yanagihara, and Hiroshi Manabe formed Animation 3-nin no Kai (Three-Person Animation Circle) and organized Japan’s first experimental animation screening at Sōgetsu Art Center. The screening series was later rebranded as an “Animation Festival,” and became the country’s foundational festival of animation, screening works from both Japan and overseas.

He is known internationally for the very black comedy of his films, with the typically naïve style of his cartooning often belying the surreal, obscene and disturbing situations they depict (though he has worked in a variety of styles and mediums, including pixilation); this made them a favorite among the fervently counter-cultural audiences, which included such filmmakers as René Laloux, of the first few years of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and in a 1967 publication he was considered to be "the most significant" and "the only Japanese animator whose work is known in the West" (which is to disregard the Tōei Animation features and Astro Boy series that were first seen in the West around the same time that Kuri's first several films were and mentioned in passing in the same publication, though these were not known as works of an individual and characteristic filmmaker and often had their Japanese origin played down).

He is also known in Japan for his comics, a collection of which earned him the 1958 Bungeishunjū Manga Award. Though now retired from film making he continues to illustrate and to teach animation at Laputa Art Animation School. In 2012 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb.