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Music Video for Yoko Kanno's Ode to 3.11 Earthquake Victims Streamed
posted on by Lynzee Loveridge
The animated music video for the "Hana wa Saku" ("Flowers Will Bloom") song by composer Yoko Kanno (Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) is now officially streaming on NHK's YouTube account, about five years after it was released on home video.
Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World, Black Lagoon) directed the 5-minute short at MAPPA with art director Shinichi Uehara (Lu over the wall, Paradise Kiss) and producer Masao Maruyama (Black Lagoon, Tokyo Godfathers). Shizue Kaneko (Doraemon films) oversaw the animation process and adapted the original character designs by manga creator Fumiyo Kouno (In This Corner of the World).
Writer/director Shunji Iwai (Fireworks, Should We See it from the Side or the Bottom?, Hana and Alice) and Kanno created the song in 2012 as the theme for NHK's Great Eastern Japan Earthquake Project, which supports the reconstruction efforts in the areas hardest hit by the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai) disaster. The video premiered on television in 2013, the two-year anniversary of the disaster, and then was bundled on the CD release.
The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake devastated Fukushima and the Tohoku on March 11, 2011. The earthquake set off a tsunami that ripped through the area and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings' Fukushima No. 1 plant, causing a nuclear crisis and claiming 18,000 lives and displacing tens of thousands more.
