Author | Hui Ye (Shanghai)
Edit | Yang (Taipei)
When you think of Japanese animation, who comes to mind first? It must be Miyazaki. His animation has influenced the world because of Hisaishi's grand soundtrack, delicate hand-drawn style, warm and lovely character modeling, direct emotional expression and deeply excavated story content, making his position in the animation industry as stable as Tarzan. Secondly, Osamu Tezuka, Katsuhiro Otomo, etc. They pushed Japanese animation to the pinnacle step by step. However, there is an animation master who has not attracted as much attention as the first three, but his only few animation works should not be underestimated, he has opened a new style of animation films, the perfect fusion of dreams and reality, so that the audience is immersed in the space of virtual and real, and this master is Imatoshi.
The animation director from Sapporo, Hokkaido, with a height of 1.8 meters tall, much taller than the average Japanese, has a face with manga colors, so some people jokingly combine his face with a rabbit with glasses into a picture, and over time it has become his alternative image symbol.
While other people's animation works are showing the external world, Imatoshi prefers to explore the inner spiritual world of individual characters. At the same time, combined with the real society, the real world and the spiritual world are mixed together to create a world between virtual reality, which is considered to be an "illusion painting", coupled with the oriental psychedelic style brought by Pyeongtaek's technological music, making his works unique in the animation industry, and even no one can imitate it.
First, the narrative technique between virtual reality and reality
From junior high school, Imatoshi had the determination to become an "animator" and was admitted from Hokkaido to the Department of Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Katsuyo Otomo was once Toshi's mentor, and with Otomo Yoko, his style of combining dreams and reality began to emerge. In Katsuyo Otomo's "Memories trilogy: Her Memories", Imatoshi served as the screenwriter. In My Dream Road, he once said of the work, "This is a precious work, and I feel that it has reached the apex of Japanese animation technology, both in terms of painting and art." "Katsuyo Otomo mostly uses the science fiction apocalyptic theme as the background to explore the weaknesses of human nature and analyze the inferiority of human nature. Therefore, in the "Memories Trilogy", "Her Memories" was rated as the shortest in the style of Katsuyo Otomo, and the reason is that Imatoshi participated in the screenwriting of this part. The story of the short film is set in distant outer space, two astronauts are rescued by a ship's distress signal, and something happens between the real and the unreal. The grand cosmic backdrop, the atmospheric "Madame Butterfly" song, and the natural intervention of the illusion make this short film fascinating. It was the screenwriter who participated in such a short film that laid the foundation for the animation style of "illusion painting" in the future, and embarked on a complex world where illusion and reality intertwined.
01
Finding the Inner Self: Exploring the Psychology of the Characters Inward
In the narrative technique between the present and the virtual reality, it can be divided into two categories, one is to explore the spiritual world of people inward, and the second is to explore the connection between real society and the psychology of the characters outwardly. Among the film works and animation works in which Imatoshi is a director, "The House of the Unma" and "Millennium Actress" are works that explore the spiritual world of the characters inward. Starting from "Tokyo Godfather", until "Delusional Agent", and then to "Red Hot Chili Peppers", his animation creation began to move from the inside out, from the spiritual world of the self, and integrated with social reality, creating a realm of "you have me, I have you" between reality and fantasy world, and the problem of reality can be more obvious in this. His works always have one thing in common, which is "constantly searching". The protagonists look for different points according to different story backgrounds.
(1) Find yourself. "Who are you?" It is a common line in "The House of Unma", which is used to express the confused and confused psychological state of Unma, she cannot locate her own identity, and has to embark on a journey to find herself. Imatoshi himself joked at the lecture on "The House of the Unhemped" that this question had been bothered by himself. The film tells the story of Wei Ma, who wants to transform from a pure idol to a mature woman, and is dissatisfied by fans who like pure idol type Unma, so a series of murders occur in the middle, who is the murderer in the end? In terms of the plot of the movie itself, this is an ordinary suspense movie, but Imatoshi uses clever means to keep the suspense to the last moment. A closer look at the reasons stems largely from his narrative perspective. In "The House of unma", it unfolds from the spiritual perspective of unma, adding fragments of the play within a play, so that the real world of the film and the unreal world of the play within the play are fused together, "Who are you?" With self-doubt, the viewer successfully spied on the mental activity of the unhemp. Due to the transformation of his image, Hema was deeply involved in a situation of self-doubt. At this moment, the audience is involved in the "virtual magic" created by Imatoshi, whether it is reality or illusion, whether the murderer really exists, and whether it is schizophrenic. Even at the moment when the mystery is revealed, there will still be people who will say to the mirror, "I am a real unma!" The ending has produced an open discussion, and some people even think that Wei Ma is the real murderer behind the scenes, but Toshitoshi is more inclined to the growth of Wei Ma in this scene. The purpose of mirror reflection is to tell the viewer that he has grown from that event and gradually found himself, and this kind of growth is in a state of spiraling growth in progress. If you don't say to the camera and don't use the mirror to reflect, then the feeling of growing up in the mirror does not exist.
(2) Look for the key male/memories. "Millennium Actress" is the story of searching, what is she looking for? In 2002, Imatoshi rose to fame by winning the Best Animation Award at the Canadian Fantasy Film Festival. The film revolves around Chiyoko Fujiwara, who has long since quit the entertainment industry and lives in the mountains, and enters the memory and spiritual world of this actress in the form of a reporter interview. The film combines the grand history of Japan, from Nara, Heian, Kamakura to Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei, allowing Chiyoko to play different roles in these eras, traveling through time and space. Journalists and photographers have also been involved in different roles as times have changed. Imatoshi is good at using simple stories and using the strengths of animation to make complex processes in terms of graphics and narratives, creating brilliant and eye-catching story content and narrative forms. The film allows two outsiders to enter the spiritual world of the protagonist, and this treatment is particularly novel, allowing the audience to enter the play and let the audience play, in short, the audience is played by The trick of today. The scene in the memories of the three heroines is similar to his early screenwriting work "Memories of the Trilogy : Her Memories". However, Toshi toshi Ima says that this film is based on Terry Gilliam's version of The Ultimate General. In the author's opinion, Imatoshi borrowed the form of "The Ultimate Heavenly General", that is, the story in the story, and the supporting characters transformed into the image in the protagonist's mind in the oral story of the protagonist, and together they ventured in the story. However, there is a difference between "The Ultimate Heavenly General" and "Millennium Actress". The former is also alias "The Adventures of the Bull King", as the name suggests, listening to the story told by the protagonist is not true, paying attention to the fun and twists of the story; while the latter focuses on the spiritual level of the characters, starting from the introverted narrative angle, the supporting characters participate in the spiritual world of the protagonist, and listen to the real spiritual emotions of the protagonist in the unreal world. Life is like a drama, Chiyoko's life is like a drama unfolding in front of the audience, and the many characters she plays and her own real experiences complement each other, showing the history of Japan and the history of her personal growth. "Millennium actress" refers to Chiyoko's journey through the millennia of history, as if she had lived for thousands of years. The purpose of this is seen in Imatoshi's view as a reincarnation of destiny. The repeated appearance of the loom grandmother in the film seems to have become a repetition of reincarnation and an inescapable metaphor.
The persistent search that runs through the film and enables Chiyoko to walk in different eras is her persistent spirit. Although she continues to walk through the intricate and chaotic memory, overcoming many obstacles, her purpose has never changed - to find a painter. However, as the story progresses, Chiyoko's "search" gradually changes. The painter who gave her the key faded away, and the director amplified the process of her search, giving the answer until the end of the film. Using the form of interviews, the film constantly evokes the girl who has been hidden in Chiyoko's heart for a long time, and opens the door to her memory. The film sees the portrait of her youth hanging on the wall in the heroine's memories, just like the director hinting that the lotus in the heroine's heart blooms. This made her gradually sober up, and it turned out that all along, what she liked was to constantly chase him on the journey. The process of finding memories satisfies her, while the director's process of exploring her memories satisfies the audience. In the early films, the protagonist is set in a whirlpool of spiritual world, and he grows himself from the torture of the heart.
2. Finding Realistic Answers: Exploring Psychology and Society Outward
(1) Finding the abandoned baby's family/self-redemption. "Tokyo Godfather" is different from to Imatoshi's first two films that tortured the spiritual world of the protagonist, from a single protagonist to three protagonists, which also paved the way for the subsequent production of "Delusional Agent". The film's protagonists are three wanderers, and the film takes place on Christmas Eve. This is a movie about luck, this time Toshitoshi really pays attention to people living at the bottom of society, because they carry misfortune, so for the sake of face, they constantly cover themselves with lies. But from the discovery of the abandoned baby, the search for the owner of the abandoned baby becomes the beginning of the story, in the process of searching, the three wanderers are constantly involved in inexplicable events, and these events, but invisibly affect them. Three people with guilt gradually redeemed themselves on this Christmas Eve. This film is more like Yuki Mitani's film, Imatoshi put down the surreality of the hand, but in the plain story background, through the continuous creation of coincidences to promote the storyline, "lucky" is the biggest surreal in reality, let the story twist and turn, until the final reunion.
(2) Look for the real culprit/source of anxiety. It wasn't until "Delusional Agent" that Tomin's exploration of social reality changed again. He returned to his familiar subject matter of intertwining illusion and reality, but the scope of his consideration was more ambitious. This is an important transitional work in the creative process of Imatoshi from the exploration of the spirit inward to the fusion of outward reality and dreams, and it is also the only TELEVISION animation work directed by him. This is a 13-episode anime that not only inherits the attention to human spiritual anxiety in the first two works, but also the attention of the real society in "Tokyo Godfather", but also paves the way for "Red Hot Chili Peppers", which plays a more ambitious surreal theme to the extreme. It can be said that "Tokyo Godfather" and "Red Hot Chili Peppers" are the two branches of "Delusional Agent", the former becoming a pure reality theme, and the latter adding a dream perspective on the basis of real social themes, becoming an excellent animation work of reality and unreal. "Delusional Agent" mainly tells the story of a young female painter who is unfortunately hit by a baseball teenager, and since then, some people have been attacked by baseball boys, and then the police have launched a series of investigations. Previously, the miniature of the small-scale reality radiated by idols and actors could not satisfy Imatoshi, but this time he set his sights on the entire real society in Japan and told the problems in society in a realistic way: during the rush hour of commuting, the subway bus was crowded, everyone held a mobile phone, but they all felt tired and uncomfortable, this crowd was highly dense, the pressure of work, the pressure of study made people mentally anxious.
Imatoshi spent 13 episodes, group portraits of The Mental Problems of Japanese People one by one, with different anxiety states, such as jealous elementary school students, teacher assistants trying to conceal personality splits, pedophile complex police officers, suicide trio, young women who want to talk big, and so on. In the film, the baseball teenager has indeed had his own person, until the case has become more and more uncertain, so it has become synonymous with the urban evils of this film, so is there really a person? The audience follows the pace of the detectives to find the truth, but on closer inspection, the title of the film "Delusional Agent" has actually explained the biggest suspense of the story. The baseball boy who is a suspect is not real, but a collective image created by people to escape the anxiety brought about by social pressure, and under people's false rumors, this virtual character has become more and more real and frightening. Just when we thought that this was just an ordinary animation that exposed the humanity of society, today we caused people to take it by surprise and return to the illusory world we are familiar with. Surreal elements slowly infiltrate the entire animation until the final episode is completely exploded. Through Imatoshi's brushstrokes, the collective unconscious anxiety transforms the invisible into the tangible, condensing into a great evil force that is about to devour the whole of Japan. Here, Jin Min is no longer satisfied with exploring individual spiritual problems such as split personality and individual recall, but is a collective spiritual problem arising from the social reality.
(3) Looking for the truth. Red Hot Chili Peppers is a science fiction novel of the same name by Yasutaka Tsutsui, which Imatoshi read in his early years and fell in love with it. After creating this work, the author Yasutaka Tsutsui has always hoped that his novel can be adapted into a movie, and he already has a candidate for adaptation in his heart, and that person is Imatoshi. Since then, the right to adapt this work has fallen into the hands of Imatoshi. The anime did not disappoint, and Yasutaka Tsutsui envied Imatoshi's expressiveness because his expressiveness could not even be depicted in words. Continuing the theme of "searching", the "search" of this film is divided into two, one is to find the real murderer who controls DCmini, which represents the search for answers in reality; the other is to find the root cause of his inability to face a person and several things, representing the search for answers in dreams. The interweaving of dual sexual threads, the interspersing of reality and dreams, and the development of the storyline, the two have become connected, and in the world where reality and illusion are unable to distinguish between reality and illusion, they have found their own answers.
The film is between logic and non-logic, with dreams and dreams separated by only "a screen". When the final mastermind wants to bring the dream into reality, Paprika and his party try to stop it, and the alternation of dream and reality, space and time, becomes the most wonderful part. The paragraph is divided into two paragraphs, the first of which is two parallel paragraphs, on the one hand, Paprika is trapped in the trap of her strengths and is bound to a wooden table by Koyamauchi, and on the other hand, Detective Tomogawa recalls the various things between herself and her former partner in the Dream Bar and unties the knot. The dreams of two people who seem to have no connection form a meeting at this moment. Detective Fanchuan walked on the road full of movie theaters, heard Paprika's cries coming from inside the theater, and he rushed into the theater and tried to enter the screen to save Paprika who was bullied on the screen. This screen is a thin wall of two dreams, breaking through the dream and entering another dream world. In terms of plot, the key word in this paragraph is "breakthrough", and the key to the interweaving of the two dreams is to break the barrier of space. This also prepares for a more spectacular "breakthrough" in the next big paragraph. The perfect blend between dreams and reality in this film. The second largest segment is that the dream breaks through reality, and is broken by the dream in time and space, creating a very rational surreal passage. The whole world is plunged into a state of unconsciousness, the subconscious of the dream invading people is like a flood, and the brainwashed people have their left arms raised forward, as if they see another German Empire under Hitler, which is the climax of the story and the most brilliant chapter of the film. The real world is wrapped up in dreams, and order collapses and falls into chaos. In a world without logic, the way to defeat the evil forces is more likely to be untethered by logic, which also reflects the cleverness of Imatoshi in handling the ending of the film. "Red Hot Chili Peppers" can be said to be the pinnacle of Imatoshi's work, he put the elements accumulated in previous animated films into the film, and the two color lines of dream and reality are woven into the grandest surreal story.
Second, the lens language: quick jumping and music rhythm change screen
Imatoshi's animated films are known in the film industry for their flexible lens language. It is precisely because of this that the scene of Unma in the bathroom in "The House of unma" has been "homaged" by director Darren Aronofsky in "Requiem for Dreams", which basically uses Imatoshi's split-shot script and shoots a live-action version of the clip.
Imatoshi has a distinctive trait in the language of the lens, that is, the rapid jumping of the camera. In "Millennium Actress", this kind of shot first appears in the historical scenes of the heroine crossing through different periods. For example, when the protagonist wrestles, the scene changes, along with the clothes and characters. This kind of rapid jumping shot, using a very short time for spatial transitions, is rare in other films and can only be seen in animated films. This editing technique was brought to the extreme in Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the opening 3 minutes of the film, the scene changes 5 times, full of dream logic, the event itself does not make any changes, but the time and space are freely traveled like "Millennium Actress". A covert investigation, from the circus directly into the aerial rope of Tarzan of the Apes, and again into the detective film scene, the fragmentary memory of the dream is recorded with jumps; then the 1-minute credits paragraph appears, and the audience follows the footsteps of the protagonist Paprika through the streets of Japan. Within a minute, Imatoshi converted 10 scenes in fairly smooth transitions. From highways, to truck advertisements, to flying in the air, to entering tall billboards... Each transition uses a simple occlusion, or the medium of image (e.g., photo, billboard) is naturally fed into the next scene. Imatoshi's jump shots make people feel fresh, and at the same time unconsciously provide a lot of story information, and if you are not careful, you may miss a detail. This kind of jumping is in line with the temperament of the dream. "Red Hot Chili Peppers" is originally a story about dreams and reality, and by jumping through the editing shots, it is similar to the fragmentary memories of the shots, which seems illogical, but it makes the dreams more realistic in the film.
In addition, imatoshi's film scenes are musical, with the editing rhythm and the rhythm of the music almost the same. The reason is that Imatoshi's creative methods are different, under normal circumstances, the picture is created first and then the music is accompanied by music, and the present is the music before the scene is created. This is quite difficult for Hirazawa Jin, and at the same time gives him freedom, and Now Toshi can find creative inspiration in music, and often the rhythm of the picture will match the beat of the music. Still using the 1-minute credit introduction scene in Red Hot Chili Peppers as an example, Paprika walks lightly, and the points she steps on each step coincide with the rhythm of the music. Imatoshi has always liked and paid attention to Pyeongtaekjin's music, listening carefully to Pyeongsawajin's music, it is not difficult to find that his musical temperament is similar to Imatoshi's creative style, this kind of technological music is different from psychedelic electronic music, his music makes people intoxicated, but also makes people sober, and every note he creates is like a molecule that enters every cell of the listener's body, so that the listener can be immersed in the ocean of music he creates. The addition of Oriental flavors to Western music technology in this psychedelic and realistic musical illusion not only fascinates the audience, but also makes Imatoshi constantly gain creative inspiration. Toshi Ima and Makoto Hirazawa's first collaboration was "Millennium Actress", and because Imatoshi especially liked Pyeongtaek's Lotus, he hoped to use the music in this film. This music later became imatoshi's funeral music.
The empty shots echo the plot, which is another characteristic of the lens language in Imatoshi's animated films. When making an animated film, Imatoshi doesn't waste a single place on the screen that conveys the film's main message. In Tokyo The Godfather, when homeless Kim sees an old tramp dying, the windmill outside the house stands symbolically. When the old man was dying, the windmill still rotated; when the old man died completely, the windmill outside the house also stopped turning. In Red Hot Chili Peppers, when Atsuko Chiba and the president discuss in a rainy car that DCmini without a controller might invade everyone's spiritual world, in a set of empty shots, the raindrops that fall on the glass window of the car outside the window meet from different places to form a long rain trail. This empty shot corresponds to the protagonist's lines, and the fusion of raindrops is a metaphor for the chaotic dream invading the spiritual world. Imatoshi, who has always been known for meticulously drawing sub-shot scripts, once made an emphasis on the creation of this part of the film, and this shot was deliberately made by him.
Third, the road to regretful dreams
When Hirazawa first saw Imatoshi, because of his tall stature and only two syllables, he mistakenly thought he was a "Chinese boxer". This director, who is full of animation feelings, can master the extremely difficult animation works, sprinkle the fantasy "red peppers" on the realistic theme, and make the soup of seemingly bland stories quickly become a great masterpiece.
In his works, we can see his little fun. For example, put the movies you have wanted to make or will want to make into the movies you are making. In the movie "Red Hot Chili Peppers", we can see two characters in the movie he wants to shoot in the future, "Dream Machine"; in the movie street that Detective Fanchuan walks through, there are toshitoshi's previous works "Millennium Actress", "Unma's Buya" and "Tokyo Godfather". His symbol imprints are engraved in every scene. Careful viewers will find that in his work, the background of a scene will also be very elaborate, and sometimes the background in the scene in the early part of the film can be hinted at and catered to the development direction of the later story. For example, when Detective Tomogawa comes to the research office to investigate DCmini, the portrait of Sphinx and King Oedipus behind it is used in a later clip: Paprika is in distress and tries to escape from the painting, which happens to be Sphinx and Oedipus King.
In 2015, an important Japanese actress passed away, and she was mentioned along with Imatoshi's Millennium Actress. She is Hara Setsuko, the imperial actress of Yasujiro Ozu. The death of Hara Setsuko has attracted the mourning of a large number of fans, and most of the rumors circulating on the Internet are that Imatoshi's "Millennium Actress" is considered to be a tribute to a generation of movie stars Hara Setsuko because of its similar character setting, and Hara Setsuko is named "Millennium Actress". However, from Toshi's "My Road to Dreams", it is difficult to find the connection between Hara Setsuko and chiyoko created by him. In the book, he says that the inspiration for his creation of Chiyoko was the singer Jun Togawa. Perhaps the status of Hara Setsuko in the minds of movie fans is supreme, and Chiyoko has created such a lovely female image with independent personality pursuits, and Hara Setsuko has become the "Millennium Actress" in the hearts of movie fans. However, this does not prevent fans from nostalgically for Hara Setsuko, her silent performance, sunny and sweet smile, worthy of the title of "Millennium Actress".
Epilogue
Before his death, Imatoshi was working on his next anime, Dream Machine, but with his death, the work will be shelved forever. His colleagues were also unable to complete his work for him, because the whole story was only in the mind of Imatoshi alone, and he took the story to heaven. He once said that "Dream Machine" is a completely different work from the past, which is a fairy tale that can be read by adults and children. It has been a long time, but now only regret remains.
Imatoshi is not a prolific person, and one of his animations often takes at least three years to complete. Reality is the basis of his creation, and fantasy is the imagination in his mind. Colorful pictures, floating between logical right and wrong, with Pyeongtaekjin's technological music, dreams begin to play out on the screen. Walking in reality and fantasy, he follows the characters he has created, never stopping to search for the next different dream, but unfortunately he enters heaven with the last dream. However, these only four movies and one TV anime are the best dreams that Imatoshi has ever created.
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