Author: Ta Ta Jun
EDIT: The past is like smoke
"Violet Eternal Garden: Forever with Automatic Handwriting Dolls" (ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーガーデン 外伝 - 永遠と自動手記人形 -,2019, hereinafter referred to as "Wai Chuan") is a "movie" that is positioned from the project as a combination of two episodes of OVA (Original Video Animation) and released on a small scale within a specified date, which has recently been released in China. There is no doubt that it has gained a historical significance that no one pays attention to except for the domestic A-house: the first OVA released in domestic theaters.
At the same time, the game sets the worldview in the alternate post-war era, and involves many war scenes in the drama version, which is "Kyo Ani", the nickname of the film's animation production company Kyoto Animation, from "Full Metal Frenzy The Second Raid". The Second Raid, 2005), 14 years after the emergence of war scenes, during which Kyo Ani has constructed a world far away from the hustle and bustle of the world, built in the context of the daily life of the campus. Of course, this is as insignificant as the so-called "historical significance" mentioned above, but the point is, is the world of the "Violet" series, which is closely related to war, real enough?
This article starts from "Violet" and strolls through KyoAni itself.
Start with a classic "yan art"
Kyo Ani's 2006 Melancholy of Haruhi Ryogu (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, 2006) sparked an animation craze. Many of them consider the most popular episode to be the twelfth episode of "Live Alive", an episode of "God Knows" sung by Haruhi Ryogu and others at the campus cultural festival, which is also a tribute to Atsuhiro Yamashita's "Linda! Linda! Linda! has caused a conversation on the Internet.
Among them, the most impressive is probably a close-up of the mouth shape of the Cool Palace:
The "performance" of this episode (which can be understood as the director of a single episode) is Yamamoto Hiroshi - an animation performer who was later badly criticized by netizens for repeated exports, and retired from the company in 2007 - according to online information, the concert scene used a rotoscopic method, in which Ryogu's expression depicted the face of Ryogu's voice actor Aya Hirano when singing, and when drawing the original painting, with the saliva generated by the mouth spray, the whole close-up was full of courage. However, due to the popular cute painting style of the character design of "Lianggong" in the facial features, such a realistic mouth-shaped "performance" (the "performance" here can be understood as the performance of animation and the performance of the character) will naturally appear abrupt, so it is called "Yan Yi".
This is not only a famous scene in Kyo Ani's works, but also one of the most daring performances. Time has passed, more than ten years later, Jing Ani has never seen such an "untidy" Yanyi performance, most of the performances will follow the style of the work, just like the company's campus background works, just like the adolescent girl's "every breath", "every blink" (1), everything is pure and clean.
This "cleanliness" continues in Kyo Ani's unusual work "Violet", which is Kyo Ani's first work of an elevated world view, which is no longer a campus that has abandoned the boundary society, but a modern society in the post-war stage.
"The Master of All the People of Kyo Ani"
"Violet" is set aside, please allow the author to sell the guanzi again.
Keiyuki Okiura, the director and original artist of Man Wolf (2001), once said, "What kind of animators in Kyoto look like, look at the back of Yoshiharu Kinouchi." ”
"Ice Cream"
Who is Yoshiharu Kigami? If you poke in from the general film rating website filmmaker page, its directorial works are few, and they are far less well-known than "Lianggong" and "Ice Cream" (氷菓, 2014) and so on. This is because he appears more often in the original painting, storyboarding, and performance column, and does not appear under his real name. When the original painting was painted, he was signed "Fumio Tada" or "Fumio Tada", and the performance and storyboard were mostly "Miyoshi Ichiro". However, if you dig deeper, you will also find a saying: "All the creators of Kyoto Animation are disciples of Yoshiharu Kigami."
"Araki"
Whether it is the original painting or the performance, the technical level of Kinaka Is not under the painting. When he was active in the Tokyo animation circle in the 1980s and 1990s, he had already shined in the original painting work of many famous works. In Akira (アキラ, 1988), he is the author of the scene in which the enemy pilots an airship and strafies Kaneda's party in a drainage ditch. The significance of "Akira" in the history of Japanese animation is not only the cultural dissemination, but also the movement effect of inorganic objects in Japanese animation ("エフェケクト画", which is generally called "special effects painting" in China) towards the milestone of realistic style, and the original cut paintings contributed by Yoji Kigami are mainly about the movement effect of water, and the excellent water splash treatment is impressive.
One of the original cut paintings drawn by Yoshiharu Kinouchi in Akira
After entering Kyoto Animation in the 1990s, he began to focus on cultivating talents, and later served as a lecturer in the animation production department of Kyoto Animation Pro Cultivation School. According to Hiroshi Yamamoto, "The people in charge of painting from hiring to promotion were all Yoshiharu Kigami. In other words, only those who feel promising on Kigami can enter Kyoto Animation, and only those who accept Kikami's guidance and are recognized by Kikami can be promoted to original painting and performance. ”②
At the same time, Yamamoto also confessed that Kikami cultivated his "anti-bone spirit", which led Yamamoto and his master Kikami to embark on a completely different performance policy.
Yamamoto was inspired by Yasujiro Ozu's films, which led him to adhere to the minimalist "Fix" doctrine in his animation work. Therefore, even in such a moving scene as the concert of "Cool Palace", almost every shot uses a fixed camera position, except for some shots that simulate the effect of handheld photography, the lens does not have a single movement, and instead, all the characters present are moved. You know, many TV animations will use a lot of still pictures because of the tight production time, while many passers-by will directly stand still, so the scene of "Cool Palace" seems simple, but it is actually extremely laborious.
"The Melancholy of Spring in Lianggong"
The difference between Kikami is that he likes to use sports lenses, and even if the background is the main panorama, he often likes to shake the lens. Episode 9 of "Tamako Market" (たまこまーけっと, 2013), which features "Miyoshi Ichiro" as a storyboard and performance, also appears in the band singing drama (Tamiko's father's band performance video when he was young), and the "Miyoshi" storyboard is significantly allocated more sports shots than Yamamoto;
A more famous episode is "Blow It! Upper bass horn (響け!) In the twelfth episode of ユーフォニアム, 2015), in a scene where the protagonist Kumiko runs, the camera runs from Kumiko running head-on to the side heel, such a complex 3DCG background combined with the movement of hand-drawn characters is not common in TV animation, such a fierce camera movement also matches Kumiko's reluctance at this time, all the emotions are poured out under the character performance and the camera.
Blow It! Upper Bass Horn
This probably also leads to the fact that many Kyo Ani performers like to use sports shots. In 2016, Kyo Ani launched an animated advertisement for the bottom work "Violet" in his own light novel library, which used motion shots to cooperate with moving people and objects, and once published, the delicate paintings and performances caught the attention of many people.
The actor who shot and performed the commercial was Taiichi Ishitate, the first of the 1910s to be promoted to director, and he was a proud protégé of Kikami, and he was the director of the later drama version of the work.
Changes in Kyo Ani
The advertising of "Violet" can be described as reaching an unprecedented level of refinement, to what extent? The pattern on the heroine Violet Eve Garden's clothes is not a sticker material, but a full hand-drawn (the play version is simplified), if it is still, it is better to move, it is almost the life of the original artist, and it is precisely the characters in this advertisement who are in a state of movement. It was no one else who was responsible for such a large amount of original painting workload, it was Taiichi Ishida, Haruka Fujita, who would later serve as the director of "Gaiden", and "Fumio Tada".
If you compare the characters of Kyo Ani's first personally contracted production and the first original animation, that is, the character of "MUNTO" directed by Yoshiharu Kigami, you will find that the amount of line information that the heroine Hidaka dreams of will be so small, and the most conspicuous thing is her white water service, which is especially convenient for the drawing of the original painting and even the scheduling of the shot.
In the past ten years, Kyo Ani's animation has become more and more refined, especially in the realistic style, which has far pulled away from its peers, which has deterred many animation companies.
This refinement is not only in the art, but also in the performance of the characters, which is the most "extreme" by the director of works such as "Light Voice Girl" (けいおん!) and "Liz and the Blue Bird" (リズと青い鳥, 2018).
"The Girl with the Soft Voice"
Naoko Yamada excels at small movement performances of girls, with the hand performance being the most prominent, in addition to using offset close-up shots to focus on subtle changes in a certain part of the character, which is also her common technique. Before Yamada's directorial debut, "The First Season of The Girl with The Soft Voice", there were not many such "small actions" in Kyo Ani's works. Yamada believes that she depicts something called "adolescence".
I don't intend to attribute the "subtlety" of these performances to Yamada, but as an animation company with a sense of overall belonging, it is a common activity for employees to learn from each other, and this change is also holistic. What's more, before Yamada, Ishihara Tachibana ("AIR", "Blow It!" Yu Feng") has already made extensive use of offset close-up compositions. This relationship of influence is probably as difficult to clarify as the relationship between chickens and eggs, and due to the special japanese animation production system, kyo Ani cannot be dissected to ignore the integrity of the team.
This "subtlety" is also shown in the arrangement of the shots, sometimes one shot can be completed, but it has to be cut into two shots, and often one of the shots is close-up, telling the audience what you should pay attention to.
Along with this "subtlety", Kyo Ani became more and more neat in his performance (compared to the above example of "Lianggong"), and the amount of information on the screen became larger and larger (not only more and more lines and color blocks, including the movement shots on the wood were also played to the extreme, the advertising of "Violet" was the embodiment of both), and he was also more and more keen to create a pure and flawless unique time and space about adolescence - the praises of the daily miracle in "Everyday", or "Light Girl" Stopping the story at the last moments of the protagonists or high school students— both in form and content— Kyo Arni adheres to a kind of "purity", and "Violet", as an alternate worldview, is the new peak of this trend. At least, the author believes that the current Kyo Ani cannot appear the kind of incongruous facial art in "Lianggong".
The "cleanliness" of "Violet" is awkward
The above changes are not speculation by the author. Hiroshi Yamamoto, who had long since left, used 2007's Lucky Star (らき☆すた) as the dividing line between Kyo Ani. (Since many of Yamamoto's views are more extreme, but he is a good witness to the past, I think some of these views can be distilled.) ）
Lucky Star
He believes that the biggest difference between "Light Voice Girl" and "Lucky Star" that he personally handled is that the former barely allows male characters and parents to appear (Although Hirazawa's parents appear in the theatrical version, they are filmed in a long-range location and do not show their faces), while the latter "tries to make the audience aware of family and the opposite sex, as well as society." In order to emphasize that the protagonists' schools are not girls' schools but co-educational schools, minoru Shiraishi (CV: Minoru Shiraishi) is given a lot of scenes. ”③
In fact, in the category of ACG works, "Light Girl" and "Lucky Star", including the later "Everyday", all belong to a category called "Air System", also known as "Daily System". This is a category defined by literary critics, referring to the abandonment of storytelling (material language), the pursuit of so-called "air sense", or even no connotation, depicting the leisurely daily life of young girls.
The time shown in the "Air System" work is a cycle of day after day, which is to eliminate the time of progress. The ideaary Kato mentioned on Monday that there is a "daily time" in Japanese culture that has a "cycle of a circle without beginning and end" and "emphasizes living in the 'present'" (4).
"My Neighbor Jun Yamada"
In the ACG culture, for example, Takahata Ying","Chie Koma" (Jarinko Chie, 1981), "My Neighbor Yamada-kun" (Hohokekyo My Neighbor Yamada-kun, 1999) Ya-Ayoi Special Conquest; "YOI" 类别,First student in the 70's, 1 finger on the rise "Grave storm surge,Critical to the forfeith," "Yamanashi, Ochinashi, Imanashi"- She was born in the Two of the Two City.
Leeds and the Bluebird
Kyo Ani is the "cleanliness" hobby of this group of creators, and Naoko Yamada is the most representative. Yamada's removal of social and adult power in "The Girl with a Soft Voice" has no intention of criticizing it, because this is her personality as an author, and this writer's sexuality is maximized in the future "Liz and the Blue Bird" - the story is only about two girls, and they are confined to the cage of the school. Yamada seized on a glass-shattering, fleeting, and ephemeral moment that was hard for others to capture. And such cleanliness is also reflected in the "Violet" led by Shi Li taiyi.
We finally return to the starting point of this article, does this kind of writer's "cleanliness" with the imprint of the company really work in "Violet"?
As mentioned earlier, "Violet" is the first time that Kyo Ani has left the daily background of the campus to construct a modern European world that has just escaped from war. The young girl Violet was once a soldier, and because of her injury, her hands were replaced with silver steel prosthetics.
With the help of Claudia Hawkins, a close friend of Kilbert, she traveled to the southern port city of Leiden and became an "automatic handwritten doll" to learn the true meaning of "love" as she ghostwrote letters for people.
At the time after the drama version, Isabella York, who attended the school of female aristocrats, was originally a poor girl who was dependent on her righteous sister Taylor Bartlett, originally named Amy, and she and Violet, who assisted her in her daily life, became increasingly friendly. The Tale is divided into two parts, telling the story of Isabella and Taylor three years later.
So where does Kyo Ani's cleanliness habit show in this work? Deletions of information about the social environment in the original book: for example, Amy earns a living by stealing and lives in the Red Light District, and the most popular occupation of this generation is prostitute, followed by thieves, and some people work part-time at the same time.
There is a scene in the animation where Amy takes something to a pawnshop to sell, and it is not explicit that Amy's things were stolen - such a cryptic adaptation is understandable - but what is not said in the animation is the social environment information behind this plot: the stolen goods are sold to the store, and the lost owner can only be redeemed for several times the price when they are recovered. "The sale of stolen goods and redemption constitutes a vicious circle of buying and selling". When Amy picks up Taylor, the original book also has a scene of Taylor's mother dying in the street. The meticulous portrayal of all this "selling misery" adds credibility to the postwar worldview in my opinion, and Amy's reason for adopting Taylor later is more convincing.
The absence of the post-war social environment is not only the "Outer Tale" directed by Haruka Fujita, the drama version directed by Taiichi Ishita also shows an overly ideal post-war environment, Violet contacts all gentle and good people (and thus she learns to love from others), and the citizens on the street are all living and working in peace...
However, in the context of the self-contradiction of social and environmental spatial information, the second half of "The Tale" involves the proposition of "era", showing the scale of time with the construction progress of the electric tower that resembles the Eiffel Tower in Paris, suggesting that the Industrial Revolution is coming. (Ignore Violet's prosthetic prosthesis technology far beyond her time.) In fact, throughout the film, you will find that the proposition of the era is disconnected from the theme of the whole film, because this is the plot that inherits the theatrical version (canon) released in Japan in April this year: the postal industry affected by the Industrial Revolution.
However, the social environment that exists as the basis in "The Outer Biography" itself is already difficult to reconcile, so why talk about the torrent of the times and the appearance of sentient beings under the torrent? Coupled with the fact that the role of this proposition is only to elicit a sequel, it is even more chicken.
In Kyo Ani's previous campus stories, in fact, and most Japanese animation works, the particularity of the "school" institution is used to unfold the story: an "authority" that isolates excess social information from space and time (attendance inspection makes it difficult to skip school) (the right to speak is in the hands of adults), coupled with the students' daily two-point and one-line schooling route, which helps to form a self-world that no one knows about, and this is pure (the reason why the air system is the air system is the air system).
Thus, at pure extremes, ACG works also produce stories of the genre "World System" (5). However, once a complete picture of the world is needed, such as "Violet", this pure "cleanliness" is undoubtedly difficult to create a complete world and order.
The war shown in "Violet" is less muddy than "All Metal Frenzy" more than a decade ago, and more of the beauty of the character's acting skills, which is probably Kyo Ani's "cleanliness" - or gentle embodiment.
Immortal purity
From "Cool Palace" to "Light Voice Girl" to "Violet", including Yamamoto Hiroshi, many people feel that Kyo Ani has become more and more conservative, as if hiding in a greenhouse to maintain a state of eternal cleanliness, this kind of argument is constantly heard among the audience...
However, "that day" was unexpected by all the anime audiences, and no one would have thought that in the last year of the 10s, Kyo Ani was on the news of major media around the world in such a heavy way, and was known to more people in an unbelieving way. After the incident, many people were surprised to find that in all corners of the world, so many voices had been blessed with the gentle grace of Kyo Ani.
Unfortunately, "Gaiden" was completed exactly the day before the event, which also led to the release of "Gaiden" attracting much attention. At the same time, in order to leave traces of the existence of the deceased, the ending list of "Gaiden" allows all employees of Kyo Ani to appear on the screen as the famous doctor of "Supporting Staff", where the living and the dead are equal and undifferentiated. (Kyoani also never personally published the list of the dead.) ）
However, the information that comes to the face has already drowned out many hearts that have nowhere to be placed, and it is difficult for the author not to know one bad news after another, followed by a lot of "hindsight"...
The first honored master, Miyoshi Ichiro, compared to his real name, Yoshiharu Kigami, let the name that exists as a performer and not a "supervisor" (director) be engraved on the screen, which is probably a proof of their tacit understanding.
Yasuhiro Takemoto
Also in the group is Yasuhiro Takemoto, who once said that he wanted to "communicate more with others as an ordinary person" than the director. Fortunate enough to be part of the audience for his work, I can confidently be sure that Takemoto's work is absolutely interesting, but I don't know if I have explored Takemoto's "words" in his work.
Taishi Nishiya, who became a character designer in the 1910s, like many people, knows him through his Origami Bōtaro. However, after the incident, Yamamoto Hiroshi answered the answer that many people had in mind: the part of Haruhi Ryogu singing was all drawn by Westinghouse, and no rotography was used at all... ⑥
Whether it is the multiple "vests" on the wood, or the self-effacing of performers such as Takemoto, or perhaps self-made sentimentality, we seem to know why Kyo Ani's works choose to depict purity, and why there is such a world as "Violet" that is not complete.
That's probably because it's a group of voicers who challenge the name "story" with purity as the power.
exegesis:
(1) Naoko Yamada.
(2) Anitama New Year Special: Interview Series with Hiroshi Yamamoto, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/25138863;
(3) Ibid.;
(4) Monday Kato, translated by Peng Xi, Time and Space in Japanese Culture, Nanjing University Press, 2010, P16;
(5) Connecting the protagonists with abstract and huge issues such as the destruction of the world, but the entire external society is dissolved into a vague background, and the story only focuses on the small 'you' and 'I' (generally referring to the male and female protagonists), and the representative works include "The Sound of stars", "The Sky of Irino, The Summer of UFO", and "The Final Weapon". Kyo Ani's "Ryogu" is a world-class work, and the critic Uno Tokihiro also believes that "Ryogu" is a work that pursues a "sense of air".
(6) Among animation fans, there are many enthusiasts who like to study animation painting, and experienced painting enthusiasts can confirm who made a certain cut original painting through clues such as the original artist's painting style and habits, but Kyo Ani's animation is often difficult to recognize the author because of the unity and coordination between the original artists.