Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Thirteen: Multiple Frames of Reference
In sum, the animetism of flat compositing, played to the hilt in these scenes from episode 13 of Nadia, plays with relative movement and the ‘relativization’ of our frame of reference for movement. We lose the frame of reference, and then the frame of reference shifts, and before we know it, there are multiple paths. There are also rhythms of sudden appearance and disappearance, of things jumping into and out of the frame of the screen. Instead of fluidly coordinated or goal-orientated action, we have a series of mishaps, windfalls, and adventures, and choppy, jerky actions.
Similarly, at the level of narrative in Nadia, even though the first episodes sets up an adventure paradigm in which the heroes set off in the world to pursue their dreams and to achieve certain goals, those goals become more and more uncertain because the frame of reference for action keeps changing. And their dreams too become more tenuous. Jean, for instance, feels that, even though a sea monster destroyed his ship, his father is alive somewhere. Not only does he learn of his father’s death. But also the sea monster turns out to be a submarine, and then it turns out that the submarine is not really of the 19th-century. The Nautilus was built with ancient yet highly advanced technologies, which are as destructive as they are beneficial. His faith in science and dream of progress is thus undermined. Jean also vows to take Nadia to Africa, but Africa isn’t really much like Africa, and Nadia turns out not to be African but alien, extraterrestrial. Nothing is what it seems. Even islands are not islands. They turn into space ships. In other words, at the level of story, Nadia repeats the trick of relative movement that comes of the animetism of flat compositing: the direction or orientation of action keeps changing, because the reference (for instance, Nadia is African) continually shifts. What is more, solving the riddle (Nadia is alien) doesn’t introduce a stable frame of reference to orientate action. It complicates matters. Jean might say, “So my girlfriend is an alien,” but this doesn’t exactly clarify the situation. All forms of advance or improvement — not simply modern technological progress — feel hollow. We’re left with leaps of faith and acts of sacrifice in the final episode. But how convincing are these ‘solutions’ or ‘resolutions’?
The multiplication of frames of reference also occurs at level of mise-en-scène and music. The ‘world’ depicted through technologies and felt in the music feels very pop-retro, with numerous references to classic anime and other entertainments — the 1970s in 1989-90, the 19th century in 1989-90, the future in the 19th-century, antiquity in the future — multiple time frames strung together with bubble gum, inflating and popping.
In sum, the multiplication of frames of references repeats in different registers of the animation, but it is grounded in the real experience of relative movement that follows from flat compositing as it brings everything to the surface, allowing for sudden shifts in movement and new trajectories. There’s no end in sight — just technical operations, unrelenting operativity, optimization. Rather than try to give a frame of reference outside or beyond technological optimization, Nadia places us within it. It thus poses the question of how to live in a world of technical optimization without a fixed objective, optimization for the sake of optimization.
And so we need to address how the multiplication of frames of reference goes hand in glove with what Heidegger calls ‘enframing.’
