The name Imatoshi, the light flickered. In Japan, where there are many talents in the animation industry, he is also a genius among geniuses!
August 24 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Japanese animation film master Director Toshi Imamoto. Taiwan will also recently re-release Imatoshi's feature film debut "The House of Unma" in theaters as a souvenir.
As an animation director, Imatoshi has not produced many works, with only four feature films, "Unma's House", "Millennium Actress", "Tokyo Godfather", and "Red Hot Chili Peppers", and a drama series "Delusional Agent". However, each of these four animated feature films is a classic of great genius!
Imatoshi's cartoons are different from Japanese animation masters such as Katsuhiro Otomo, Mori Oshii, and Hayao Miyazaki. His work is all geared toward adults, with characters either shuttling between eerie dreams and vague realities ("The Unma's House", "Red Hot Chili Peppers"), or incarnating different film and television characters to travel through the millennium to pursue old dreams ("Millennium Actress"), or a few strange marginal people holding a baby and walking in the confused metropolis of Tokyo ("Tokyo Godfather") ... The wonder of its imagination, the boldness and profundity of the criticism of reality, and the excavation and presentation of the nature of the world and the human heart make the audience one happy and one afraid: the joy is that these cartoons are exquisite and delicate, the narrative is smooth, and the story peaks and loops; the fear is that its theme is deep, pointing directly to the human heart, listening to thunder in the silent place, after watching the film, often feel that the blue sky and day of the real world suddenly become cloudy and uncertain, and in the trance, I don't know whether it is Zhuang Sheng's dream butterfly or Zhuang Sheng's butterfly... There are very few cartoons that have this kind of bone-pulling and thrilling charm!
The so-called debut is the peak, imatoshi's debut film "The House of unma" has played its characteristics to the fullest. The first half of the film is nothing more than a story of a newcomer in the entertainment industry trying to transform from an idol to an actor, and encountering strange fan harassment. As the story progresses, the protagonist Wei Ma becomes more and more immersed in hallucinations, as if he has become a divided doll, and his every move is controlled by others.
Imatoshi himself admits that "The House of the Unma" is a difficult anime. Its themes and intentions are very rich.
First of all, the film shows the relationship between idols and fans in the entertainment industry through artists who have not been ma, the former star who has become an agent, and the fan horse-faced stranger who has not been ma: Liu Mei has controlled the extreme fan horse-faced people by playing Wei Ma; the agency company has also let Wei Ma take on large-scale rape scenes and take nude photos through the name of "cultivating stars"- this is essentially the consumption and control of the artist; the extreme fans use stalking, threatening, building websites to expose the privacy of the artists, etc., to carry out mental control and moral kidnapping of the artists. Between the agency/producer, the artist, and the fans, a complex ring is formed, relying on each other and controlling each other. As a result, human nature is lost, distorted, and transformed into some kind of social symbol, a vassal of capital or others. As an animation work from 23 years ago, it has to be said that its understanding is profound and advanced.
The film also deals with multiple personalities and the role of people. Liu Mei was once an idol artist, old and fading can only be an agent, she is eager to play the role of Unma in her heart, and re-experience the feeling of being a popular idol. As a result, Rumi's personality splits, thinking that she is the real Unma, and the real Unma has given up her identity as an idol and slowly becomes the object that Rumi wants to destroy. At the same time, Wei Ma, a transformed actor, also faces the problem of a double life: she still wants to sing in her heart, but in reality, she can only continue to receive large-scale film and television works, and the spiritual world is constantly squeezed and invaded, and finally close to the brink of collapse. In the entertainment industry, celebrities/idols are originally played, with a virtual image. Wei Ma is constantly entangled between the false appearance and the real heart, and is at a loss.
"The House of the Unma" shows the multiple personalities of the characters in the form of a large number of plays-within-a-play. For example, at the beginning of the film, it is a fan meeting: the live performance of the TV series "Computer Warrior", and some fans think that the scene is completely different from the TV stage. This brings up topics such as the relationship between performance and reality, the audience's imagination of the characters, and so on. In addition, the film and television work filmed by Wei Ma in the film is called "Double Bind" (hereinafter referred to as "DB"), which comes from the psychological concept of "double bondage", which refers to a dilemma of confusion, such as the mother saying "I love you" to the child while turning her head to ignore him, and the child will feel "double bondage". This is also an important cause of schizophrenia. At the same time, the title "DB" can also be seen as a tribute to Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity", which also implies the "dual identity" of the characters in the cartoon (i.e. the literal translation of the title of "Double Compensation"). During the filming of DB, the lines and storylines spoken by Wei Ma and other characters formed an intertextual relationship with the reality of the film itself: when shooting DB, Wei Ma's first line was "Who are you?" That is, it hints at her confused mentality, and it is increasingly unclear who she is and what she is doing; in "DB", Unma, who plays a girl with multiple personalities, Takahashi Yoko, kills her sister Rimi Takahashi, replacing her sister as a model, and her personality disappears - and in the cartoon, the lines that Unma began to say are not the name in the DB drama, it is her real name "Kiritsu Noma", and the identity she confesses is not the model in the play, but her own identity in reality: actor. This intertwining of reality and virtual ambiguity makes the film have a great thriller appeal, and also makes the film's information soar. In Imatoshi's works, the content in the film is often only the tip of the iceberg, and it is the content that hides the background, clues, and the true face of the characters behind it, which is the obsessive content.
In an interview with Imatoshi, he once mentioned that he likes the concept of opposites, such as black and white, fantasy and reality, true and false, and so on. "The House of the Unma" uses a lot of mirror images to show this opposition and unity. In the film, there are a lot of mirror images, such as yourself in the mirror, the character staring out the window, the reflection reflected in the car window, the self-talk in front of the fish tank, and so on. These mirror images often mean both real and illusory existence: it is the real projection of the inner moments of the unma, her lonely self; at the same time, it is also the opportunity for the fantasy to get rid of the shackles: the more authentic "original self" can be released - more interestingly, the unmax original self is also the personality role played by Liu Mei. The original self, which should have been more real, was thus replaced in the mirror by the evil and madness of the beauty, resulting in the pain of the "self" of the unma, and the "original self" being tampered with and polluted. The ending twist of the film is a bit too fast: Rumi frantically wants to kill Wei Ma, and after failing, she is ready to throw herself into the car to seek death, but is saved by Wei Ma. At the end of the film, Wei Ma, reflected in the mirror of the car, says to the audience, "I'm really." Through another mirror lens, Imatoshi reminds us that this is not a simple reunion ending. Wei Ma did not get redeemed by abandoning his past self and becoming a real star. This is also the multiple meanings of the film's English title: "Perfect Blue" can be understood as "perfect blue" - the only time the blue sky in the whole film appears at the end of the film; at the same time, it can also be translated as "very melancholy", symbolizing that we may never be able to distinguish whether we are in reality or in an illusion!
"The House of the Unhemped" is written about the mirror within the mirror, the dream in the dream, the peeping in the peeping, the fantasy in the fantasy. This is a great legacy left by director Imatoshi. However, can we really wake up from our dreams? Seeing the truth in the mirror? There is a line in the film that "fantasy cannot become reality", is this the real idea of Imatoshi?
PS. Darren Aronoff loved the film so much that he used the unhemp bathing footage in his film Requiem for Dreams. But Imatoshi said on the show that he had not received the royalties paid to him by Darren. Darren's later black swan also has many similarities with this film: the English of unma is Mima, and the name of the protagonist of black swan is Nina; both films involve multiple personalities, the ambiguity of fantasy and reality, the performance stage and reality, and so on.