Text | Zheng Zhou
Japanese commercial animation enthusiast
In this summer's fiery Japanese film market, Makoto Shinkai's "Your Name" finally came out on top. This animated film launched by Toho made the original monogamous department niche supervisor the second animation supervisor after Miyazaki hayao. In China, the film's decision to introduce and file it after 12.02 also caused a lot of enthusiasm.
Among the tens of millions of moviegoers, some viewers who know about Makoto Shinkai's works before will undoubtedly have a special sense of intimacy in the first two minutes of looking at the big screen: the vast sky, the wide sea of clouds, the comet orbit that runs through everything, and the monologues of the hero and heroine in the future, the exquisite realistic background...
In other words, the process of the comet's fall as a visual image represents the core "distance" of the previous Shinkai Makoto animation at the very beginning of the film. But at the same time, the audience watching the whole film will understand that this opening is boarded by another brand new Shinkai Makoto. Every picture of this beautiful scene is closely linked to the subsequent plot, indicating the richness of the film's story.
Yes, Makoto Shinkai, who used to be ridiculed as a "wallpaper maniac" and "without a thin plot theme", began to tell a story seriously in the new work, and received praise from the audience for actual feedback with high box office.
The Garden of Leaves (2013)
However, this is still a Shinkai Makoto story that loves to express various distances. I think it is the director's obvious increased commercialism and previous personal consciousness that combine perfectly to produce the effect of one plus one is greater than two, so that the film jumps out of the fixed fan base and attracts more audiences.
Around the story, Makoto Shinkai has changed a lot at all levels of "Your Name", but what runs through it is to find a distance that is closer to the audience's heart. Here are a few points of my personal feelings.
First, as the distance of the landscape perspective
What impressed Makoto Shinkai's previous animations most impressively was the extreme refinement and dazzling of the background.
On the basis of the photo data, through its own perceptual elimination of the miscellaneous parts, through the strong art design and light source control, the everyday places that can be seen everywhere are transformed into "places that may have existed" with aesthetic feelings. Then the multi-plane fit in the animation production process takes advantage, and the background is the space, and when it is further combined with the story and characters, it becomes a landscape.
The reason for adopting such a video style, in addition to the limitations of the conditions that he is not good at painting people, goes back in the direction of methodology, and the concept of "landscape" itself is also stuck to Shinkai Makoto. He once mentioned that he was influenced by the landscape theory in Yukitoshi Tsutomu's "The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature".
In the book, Yukitani puts forward the idea of "the discovery of scenery", and modern Japanese literature, which began to originate in the late Meiji 1920s, uses the superficialization of "landscape" to highlight the subjectivity of the characters. In pre-Meiji Edo literature, landscapes refer to nature (scenic spots) that have been given meaning by their predecessors, while in modern novels, they "sketch" "meaningless landscapes that emerge from time to time." Because the landscape is meaningless, the spiritual side of the person who projects his gaze (meaning) on it is grasped.
This conclusion can almost be appropriated to the observation of Makoto Shinkai's animation. In Makoto Shinkai's works, much of the flow of the picture is through the combination of the character's voiceover monologue and the fragmentary landscape depiction of "it seems to be here and not here".
The fading lights of sunsets, trams, and skyscrapers at night are everyday and meaningless, but we have tainted these landscapes with a strong story mood through the recounting of the characters. But under this landscape perspective, the viewer-character-landscape's tortuous route makes the distance between us and the background constant and inaccessible.
Five Centimeters per Second (2007)
Then go back to the new work "Your Name". Here the scenery is turned upside down again.
First of all, in the setting stage, I consciously narrowed the distance, and when I opened the map of Japan, I could find that this time the stage Tokyo and Hida were at a delicate distance not far away. More importantly, the fictional Town of Itosumura has a distinct cultural and dramatic dual nature in terms of scenery.
The unusually typical elements of shrines, festivals, and Japanese houses create a picture of Japan before the height of the growth period, and the scenery has become an easy-to-understand stage installation with a universal meaning (nostalgia). In past works such as "The Other Side of the Cloud" and "5 Centimeters per Second", Hokkaido and Tanegashima were deliberately chosen as distant stages because they were places outside the memory of the Japanese community.
The Other Side of the Cloud, The Promised Place (2004)
On the other hand, in terms of plot, the sense of distance that "seems to be here and does not seem to be here" has also been smoothed out. Tokyo and Hida firmly echo the plot drawn out of the misplaced view of time and space, and the meticulous portrayal of scenes such as Kagura Dance is also due to this.
The audience understands the landscape through the advancement of the story rather than the whispers of the characters, and the feeling of latecomerity gives way to the exploration of the precursor. The viewer can always understand the meaning of the scenery in parallel or before the characters, and in "Your Name", although the background art generally continues the style of Makoto Shinkai, there is a new landscape perspective.
Second, as the distance of the character structure
Because of the production process of the division of labor system, the background and characters of Japanese animation have often developed along different theoretical routes. In summary, the background is becoming more and more photorealistic "realistic", while the characters are reinforced by animated "markers".
Makoto Shinkai's previous animation can be said to be extreme in both aspects, and the audience is impressed by the background but cannot remember the face of the character. Makoto Shinkai's royal art supervisor, Tanji Shima, mentioned in an interview that Makoto Shinkai's role was created together in the space design of the background. So the characters are often obscured in space and hidden in the lens.
This is reminiscent of the Japanese critic Hideshi Otsuka's theory of character construction. In his book Astro Boy's Proposition, he argues that the generation of characters in Japan's postwar manga culture is based on the fact that the eternal marker body of Mickey Mouse is injured by reality, that is, the moment when the body can die is obtained.
Since then, this transparent symbolic/opaque bodily structure has existed in Japanese anime characters at the same time. Makoto Shinkai's use of cats (inhumanity) in "Her and Her Cats" is first revealed, and his atonal monologue as a symbol of the character's absence is a complete emphasis on the character's transparent token side. At the image level, the viewer cannot turn the perspective of the character, and can only abstract this signage emotionally.
She and Her Cat (1999)
But as mentioned above, the shift in viewer-character-landscape perception makes possible in Your Name is the foreground of the character. The common monologue was discarded, the camera was aimed directly at the character's face, the painting supervisor Masashi Ando gave the character acting skills, there was no doubt that the opaque physicality was revived, and the audience shortened the distance from the character in Makoto Shinkai's animation.
Along with the landscape, the characters become the characters in the plot that we can see. In the first half of the film, "Body Swapping", the meticulous and unique personality portrayal of Mitsuba and Taki produces a sense of humor that Shinkai Makoto animation has not yet had.
It is worth noting that the two protagonists in the film write names to each other physically in order to prevent forgetting memories. Amnesia as a manifestation of the character's injury, the eternal consistency is blocked.
The characters in the film recognize this and engrave marks on their bodies, but before they can finish writing "Your Name," the pen falls to the ground. Rather, through this self-reminder of the body, Makoto Shinkai transformed his previous extremely close and distant character structure into a character structure that could be seen at a flat level and had a fixed distance.
Third, the distance as a kernel catalyst
Japanese film critic Daisuke Watanabe wrote a widely circulated film review of "Your Name", describing his first impression of the film as "a self-conscious return from a world series of works and beautiful girl games" and "well adapted to the changes of the times after that". At a time when the world series of works and beautiful girl games have passed the tide, this conclusion that has a bit of a legacy liquidation meaning better summarizes the retention and expansion of Makoto Shinkai in the core.
The concept of world system, which began in 2002, is briefly a type of story in which the daily life between the hero and heroine is directly related to abstract issues such as the destruction of the world, and there is no society as an intermediate item. Although Makoto Shinkai's "Voice of the Stars" is a masterpiece of the world system, in fact, his favorite point is different from the mainstream of the genre.
The Sound of Stars (2002)
In his work, the world system is just a coat that is very suitable for that indescribable sense of loss, an expression of the distance of the milo, almost drowning. This is also why "5 Centimeters per Second" does not involve any world-class big problems but makes the audience feel very world-class. In the film, the hero and heroine, who are still elementary school students, talk about cambrian periods eagerly when chatting, as if the relationship between the two is connected to the depths of the universe.
In "Your Name", the story elements such as the space-time separation and the fall of the comet bear the mark of Makoto Shinkai, but just like the scene in which Yoshimason Yokunomiya is responsible for the abstract beauty of the lines like norman McLaren animation, the distance of all this is closely related.
At the end of the film, the male protagonist enters the forbidden horizontal strip of the revival hall seen by the tie guard, which resembles the rope of the shrine, sealing the world before Makoto Shinkai, a barren world that cannot be brought closer. The second half of the film, which "twists, winds, and reshapes," is Makoto Shinkai's response to the times, and it shows the possibility of all things communicating.
For example, mobilizing friends to help when saving a small town is a communication, dissuading the mayor's father (society) is an exchange, and publishing a radio is also a mass media communication.
More basically, the communication between the male and female protagonists from both perspectives. The sense of loss that is not here but in the distance is gone, and it is precisely because you and I are not in the same place that I have to go to Tokyo and go to Hida. The flow of the three-leaf headband is the convergence and fusion of the perspective, which completely breaks the distance of the previous single-perspective blockage.
It's also interesting to note that The Voice of the Stars sends high school girls to space to drive robots without any explanation, while Your Name doesn't have any explanations for swapping bodies between the two without any connection. The former is that the formed communication is arbitrarily blocked, while the latter is the communication before the exchange.
In this day and age, everything is gradually becoming intelligent, and in a sense, our space is flattened. Connect to various SNS websites to communicate with strangers around the world. The possibility of Mitsuba and Taki's communication before the exchange may also be a silhouette of the distance in the Internet age.
Fourth, the distance produced as a story
If "Your Name" builds a softer and easier distance to grasp at various levels of expression than before, and returns to production, Makoto Shinkai's personal and works are far-reaching. The most obvious change is that this is the first time that Makoto Shinkai has adopted the production committee system, and has a huge team that is now at the top of the Japanese animation industry. In the process of story production, Shinkai Castle becomes "more like a supervisor" than an individualist.
During the script stage, he revised the script with Toho's producer, Genki Kawamura, and learned how to translate what he wanted to express into a film rhythm. In the split stage, he worked with art supervisor Masaji Ando to perfect the layout, trying to make the artistic background of The Intention perfectly combine with the delicate acting skills of the characters. Makoto Shinkai, film, and animation are not wrestling with each other but blending together.
Makoto Shinkai has always been an animation supervisor who can tolerate change, and in his current six works, he constantly adjusts the length, theme, and composition. The latest work, "Your Name", has achieved considerable success as a collective work with a personal imprint, so how can we go further after the social phenomenon? Let's look forward to his next work with questions.