Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Thirteen: Multiple Frames of Reference
In the first unit, I dwelled on the tension between cinematism and animetism, discussing how cinematism, like Cartesianism, is not so easy to sustain. At the level of animation, it demands a great deal of finesse with compositing, character animation (including mecha design), and mise-en-scène. As such, cinematism settles on a series of conventions for sustaining movement into depth, which bring an overall orientation to the animation, even at the level of story.
We looked at how the resistance in Miyazaki’s animations to certain narrative conventions of boy’s adventure films and action films is inseparable from a resistance to cinematism at the level of animation technics. Nonetheless, even though his animations resist animetism with the use of open compositing, sliding planes of movement, and ambiguous mise-en-scène, they nevertheless sustain a stable sense of depth, an unambiguous orientation of characters vis-à-vis the earth and nature, and stable frame of reference. Even if Miyazaki’s characters in Castle in the Sky reach their goals in a way that leads them to rethink those goals, action is nonetheless largely goal-orientated.
Flat compositing also tends toward animetism, favouring a lateral view of movement, with sliding planes over movement into depth and sliding of the viewing position over the image. In Nadia, for instance, in addition to sliding layers to convey movement, there are lots of slow pans across images, and the images are frequently fairly flat, iconic, or schematic in their evocation of depth. But this animetism does not entail resistance to cinematism nor bring in play almost mythical conflict of closed compositing (ballistic perception) versus open compositing (sliding layers) as Miyazaki animations tend to do. Flat compositing is at once open and closed — rather like the structure of exploded projection in which we see something at once taken apart and held together, it just depends on how you look at it. There is no fixed frame of reference other than your relation to the object.
Because flat compositing tends to ‘relativize’ the frame of reference, it tends to generate movement and actions without a clear sense of orientation. The frame of reference continually changes. The result is a sense of disorientation and uncertainty, of sudden disruption and surprising appearances and disappearances.
Episode 13 of Nadia (Run, Marie, Run) highlights these tendencies of animetism produced with flat compositing. It begins with literal repetitions of actions and phrases, with Marie asking everyone the same question (want to play?) and receiving the same response (later). Marie and King then wander off and lose their way. We see their movement laterally, and the sense of forward movement of Marie for instance is achieved by sliding the foreground layer and background layer backward, while Marie, actually standing in place, pumps her arms and legs as if walking.
