Japanese Animation and New Media
Lecture Four: Chapter Eight: Giving Up the Gun
Character animation is stretched between full animation and limited animation. Generally, Japanese animations, even those of Miyazaki, do not follow the Disney ideal of full animation. Yet this polarization between full and limited tendencies persists at the level of ‘grounded’ versus ‘ungrounded’ character movement. Later, when we look more at highly limited character animation, we’ll see that this polarization is also a matter of emphasizing character movement versus emphasizing character design. Gradually we have seen that the relation between compositing and character animation is really important. It is not so surprising that this relation is so important, since the earliest and simplest forms of animation consisted of sequential photographs of drawings of characters (or some other kind of figures) against a background. At this level of the relation between compositing and character animation, we have seen that character animation implies a set of focal concerns. Which is say, the way in which character moves implies a set of orientations not only for movement in general but also for action in the world. At this level, we need to consider character action: to what extent is a character targeting, exerting, aiming, striding, questing, wandering, stumbling, exploring, floating, soaring or flying? And there are qualities of these actions: resolutely striding, aimlessly wandering, buoyantly floating, cheerfully stumbling, etc. In other words, here too, I am calling attention to movement, giving techniques of movement priority over psychic states or psychological content. This is not because psychic states are not important, because animation conveys primarily through movement.
Let’s turn briefly to an example from another Miyazaki film, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi or Spirited Away. From the outset, Chihiro appears reluctant, withdrawal, clingy and leggy, awkward. As she seeks out the boiler room in order to ask for a job, she literally stumbles and falls into that world, and her characteristic style of animated movement transforms her reluctances into a headlong rush, and the transition to cinematism (tempered with gag devices) feels like a release.
In this film, from the outset when the car rushes at the tunnel to the lost amusement park, cinematism appears as a source of danger and fascination, whose appeal cannot be avoided but must be addressed and overcome.
