While setting out to make a soft porn animation film, Kaho Yoshida succeeded in visualizing a very personal project. ‘Tongue, not only relates to her own frustrations as an Asian woman living in the West but also to those of other women living abroad.
Tongue is screening at Black Movie
‘Tongue' starts with an Asian woman in a bar. It's a noisy place. People talk loudly over one another, making it difficult to have a real conversation as you can hardly understand what your companions are saying. Nevertheless, we can just about make out that a man is telling the woman that he is an expert at guessing what country in Asia she's from. He's not interested in her or her opinion. He only wants to show off.
By doing this he reduces identity to a party trick while at the same time turning it into a one dimensional concept. By focusing on her country of origin he's labelling and objectifying her. On her website, Kaho Yoshida talks about this happening to her and how she fantasized about pulling out the tongues of men treating her like that.
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This was the starting idea for the film but there is more to it. The human tongue can serve as a metaphor in quite few ways. And the story Kaho Yoshida convenes, refers to a multitude of these. For sure there is tongue as a reference to speaking, and in her case, also to accent and to the difficulties of learning a different language. But we also taste with our tongues, use them for licking, when kissing and during sexual activity. And then there are idioms. For instance, the man in the bar gives his opinion freely without thinking of others. He is, as the saying goes “giving his tongue” and she's literally taking it.
Kaho Yoshida was raised in Tokyo, but chose to move to Canada by herself at age 15. She later studied animation in Vancouver at the Emily Carr University, specialising in stop motion. ‘Michi', her graduation film, was selected for festivals such as TIFF and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Working with mixed media, she later taught herself After Effects and Photoshop cell animation and made combining the two one of the trademarks of her work. As such ‘Tongue' fits in with her other (free) work, but it does stand out as her most personal film so far. With its selection for a multitude of festivals such as Black Movie, Encounters Film Festival, ANNECY, Festival, Vimeo Staff Pick it is also her most successful film so far.
In ‘Tongue' the tongues were animated in stop motion and the 2D animation was added afterwards. This gives the tongues fleshy appearance, they become tangible and there can be no mistake that they are at the center of the film. The colors used in the film are bright. The predominant color is pink, the color of our tongues, but pink is also a girlish color. As such, it can also be seen as another reference to our prejudices concerning Asia: Japan's kawaii concept certainly comes to mind. At the same time, the vivid color scheme prevents the act of biting off a tongue from turning into a gruesome scene. This is further emphasized by Ana Roman‘s sound design which, from the start, acts as a strong support for the story.
‘Tongue', funded entirely by Kaho Yoshida herself, is only 2 minutes long, rather short. When we look at other narrative films of that length, we notice that most of them are jokes as these are at heart very short funny stories and are easy to tell in that time frame. That she succeeds in addressing a serious topic in her film, together with the excellent animation, makes ‘Tongue' a movie not to be missed.
