In May 1989, Japanese manga artist Masamune Shiro serialized a destined novel, Ghost in the Shell, in the Kodansha youth manga publication Young Magazine.
Kenji Kawai has often scored Chinese films in recent years, and his works have a strong national music characteristic
Reporter | Wang Danyang
The name of this work is incomprehensible just from the Japanese kanji that has been directly moved, but its English translation of "Ghost in the Shell" is much easier to understand, and the meaning is the soul that breaks out of the shell. In 1995, animation director Mori Oshii brought it to the screen, achieving its status as a legend of a generation. This year, Paramount's American version of Ghost in the Shell came out, and Suko Kusanagi, played by Scarlett Johansson, suddenly pulled people back 20 years ago, the righteous man who only had a soul as the real one.
Behind "Ghost in the Shell", in addition to Oshii Mori, there is also a name that composer Kenji Kawai. The success of the film has strengthened the royal relationship between the two since the 1980s, and just like Miyazaki and Hisaishi, Oshii Mori and Kenji Kawai are another pair of "god-like combinations" in the words of the manga industry.
<h1>The pantheism of the modern city</h1>
From downtown Tokyo all the way south, through some slightly flat scenery, to another piece of reinforced concrete jungle, Shinagawa Ward's new city construction is in full swing. I heard that Shinagawa was just a crowded town 20 years ago, but now get off at Osaki Station, people are in a huge space city-like building, various air corridors are connected to business buildings, just like the robot's body is full of antennas, and people can no longer find the north and south in the hard shell of the cold machine. I had a brief interview with Kenji Kawai, and I was glad that I had set off an hour earlier than expected, and indeed repeated several times in the belly of that space city, and strangers in Tokyo, obviously unable to penetrate the dense organs of the city at once, were caught in the invisible floodgates and involuntarily slid into another "dimension".
It was because of the 1995 film Ballad of the Golem that I had the idea of seeing the composer's real body. On the forum, there are anime houses that worship him as a god-level character, and indeed, a song "Puppet Ballad" makes people remember for 20 years, and must have divine feats. From his assistant, I knew that he had to work 12 hours a day in the recording studio, his time was scaled, and Guo Min, a Chinese yangqin player who had been in Japan for 30 years, was an old friend of Kenji Kawai, and they had known each other 10 years ago when they worked together on the soundtrack of "Ink Attack". "There are queues for movies looking for his soundtrack, and he's been very popular in Europe and the United States recently."
Shinagawa's skyline is lined with clusters of new buildings, and Tokyo's "height" has slowly drawn circles around from the current Tokyo Station. Haruki Murakami has a short story related to Shinagawa called "Shinagawa Monkey". In the novel, a wife who lives in Shinagawa suddenly forgets her name, and the name tag of a middle school neck in the family is also lost, and later a section chief of the district civil engineering company finds a talking monkey in the underground sewer, who takes pleasure in stealing people's name plates and always steals the names of women who make him fascinated... This story is included in the "Tokyo Strange Tan", this collection of stories always makes people feel that even in a city like Tokyo, the Japanese gods are still so vivid and full, and there is no place to build a dojo between the crevices of high-rise buildings.
When the word "puppet" has departed from the ancient meaning in the meaning of the Chinese, it still retains the meaning of puppet show in Japanese. The "puppet" still looms in the cultural psychology of the Japanese collective unconscious, which may be related to the fact that noh drama is still being staged. Therefore, the birth of "Puppet Ballad" originally originated from the roots of traditional culture, and anime allowed traditional elements to be condensed in mainstream culture for a long time. Perhaps, the concept of the gods lingers in the minds of modern people, and there will be futuristic cartoons like Ghost in the Shell and Ballad of the Golem, but full of pantheistic mourning. Before I visited Kawai, I first went to Shinagawa Shrine to visit the place where he had been playing since he was a child.
Stills from the animated version of Ghost in the Shell by Mori Oshii (2004)
In this year's American version of Ghost in the Shell, Scarlett Johansson plays the righteous man Suko Kusanagi
The shrine is a forest on a terrace connected to the slope of Gotemon Hill, and it is a forest, and the main hall of the temple is hidden in the woods, and there is a stage with a shochiku barrier on the side, and everything is quiet because no one cares. There is a small shrine on the edge of the main hall, from a dozen or so exquisite torii gates next to each other to come to the front, the process is like playing a family game in childhood, simple but full of ritual, just such a small piece of light orange red, separating the divine world from the secular world. In the shrine is dedicated to the "Ana Inari God" who produces grains, and the Inari God is one of the top gods in the divine genealogy.
Every year from June 5th to 7th, Shinagawa Shinsho holds a regular festival, also known as the Kitano No Tenno Matsuri, where various snacks, entertainment, and toys are stalled, and the festival is as lively as a temple fair. Kawai's most appealing to him was the June 7 shrine, which changed according to the rhythm of the flute and taiko drums, and many years later, this kind of music, which the Japanese call "sound head" in Kagura, appeared in his works.
<h1>The enduring Ballad of the Golem</h1>
The Main Line of the Tokaido Line outside the shrine has gone through the Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods, and in 1889 the Tokyo-Kobe section was opened to operate, which was the main route connecting Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto at that time, while Shinagawa was the first stop after 53 stops from nihonbashi, becoming an important trading port, the first place for tourists to eat and sleep after coming to Tokyo, and there are still many small temples and shrines along the line, which is a neighborhood with rich incense and strong beliefs in the gods. Kawai grew up in such an environment. Today, his studio is 10 minutes from home, a three-story villa in an alley, with a large iron gate tightly closed, making it hard to imagine that it is a place to play electronics.
His hair had been dyed silver from decades of yellow, and he had a silver ornament hanging from his neck, looking like he was sixty years old, and in a way, he had spent his life in a recording studio from morning to night, and in Japan, such electronic music producers were called "shed bugs". He walked out of the recording studio, could not return to God for a while, spoke softly and slowly, and said that the last time he came to China was in June this year as the soundtrack of "Embroidered Spring Knife 2" at the publicity conference, and he took the stage to play an idle drum. The big drum is his best at it besides guitar and keyboard. In addition to publicity, he does not like to travel abroad, thinks he is a person who hates trouble, and does not even watch movies on weekdays, except for samples that require a soundtrack.
Lu Yang, the director of "Embroidered Spring Knife", grew up listening to his animation music, so he asked him to come to the soundtrack. But Kawai admits that in Japan, Otaku sometimes doesn't mind the soundtrack of a cartoon so much that he's more of a professional in his home country. Born in 1957, Kawai attended the Department of Atomic Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at Tunghai University, but he said that he did not like to read, often skipped class, and fled to nowhere to escape, so he chose to quit school to play guitar at home. After that, he formed a band of his own, often scored some advertisements and video games, and won an award, so he embarked on the road of professional soundtrack. He said that he was not a college student, and as for many Chinese anime houses in the forum that he later turned to the study of Japanese Bangle, he admitted that he did not, he did not understand ethnic music at all.
"If I dance, the beauty is also intoxicated; if I dance, the moon also rings; the god descends on the wedding night, and the dawn tiger cries." Kawai composed a total of three "Ballads of the Golems" for Ghost in the Shell, the earliest of which was created in the 1995 film version, the beginning of the taiko drum and bells or a piece of music, suddenly introduced a female chorus called "Ghost Sound", with a crane-like poignant voice line to capture the soul, the tail note is very long, is the Kagura style that has never been seen in animated films. According to legend, ghost sounds originated from the Tang Dynasty in China, which is a kind of crying voice, an ancient music composed of female qingyin imitating ghosts and lamentations, which belongs to the category of sacrifice in Japan. "Oshii Mori specified that he would use a taiko and a bell in his music, but I felt that the light elements could not form a melody, it was too monotonous, so I thought if I could sing it (would be good?). ）。 He said.
"Ghost tone" appeared in folk songs, but it was usually sung solo, but Kawai got a dozen folk singers to sing the chorus, and put on a leading "tone head" (おんど) and began to sing. There are different sounds in different regions, Tokyo sounds, Tohoku heads, Akita heads, Chichibu heads... Kawai said that he had not specifically learned it, but only heard a starting tune, and the later melody flowed out naturally in his heart. The words of these three ballads were written by him all day in the library with reference to the Manyo Collection.
The soundtrack composer who played guitar in the 80s and later came into contact with electronic music had his dream of being a mixer rather than an arranger, and he admits that his "visual score" is very slow, and he is not as slow as his classmates who can read and play the score synchronously. In Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, various Forms of Western music such as classical, jazz, and electronic rock were all piled up in this country of bullets, and the Beatles were very popular, such as Haruki Murakami once wrote that when he was young, he did not reject Western music trends, and pocket money was used to buy records and listen to the scene when he had the opportunity. Japanese intellectuals who walked through that era had too many Zelphiles enthusiasts, and Kawai preferred French pop music, longing for Raymond Lefebvre, Francis Lai, and Burt Bacharach in the United States...
Traditional Japanese Bangraku, Gagaku, and Kagura are all subconscious cultural memories. Guo Min once recorded the yangqin part for Kenji Kawai in "Ink Attack", and she told me that arranging music and research are different, and more often the success of a arranger lies in an innate intuition and genius. "He can't understand Bangle, but what he creates is like Bangle, and the spring festival, autumn festival, and pot festival are danced and sung everywhere on the street, and there is naturally a sense of music in this atmosphere."
"Even if there is no moonlit day and night, the tiger bird cries in sorrow as before, and suddenly looks back at the hundred flowers, as if the heart is gone without a trace, and the newborn world gathers the gods." This is the lyrics of another ballad. The tiger bird in the lyrics was a hybrid monster in the Heian period, with a very sad voice, known as a soul bird, and is written as "鵺" in Japanese kanji. The Taiping Chronicle of the Ping'an Dynasty records the appearance of this bird: on the seventeenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, on the night when the moon was empty, a large dark cloud suddenly drifted from the side of the mountain, and then a strange bird began to cry incessantly, and when it cried, it would spew flames from its mouth. Lightning also appeared, and the dazzling light penetrated the bamboo curtains of the palace, and the emperor was too frightened to sleep.
Mori Oshii, one of the three major Japanese anime directors today (middle)
According to the 13th-century Kamakura period's Tale of the Heike Family, the tiger has a head like an ape, a body like a tanuki, a tail like a snake, and four legs like a tiger... Japanese people like to visualize their fear of the other world, so in the history of Japanese art, ghosts and monsters are rampant and approachable. Yokai born in the Middle Ages multiplied dramatically during the Edo period and strode high on the streets of Edo. Those monsters spawned new stories and were illustrated. There are pillow people with heads that are women's heads and green smoke on their bodies, ghosts who use lanterns as hand lanterns, foxes that chop wood and burn fires, skeletons that peep through barriers... Ghosts are also painted on hanging scrolls and are also active in the theatrical world. The ukiyo-e master of the Edo period, Katsushika Hokusai, was famous for his Kanagawa Nanari, and his Hyakuto monogatari is an encyclopedia of ghosts.
<h1>Apocalyptic sentiments on the ghost path</h1>
It's hard to imagine a Japanese man with a guitar and electronic background who has the imprint of "cyberpunk" to tap into tradition. Kenji Kawai's 2007 concert was "Ballad of the Puppet". A folk choir of 15 people dressed in white ceremonial costumes and dressed as goddesses stood on a singing stage with a band behind them, singing in the theater with a strong sense of ceremony, a ballad that was so sharp and poignant that it would break through the roof.
Japanese people like to listen to monotonous sounds such as taiko drums, bells, and shamisen (three-stringed harp). The bronze bells in Japanese temples do not have harmony, but they love this individual clear tone, and listening to the timbre ups and downs of the individual instruments themselves seems to evoke a seasonal sense of sad spring and autumn. The pause between instruments is called "間" (ま), such as the small drum, the big drum, and the taiko drum in Noh, and there is a "between" effect in the alternating difference in the subtle acoustic effect; for example, in "The Ballad of the Puppet", the ghost sound seems to appear at the pace of the tuk tuk, and rises and falls in the silent place. Japanese people like to make the treble and natural melody a natural separation, and harmonious blending has become a kind of childishness. There is an incongruous "space" that cannot be expressed in terms of interval relations, which is "between".
Its existence seems to be to make the next sound more vivid, the Muromachi period noh drama theorist Shi Ami in the "Wind Posture Flower Legend" specifically discussed "between", he believes that an actor on the stage when the action freeze frame is the most evocative, "moving very distracted, moving seven parts", frozen in the footsteps of the move often makes the energy saturated. The stillness between the moves, the gap between the drum and the low chant in the mask, is called "between", and this "between" culture may be an indispensable element in "Yu Xuan" and "Silence".
In this "Ghost in the Shell" movie, there are many simulated street pictures, and the oppressive and dull portrayal of the environment and the obscurity of the speech convey a kind of apocalyptic sorrow together with "Puppet Ballad". Even today, the philosophical heights it contains are ahead of its time. In 2029, high-tech and informatization are flooded, so that people can make their bodies more powerful through the replacement of prosthetic bodies, connect to the network through the interface on the body, download information at any time, and even carry out the prostheticization of the whole body, copying the memory to the electronic brain. While providing convenience, the "electronic brain" also exposes the control system of the brain to the network, giving birth to new types of hacking and criminal means. In order to cope with the unconventional sudden situation, the government set up a special secret department "Nine Lessons of Public Security". The heroine, Suko Kusanagi, is a full-body modified righteous person.
In this work, almost all the people in the Nine Lessons of Public Security are "righteous people", and their developers and owners are the government. The hacker program "Puppet Master" in the computer declares himself to be a real ghost (ghost, ghost) and needs nothing more than a body shell, while Suzi's prosthetic body gradually takes shape in the quiet and mysterious singing voice of sacrifice, floating on his knees in the water, and questioning himself in the form again and again. The puppets of the futuristic cyber world in the work still glow with the mournful atmosphere of the Japanese Middle Ages, and in any era, the Japanese people's complex for souls, spirits, and living beings is endless, and these ghost always have involuntary resentment.
There are "now can" and "dream energy" in the noh drama, which shows the transformation of the next life, and the theme of "dream energy" is a bit similar to China's "Four Dreams of Linchuan", all of which are noisy and chaotic, and finally disappear into emptiness, the difference is that the undead in the noh drama complain about their lives on the stage, which is rare in Chinese drama. The routine of "dream energy" is generally a traveler who arrives at a certain place and meets a person who is possessed by the protagonist's undead, and this person begins to talk about himself in a third-party tone; in the later part, the protagonist appears in his true form and then tells the past scene. As a theater watcher, after being substituted layer by layer, he is placed in the perspective of the undead, and life and death are boundless.
Oshii's Ghost in the Shell shocked the Hollywood world, and Westerners found that the puppets in it had gone beyond a simple teaching, no longer using the omniscient perspective of people to affect the fate of puppets, and finally give lessons of good and evil. "Ghost in the Shell" deviates from the perspective of human-oriented creation, more like a pole uprising on the elven road, Suzi, as a righteous person who can load the soul into and unload, thinks about human depravity and greed from an inhuman perspective, and speaks human words, "My memory is unique to the individual, I have my own destiny, although I feel the limitation, but I can stretch myself in the shackles." This is the position of this work 20 years ago, and the director's sentimental nostalgia when criticizing the cold and mysterious nature of mechanization and the fantasy mystery of constructing the future world is like the ancient noh drama and puppet drama wearing a cloak of the artificial intelligence era.
In Japan, Oshii Mori has a status comparable to That of Miyazaki, representing The Japanese animation, but explores very different ethical dilemmas, and he forms his own characteristics with philosophical speculation and sharp scrutiny. "Titanic" director Cameron wrote a special article to express his respect for him after watching "Ghost in the Shell": "Oshii Mori film is to first establish the world view, and then set up characters and characters, which is not available in Hollywood, he examines the development of science and technology from the inside, and has a dystopian complex..." The background setting in the film is in Kowloon, Hong Kong, where billboards are lined up, behind the prosperity is a highly controlled society, all kinds of surveillance eyes hover in the air, dirty air, dirty rivers and markets, The puppets roamed the world in hard mechanical shells, thinking about their future. It is reminiscent of Tokyo today, the elf dance that fills the streets during the Obon Festival – both are on the same cultural and psychological soil, one is desperately digging into the soil, and the other is sending new shoots into the air.
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