Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Eight: Giving Up the Gun
Compositing is stretched between open compositing and closed compositing. But neither open nor close compositing can exist in a pure state. It is difficult to imagine an animation that would be entirely closed, with all movement constantly and consistently directed toward a single target and ultimate goal. An entirely open animation, in which directionality and orientation happens only through sliding layers, is equally difficult to imagine. We always have a mixture of these tendencies at the level of compositing. And compositing thus has to mobilize other techniques in order to finesse its degree of closure or openness and to impart a sense of an overall tendency. It is the sliding of layers of image that is the most salient kind of open compositing, because, when there is movement, we feel the gaps or intervals between the layers (the animetic interval). But the viewing position also becomes very important, especially the degree to which the viewing position allows for movement into depth, and the degree to which it becomes focalized.
Princess Mononoke begins with some classic Miyazaki gestures of animetism. We see luminous and peaceful landscapes, and the viewing position slides over them. But soon this tranquility is disrupted. In an early sequence that sets the film’s actions in motion, the young man Ashitaka climbs a lookout tower. There is something odd stirring beyond the walls of the field, and suddenly the sliding viewing position gives way to cinematism. A giant boar, monstrously transformed into wriggling mass of ‘mono no ke’ (a rather archaic term referring generally to spiritual possession and spiritual impurities), charges out.
