Makoto Shinkai, you don't know love

Author|Xie Minghong

Editor|Li Chunhui

In 1986, Miyazaki's movie "Sky City" was released. That year, Makoto Shinkai was 13 years old, and he began to be interested in anime when he was young and ignorant.

If we say, being known as "Little Miyazaki" makes people notice Makoto Shinkai's "author" identity. Then when Makoto Shinkai became popular in Asia with "Your Name", it meant that people more systematically recognized the uniqueness of his artistic creation.

Compared with Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki and others, Makoto Shinkai did not experience the profound turmoil and changes in Japan before and after the war. Therefore, his works do not have the strong sense of mission of his predecessors, the deep thinking about the land under their feet and even the fate of mankind. Even if you force a grand theme, it is always a little too simple. At the end of the day, Makoto Shinkai and his audience are the same kind who are looking for meaning in their own growth in ordinary lives, waiting for healing, longing to be loved, and trying to be recognized by the world.

This may be the big time and the small era of Japanese creators. When youth no longer experiences the turbulence of the torrent of the times, it will merge into infinite self-ambiguity. In a word, Makoto Shinkai's youth is always painful. The protagonist who goes to find love with the smell of gardenia will inevitably make others feel an unreasonable impulse.

"I'm not afraid of death, but without a world of grass, I'm afraid." The girl Suzuya, who shouted this sentence in "Journey to Bell Bud", spent less than a week with the male protagonist. And the male protagonist who is really not the "form" of the chair has met with the female protagonist three times. Audiences who are not pure enough to love, such as Hard Candy Jun, are inevitably full of question marks in the face of all this. This is simply the talent and beauty drama criticized by Jia Mu in "Dream of Red Mansions", seeing a handsome man, the heroine can't learn, the family doesn't want it, and people can also iron man pentathlon.

But if the heroine's "pursuit of love" is regarded as a variant of "pursuing self", everything can be understood. In the ordinary and boring daily life, people without a sense of mission pick up a mission on the street. Because life without purpose and a sense of self-worth is really empty and even painful. However, this kind of mission is ultimately less self-righteous and powerful.

The iron man pentathlon who loves girls

In the movie "Suzuya Journey", Suzuya accidentally sees the "closed door" Kusata prevent Earthworm from entering the world, and then gets involved in a fantasy journey in a vague way. The heroine is only 16 years old, and she has not met a single bad person, and she has traveled around Japan in a miracle. For female high school students who have never stepped out of town, it really takes great courage and excellent luck.

"Look at that woman, she didn't even wear socks", "And her clothes are torn", "The body is dirty"... Seeing Suzuya on the Tokyo subway, I am afraid that she will think that she has only finished the Iron Man pentathlon. For a three-legged man, no, a three-legged bench, she climbed steamships, climbed Ferris wheels, jumped bridges all the way. This kind of mental situation and physical fitness really can't play short videos, and it is easy to be brainwashed to go to Thailand and northern Myanmar with men.

Saying that Suzu Bud is too guilty of grass, Hard Candy Jun believes it. Mistakenly opening the door, pulling out the stone, indirectly causing Kusanagi to miss the teacher qualification examination. To say that Ling Bud has too much love for grass, we still think it is too far-fetched. Is it out of the girl's natural affection for male college students, or is it appreciation of his good qualities (insisting on ancestral business and closing doors everywhere)? I remember that there was an episode of "Family with Children", Yang Zi coveted the tutor played by Marco, which stimulated a strong enthusiasm for learning.

It can't be that you look handsome when you chant a mantra, right? According to this setting, the male protagonist should indeed be a handsome man, and Hard Candy Jun can only try to imagine him as a white dragon or Hal.

More importantly, Bell Bud pays so much for the grass. Not to mention the various physical labors in the front, and finally entering the ordinary world from the door, desperate and even willing to sacrifice oneself, is it not an extremely strong sacrifice for love and unilateral sacrifice? Fortunately, the grass is not too scum, if you meet the sea king family, you can be saved and leave gratefully, after all, there is no commitment or even a relationship at all.

"Journey to the Bell Buds" must not be watched as a romance film, otherwise the heroine's decision-making motives are difficult to explain. Wouldn't it be better to change the story of Suzuya and Kusata to a friendship line? The plot is the feeling that you can see that Suzuya likes Kusata in the end, but does not declare it. Just like in "Spirited Away", the heroine doesn't know if she can still see the white dragon. But for the sake of commercial films, there is no love and it cannot be met by a vast audience of pure love.

Judging from the current progress, Shinkai Makoto's concept of love may never reach maturity. In "Five Centimeters Per Second", the male protagonist Guishu and the female protagonist Akari have known each other since elementary school and have been exchanging letters. Although the timeline of "Your Name" is staggered, it is still 17-year-old Taki who meets 17-year-old Mitsuba 3 years ago. In "Children of the Weather", Fan Gao is 16 years old, and Yona's actual age is 15 years old. Few accidents appear in "The Court of Words", the female protagonist Yukari is 27 years old, and the male protagonist Takao is still 15, which can be regarded as forgetting his love.

Always young, always teens. It is not difficult to see from the age of the characters that Shinkai Makoto yearns for the ignorant, youthful, but most enthusiastic and most desperate emotional impulses between boys and girls. But an incomplete self, through a love to make up for the personality, how to say, after all, is not the love that most adults can appreciate, and only the beauty of the atmosphere.

All want to heal, who is the antidote

Compared with the weakness of the love line, the self-reconciliation and meaning search of "Journey to the Bell Buds" are more colorful. Ling Bud, who lost his mother in childhood, has always had an untouchable shadow in his heart. She strayed into the ordinary world and met a strange sister, who told her: "You will like others in the future, and you will also meet many people who like you very much... You will grow up under the sun. This will be the case in the future, because it is already a predestined thing. ”

This is a line buried deeper in the movie, because the sadness of losing her mother is so strong that Suzuya forgets everything that happened in the door, and even blacks out the recorded diary. It was not until the end of the movie that 16-year-old Suzuya entered the ordinary world again and found that the sister who gave him relief was his self when he grew up.

Makoto Shinkai joked to the audience in circles, we wandered around looking for the antidote to life, but did not find that the antidote was ourselves. The meaning of self-existence requires another self to affirm. Hong Kong Zhen, although this is not very profound, but it is more natural than the love line.

Of course, compared to Miyazaki's deep white space, Makoto Shinkai is always too straight to pour. All kinds of metaphors, images, meanings, values, all stuffed into the movie, afraid that everyone will not understand and simply let the protagonist say it directly. For example, Kusanagi's sentence: "I know that life is like a mayfly, and death is always like a shadow." But I still pray that even if it is another year, another day, one more time, we want to live. ”

When watching the movie, Hard Candy Jun thought, this sentence is afraid to be widely quoted. This is what Xinhai Cheng specially wrote out and hoped that everyone would post it in QQ space and write on the title page of the notebook. But whether it's Kusata's words, Shinkai's words, or the Japanese culture's thoughts of mourning, the neon people's sense of life, I always feel that it is too explicit - you are a movie, you should act out this meaning instead of shouting it.

According to the statistics of some netizens, Ehime, Kobe and Osaka where Suzuya passed to Tokyo have all had earthquakes, and the time she closed all the way is the reverse chronological order of major earthquakes throughout Japan. This is probably an overinterpretation, which place in Japan does not earthquake several times a year, Shinkai Makoto should mainly target the 311 earthquake in 2011.

Another theme of the film is the reconstruction of the mind after a disaster: when a place is abandoned, how do people accept the feeling of emptiness? There's a closed amusement park, and a sign flashes in front of the movie that says, "Thank you for your patronage for forty years." How did the place that once brought joy to countless children become a decaying grass and poplar?

Kusata tells Suzuya as she closes the door, making her close her eyes and feel the emotions that existed before in the ruins. The movie shows farewell before everyone goes out, small talk on the way to students, and laughter at the amusement park. The picture is warm and bright, but the thought that the person who said these words may not have returned home makes me feel heavy.

This is what Shinkai Makoto wants to say: "When people die, there will be funerals, but land and cities will die but not." "As the creator who is best at recreating the beauty of Japan, Makoto Shinkai can also be regarded as comforting the land.

Cats, aunts, road slices

Just as a road movie, with old Japanese songs, "Journey to the Bell Buds" is still wonderful. Whether it is the Internet celebrity cat minister, or the aunt who has an ambiguous relationship with college students, or even the bear child riding on the head of Kusanagi, he has a better chance of showing his personality charm than the male protagonist Kusata himself.

The white cat minister in the movie has unfortunately become a tool for the love of the male and female protagonists. At first, Hard Candy Jun thought that it was a social animal who had been a social animal for fifty years and was physically and mentally exhausted and vowed to escape, but it turned out to be just a kitten who wanted to be a bell bud? Doesn't it mean that cats are very cold, when licking cats lick to the last nothing, hey! Some people say that the big black cat and the little white cat are metaphors for aunt and bell buds, although they are also round, but according to such an over-interpretation method, you say that this metaphor is Japanese politics.

In Shinkai's works, "cat" has always occupied a special position. As early as 1999, the black-and-white animated short film "She and Her Cat" told the story of a cat and a lonely woman white-collar worker. In 2007, he also had a short film called "The Cat Assembly". 2013's "Someone's Eyes" focused on a family of three and a cat.

The part of the quarrel between the aunt and Suzuya is a rare firework gas in Shinkai. In his past works, the parents of boys and girls are mostly absent, which can better shape the sense of loneliness. And in "Journey to Lingya", although the aunt tried her best to take care of Lingya, she also had complaints in her heart for failing her life.

"Although dissatisfaction is an expression of it, these are not all emotions." The words spoken by the aunt when she rode a broken bicycle with a bell bud symbolized the reconciliation of two generations of women. Thankfully, the aunt did not deny the angry words she said during the quarrel. It is anger and truth, this is the real family and the real individual.

To say that the only love that makes Hard Candy Jun a little scornful in the whole film has to be his aunt's love triangle. My aunt's colleague Uncle has had a crush for many years, and he is not as fast as Kusanata's classmates for 7 hours. Love is really not a first-come, first-served, pay attention to a timing and atmosphere. According to Hard Candy Jun's bloody appetite, he definitely arranged for his colleagues and uncles to also go on the road to chase love, and bad young people to have a peacock to open the screen, this way more choices and more laughter.

As a social kaleidoscope, the form of road films can always connect various group portraits of various characters. The first stranger Suzuya met was Qianguo, who helped transport oranges to the family, a typical girlfriend love. The second met a single mother, with two children in a hurry, the customers in the store are strange, and when they encounter anxious ghosts, they have to use some quacks.

In connection with "Your Name", "Journey to the Bell Buds" still takes medicine according to the prescription - using two-dimensional magic to heal the wounds of real disasters. As a creator of the 70s generation, Shinkai Makoto has no chance to carry a heavy history, and it is unlikely that he will have a real painful thought about the grand narrative of sad and compassionate people. In the sequence of values in his works, the loved one is more important than everything else, and the loved one is often a projection of the self.

As far as the "please enjoy" section is concerned, the wallpaper is still stunning. As far as love is concerned, "Lingya's Journey" makes people believe that Shinkai sincerely loves Miyazaki Hayao more than the female protagonist loves the male protagonist. In terms of theme, Makoto Shinkai, who lacks an independent core, still needs to prove himself through others. This makes them unreasonable and lacking in charisma, but it can fill the gap for some people.