Japanese Animation and New Media

Lecture Two: Chapter Five: Flying Machines

While Castle in the Sky sets up a seemingly technophobic and deterministic relation to technology, it also offers plenty of signs of other relations to technology.  In fact, the animated film seems to evoke the classic deterministic relation precisely in order to challenge it. Ultimately, the film appears intent on changing our manner of thinking about technology by altering our perception and experience of it by the way in which it uses techniques of animation.  Techniques of animation promise to afford a free relation to technology that will save us from the modern technological condition.

We can explore these techniques in four different registers:

—compositing, and the tension between cinematism and animetism

—mecha design, that is, the design of mechanistic devices, especially vehicles such as cars, tanks, planes, and boats as well as robots

—character animation

—mise-en-scène; in film studies, this generally refers to everything that appears before the camera and how everything is arranged, such as sets, props, costumes, actors, lighting.

In the next lecture I will talk about character animation, so let me just say for now that, in Castle in the Sky, buoyant energies, especially of the children characters, present a sharp contrast to militarized technologies. I will address mecha design later as well.

As for mise-en-scène, one of the characteristics of Miyazaki’s animation is that we can’t tell exactly when or where they take place.  Even when we’re quite sure that the location is Europe or Japan, for instance, there is an eclectic mixture of places.  Similarly, even when we’re fairly certain of the historical period, the temporal references are nonetheless rather eclectic. Such gestures undermine a deterministic ordering of time.  So even if Castle in the Sky, for instance, gives us a very deterministic paradigm for technological development, we’re not entirely sure where and when we’re located in the cycle.  The period look evokes the late 19th or early 20th century, but we don’t know if there are large cities like London or Tokyo, or if the mining village, with its industrial mode of production, is typical.  Or does rural agriculture dominate?  Because Miyazaki animations often dwell on luminous pastoral or arboreal landscapes, we may feel that these dominate the world.  The emphasis on these landscapes thus imparts a sense of something that stands out or resists the modern technological condition, even as modern technologies destroy them.  What is marvelous about such landscapes is that they are drawn and painted to imply a sense of depth and the same time they are luminous due the techniques of lighting.  They draw the eye in, while light emanates from them, as if lit from behind.  Take this scene from Castle in the Sky, for instance.

This clip also reminds that animation is an art of movement.  As such, even though we need to consider mise-en-scène and other elements of design, we experience these elements under conditions of movement.  This is why I continue to stress the importance of cinematism and animetism.  Just looking at the art of landscapes, for instance, doesn’t tell us about the art of animation. In this clip, the panoramic view over the depth of the valley creates conditions for cinematism.  We might expect movement into depth.  Instead we have a wheeling flock of birds that encourages our eye to move over depth rather than in depth.  In conjunction with the luminous rays of light, the sequence tends towards soaring, wheeling, and gliding.  It is combination of cinematism and animetism in which an evocation of movement into depth actually heightens the sensation of animetism.

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