Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Four: Chapter Eight: Giving Up the Gun
Mise-en-scène we have discussed at a couple different levels, with an emphasis on background art and setting. First, we have explored how mise-en-scène is stretched between two tendencies: unambiguous versus ambiguous location in space and time. Second, there is tension between a grounded versus an ungrounded relation to the earth or the world. We have focused more on the first level, looking at how the worlds in Miyazaki animations are difficult to situate temporally, historically, geographically, and even geopolitically. This is even true of Mononoke-hime or Princess Mononoke, which of all of Miyazaki’s animation is the most historically and geographically situated, in late 16th or early 17th century Japan, between the time of introduction of firearms into Japan (ca. 1543) and the imposition of severe restrictions on their use and manufacture (early to mid-1600s). Not only are there a number of non-historical and fantastical elements in Princess Mononoke but it also portrays this period of ‘warring states’ in a highly unconventional manner.
In the context of the relation between character animation and world, we also began to look at how Miyazaki animations tend to produce a sense of a grounded relation between character and world. In other words, location may be historically and geographically ambiguous, but the relation to the world tends to be grounded.
In sum, when I say that Miyazaki animation tend toward animetism, it is a matter of a tendency toward open compositing, in conjunction with the use of girl characters as a focal concern that at once prevents a form of focalization that is ballistic or logistic and stabilizes or embodies a sense of openness in relation to the world, to how human might relate to their techniques and technologies. Rather than simply eliminate cinematism and the modern technological condition, these animations strive to present it and to open it from within into another set of relations. But, as we will discuss more in part two, we can already sense a sort of compromise at the level of mise-en-scène, which implies an uneasy combination of ambiguity in spatiotemporal orientation and insistence on groundedness (fixity in orientation toward nature and humans). It is this latter insistence that many of the Japanese animations called anime challenge.
This fixity becomes salient at the level of studio production and commercialization, where the authority of the director (Miyazaki) and the construction of a Ghibli world (evident in the Ghibli Museum and Ghibli merchandising strategies) imply a fairly authoritative and unambiguously hierarchical relation to workers and consumers.
