or: Froggy Went a' Courtin' in Your VaginaHere in George W. Bush's Judaeo-Christian America, we think of frogs as the stars of Number Two of the ten plagues that befell Pharaoh, the subject of a Mark Twain story, and the best shorthand imaginable for the feeling one is losing one's mind.
But Japanese pornographer Daikichi Amano uses them as low-cost scene partners in his new flick, The Frog Crawling on the Stomach Is Torn And Smiles.
Amano is not the first pornographer to use images of performers interacting with non-human carbon-based life forms; he has just made it very popular. His monthly column in Bizarre Magazine is as articulate and humorous as it is unapologetically ghastly. This is what Edward Gorey would be doing if he liked girls.
"Do you have a problem touching frogs?" Amano asked prospective actresses for the movie, produced by the company Genki-Genki. "Could you squeeze and crush one with your bare hands? Would you be prepared to insert one inside your body? How about biting into a frog while it’s still alive?"
After working as a graphic designer in San Diego, Amano only started making porn upon his return to Japan. He had answered a job posting while still in the states and was surprised on his arrival to find that the job was with an adult company. When he began making his own films, he was fond of casting eels, snakes, and the loach opposite quivering hentai actresses.
Amano, whose sense of humor some may describe as, oh, evil, has recently begun working with frogs.
"I’m going to tell you something you probably didn’t know about frogs," he said. "When they cry they sound like cats. It’s absolutely true. As soon as Ms Haruhi arrived on set, she heard the frogs crying. 'Do you have a cat in here?' she asked. 'Yes,' I said, 'several.' I didn't want to startle her."And, though Playboy Bunnies don't insert peacocks into themselves, I was interested to note during a recent trip to the Playboy Mansion that peacocks sound like cats, too.
Amano doesn't believe that Japanese performers are the only ones capable of realizing his vision. But it is generally the case that Japanese audiences prefer to see Japanese performers, Amano's producer told me.
Amano's latest project is spare in that, instead of using several species of reptile and amphibian, he is restricting on-camera parts to humans and cow frogs. But there will be elaborate costumes.
"Although the costumes I had designed for my actors were inspired by the Cirque Du Soleil," Amano said, "the idea for the film itself came from 'Alice In Wonderland'. In my version of the story Alice gets lost in a supernatural world and, instead of a toadstool, consumes a feast of frog flesh fed to her by two mysterious guards who look a bit like Tweedledum and Tweedledee."
And don't tell me Lewis Carroll wasn't a porn fan.
But why food? Could it be that Japan's food culture makes Japanese performers more comfortable putting raw food in their mouths or other places? This was suggested to me by Amano's producer. I'm not sure about this, because I can count on one hand the times I've inserted steak, potato salad, and Jagermeister bottles into anything other than my mouth, and I love all those things.
A porn set anywhere else in the world might be awash in several stripes of bodily fluid, Diet Coke, and crystal meth when the cameras stop rolling, but Amano has to deal with frog remains."As you can imagine, every inch of the studio was covered in amphibian blood and guts," he said. "Quite a few of the frogs were still alive but in order to dispose of the bodies they needed to be dead. I split the crew up into pairs and we systematically exterminated them. It was like a production line. One person held the limbs of a frog, the other smashed it between the eyes with a hammer. There was no joy in it."
Describing the appeal of this material is tricky. Anyone who watches any kind of porn knows that it often defies description. "Well of course I like it," they'll say. "It's porn." And when faced with the pornography of another country, like the Germans' love of poo, the Swedes' love of Abba, or the Brazilian tranny-industrial complex, people wag their fingers.
But Daikichi's style might have something to do with cruelty which, if you've ever watched a Japanese game show, you'll know is as popular there as shows about angels and police are here.
"I loathe frogs," Amano said. "I can’t even look at them, let alone touch them. (But) I hired an all-female crew for this shoot. And as they were engaged in killing the frogs, they shrieked in horror. Just the look on their faces told me they were clearly not enjoying themselves. But, of course, I was having a ball."
See a gallery here (and, for some reason I feel compelled to tell you, aside from every other thing on this site, that it is NSFW).
Previously: What I learned from hentai; Naked nurse with statue of pig; Mandy Morbid: Cthulhu is my co-pilot; What, no tentacles?
See also: Send In the Eels: A Genki Diary (fleshbot), Genki-Genki
Labels: animals, art, daikichi amano, directors, genki, hentai, japan, tentacles
posted by Gram the Man
at
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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