Japanese Animation and New Media
Week 6: Chapter 9: Relative Movement
Watching the first four episodes of Nadia (Fushigi no umi no Nadia, 1989-90) last week, you probably noticed similarities to Castle in the Sky in terms of characters and storyline. Jean, like Pazu, is fond of building airplanes and other mechanical devices. Both are in search of fathers who have vanished, when into their life comes a girl that sets the adventure in motion. Nadia, like Sheeta, possesses a jewel with mysterious powers that is the key to her unknown origins. Grandis Granba and her ‘boys’ (Hansom and Sansom), like Dora the pirate and her sons, are in pursuit of Nadia, intent on seizing the jewel. And we will later see a number of other overlaps between the two animations.
These similarities are not mere coincidence. Apparently, in the 1970s, while working on animation classics, Miyazaki wrote the treatment for a TV series called Around the World in Eighty Days by Sea, which combined two novels by Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In keeping with his general passions at the time, Miyazaki introduced a series of elements that are not in Verne, which he would later use in Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky, namely, a girl of an ancient race who possesses a mysterious gem with the power to destroy the world. When NHK and Tôhô Studios approached Gainax Studio in the late 1980s to produce an animated television series based on this largely forgotten Miyazaki script, they were deliberately building on the phenomenal success of Castle in the Sky and other Miyazaki films, and surely expected audiences to detect the similarities.
Yet Gainax’s Nadia is dramatically different from Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky, as a brief clip from the first episode makes clear.
Even in this brief clip, we can explore the differences between Nadia and Castle in the Sky in a number of different ways: big screen (feature-length films) versus small screen (television series), Ghibli versus Gainax, Anno versus Miyazaki, full animation ideas versus limited animation, etc. In this clip in particular, it is the relation between Jean and Nadia that is obviously very different in tone from that between Pazu and Sheeta, as well as the general relation to technology. Nadia is designed for sex appeal. Her often bossy and petulant attitude presents a sharp contrast with the demure Sheeta. Jean is, to put it bluntly, an optimistic science geek, trying to win Nadia’s approval with inventions that invariably fail. In sum, in Nadia, we are approaching a realm that Miyazaki openly denounces, the realm of anime, otaku, and shojo idols. In fact, the character Nadia remains one of the all-time anime otaku favourites.
In keeping with my general emphasis on animation techniques as the key to understanding animation (and particularly how anime thinks technology), I don’t simply want to begin and end with a comparison of character’s appearance and attitudes. I don’t think that will take us very far in understanding animation. Rather I give priority (again) to the tension between animetism and cinematism in order to set the stage for a discussion character animation, mecha design, mise-en-scène, and how these techniques provide the orientations for the story and its worldview.
But to grasp how radically different Anno Hideaki’s approach to animation is from Miyazaki’s at the level of animetism and cinematism, we need first to explore relative movement and flatness.
