Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Six: Chapter Nine: Relative Movement
Later in Tabaimo’s installation, in an ‘episode’ in which a policeman captures a young man and jails him in the next car, our viewing position begins to move toward the implied vanishing point. But the effect is still not that of cinematism. On the one hand our viewing position is not aligned with the engine, and so we can’t see where we are going. On the other hand, because the cityscape layer and the train interior layer are moving in the same direction but at different speeds, the movement of city layer and train layer relative to one another catches our attention, drawing our attention to lateral movement even as the viewing position also moves into depth.
With such techniques, Tabaimo thoroughly flattens the relation between the layers of the image in motion. This also relativizes their relation, and we can’t say which layer is supposed to provide a frame of reference for our movement. Movement is thus relativized.
The commuter installation presents a series of little episodes or events, some characteristic of the little cruelties that crop up during commuting time: a businessman ogling a schoolgirl, a groper, or an arrest. This installation, like Tabaimo’s installations in general, creates a space in which it seems that almost anything can happen, because we lose our frame of reference. The schoolgirl lays eggs, and then chickens are roosting in the car; or a woman hangs her child in the wrist straps. And in conjunction with such events, the movement of our viewing position is frequently shifted or blocked with flat images.
Through her use of techniques that flatten and relativize the relation between layers of the moving image, Tabaimo generates a sense of relative movement, which implies a very different way of negotiating the relation between cinematism and animetism. Movement tends toward animetism, but Tabaimo’s animetism presents a sharp contrast with Miyazaki’s by rendering our frame of reference for movement relative. As such, it allows us to look at Miyazaki’s animetism in a different light.
