Jimmy T. Murkami

Teruaki "Jimmy" Murakami, (born June 5, 1933 in San Jose, California), is a Japanese American animator and director with a long career working in numerous countries.
His stellar career in animation, which began in the UPA studios, has earned him many awards and nominations for productions. Among his best-known works are the animated adaptations of ‘The Snowman’ and the mesmerising and haunting animated film ‘When the Wind Blows’ earned Murakami an Annecy Grand Prix in 1987.
Murakami was nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short Film for The Magic Pear Tree (1968). He also directed the music video for King of the Mountain, the single from Kate Bush's album Aerial.
As a child, Murakami was interned with his family at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in northern California. This followed President Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Under the terms of the Order, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent living in the US were removed from their homes and placed in internment camps.
Life in the camps was tough and worse still for the Murakami family, one of their daughters (Jimmy T. Murakami’s sister) became ill and died of leukaemia during this time too. Murakami often explores the ‘camp’ theme of through his work and the resulting paintings are extremely compelling not only as artworks in themselves, full of narrative and poignancy, but also as documents or memoirs produced by one of the last living witnesses to this event in American history.
Murakami who attended the reknowned Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, is extremely versatile as an artist. He can turn his hand to many mediums and subjects from his ‘camp’ paintings to Dublin street scenes and portraiture, however, his work always retains distinctive elements. There is an instantly recognisable handling of space and light and Murakami manages to put his personal trademark touch onto even the most recognisable of Irish vistas. See the low, cloudy yet light-filled sky over Dun Laoghaire as seen from the famous Forty Foot, or the luminosity and delicate outlines of a beautiful face in ‘The New Europeans’.
Maybe it is the animator in Murakami but there is a feeling, even in his familiar landscapes, of a snapshot in time, giving the viewer a sense of having been somewhere and giving them something to look forward to, something yet to come.
Murakami has been based in Dublin for many decades but has been described by Giannalberto Bendazzi in his book ‘Cartoons: One Hundred years of Cinema Animation’ as a true nomad of animation cinema. This could be one of the reasons that Murakami manages to render scenes that are familiar to Irish audiences in an entirely new, fresh manner.
Murakmai held a sell-out artist talk in the Powerscourt Gallery in October 2009 and a film of his life story called ‘Jimmy Murakami, Non-Alien’ will premiere in the Irish Film Institute at the Dublin Film Festival on the 24th February 2010. To celebrate, the Powerscourt Gallery will display a selection of works from the artist from 24th February to 5th March 2010.